If you've been around long enough to remember a time before modern-day GPUs were a thing, the name "Hercules Graphics Card" (HGCC might ring a bell. It quietly revolutionized PC graphics back in the early 80s for businesses, ushering in a new era of innovation in display hardware; you could say, Hercules walked so Nvidia and ATI could run. Even though it looks primitive by today's standards, it's always interesting to look back at how impactful old technology was when even the concept of a GPU was abstract. Let's go on a bit of a retrospective journey, courtesy of The 8-Bit Guy on YouTube, who explains not only the legend of Hercules in his video but also the inner workings of the actual hardware.
Before modern GPUs were capable of true graphical rendering, IBM PCs dominated the corporate world with unmatched credibility. Businesses essentially only needed to sift through spreadsheets and charts, handle basic accounting, and process large amounts of text in documents. For this, "graphics" weren't required; only numbers and letters were needed, which were far simpler to display. Think of it like a printer; seldom is one used for actual pictures with precise details, and more so for just text.
At the time, IBM PCs offered two display options: Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). The former could show color but had a max resolution of 640×200, so text looked coarse. Comparatively, the MDA was much sharper at 720×350 but was limited to monochrome, and incapable of displaying graphics whatsoever... which made it cheaper and, thus, more widespread. In comes the Hercules Graphics Card, possessing the best of both worlds.
It combined text-only MDA processing with the pixel-addressable graphics mode introduced by CGA, preserving the quality of both. You'd get the same sharp text with backward compatibility for existing MDA slots and monitors, alongside high-res graphics at 720×348 pixels. Not only that, but it also introduced a 32KB frame buffer — effectively an early form of VRAM — that allowed programs to directly address video memory, which no IBM display adapter had done before.
Hercules didn't invent the frame buffer concept, but it was the first MDA-compatible adapter with that power. Before it, both MDA and CGA display adapters would just tell the monitor to display certain characters on the screen, specifying where to place them, which took up a sizeable chunk of memory since it was just stored code rather than actually drawing complex shapes or images. By giving Hercules its own 32KB of memory, programs could write data directly to it and avoid clogging the CPU's main bus, enabling more complex graphics that "render" much faster.
The video then discusses how many manufacturers tried to clone Hercules cards, with more knockoffs than real ones, often combining CGA and Hercules on a single board with DIP switches. Even some ATI cards later on offered dual-mode support, allowing them to emulate CGA and Hercules. Our host also showed the Hercules Graphics Card Plus, the next-gen version of the same concept, with double the memory, a smaller overall footprint, and dedicated "RAM Font" support.
Beyond businesses, the HCG made quite a stir in the gaming community, with many games ported to work with the new standard. Some would require CGA emulation; others would essentially be glorified CGA games that scaled up the resolution, resulting in jagged lines. But there were a few that were truly optimized for the Hercules, such as Sim City and Microsoft Flight Simulator 3. According to MobyGames, 536 games supported Hercules, while 1900+ supported CGA.
The narrator actually goes on to show their own games from back in the day that supported Hercules but employed CGA techniques, so they didn't look all that great. So, they went in and recently rehauled two of them — Planet X3 and Attack of the Pesky Robots — demonstrating a "night and day difference" between forced scaling (from 200 to 350 horizontal pixels) and proper native support. 8-Bit Guy talks about a lot more games in his video, using a real MDA monitor from the era, so make sure to check it out.
Fast forward a few years to the tail end of the 16-bit era (early 90s), and Windows 3.1 had just come out. It was barely usable on CGA but looked much better on Hercules, with our host jokingly pointing out the only downside: the lack of color, which would make Solitaire difficult to play. Before this, in 1987, Hercules released the InColor card, which added color to the previously monochrome-only Hercules, but only six games supported it, and IBM's competing EGA standard outshone it in every way.
That was a trip down memory lane featuring a true OG of the graphics world. Without the bold and creative detour that the Hercules card represented, the PC industry might’ve been a little less daring. Like many a standard of those times, it served as a stepping stone in the right direction, marred by flaws but necessary to progress. Competition is often cited as the key to innovation, and Hercules proved itself a worthy combatant through the lens of history.
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