Square-pixel SVGA Games

The cRPG Blog brings you a chronological list of the most technically notable IBM PC MS-DOS games that were coded to display in and take advantage of SVGA, which is an IBM-originated graphics mode that supports square-pixel 4:3 aspect ratio 640x480 as opposed to standard non-square-pixel VGA 320x200 (16:10).

cf. Non-standard Square-pixel VGA 320x240.

From 1990s Computer Game History:

SVGA 640x480 was not just about 4:3 square-pixel resolution in 256 colors from a palette of 256K. It was also about hardware cursors, increased clockspeed and increased display memory (256 KB for VGA, 1-4 MB for SVGA). Line-draws, square-fills and poly-fills -- they were 30 times faster in SVGA.

Note that IBM's Professional Graphics Controller of 1984 supported 640x480 and could display 256 colors from a palette of 4096.

Some of the following IBM PC MS-DOS games support SVGA-standardized resolutions beyond 640x480, such as 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024. These are marked with asterisks [*].

Reminder that these are MS-DOS games, not Windows games. As a rule, Windows games (DirectX games) are square-pixel.

Populous 2 (1993, Bullfrog Productions)

Populous 2 technically runs in 16-color 640x480 but its viewport is only 640x400. Still, I can tell you that it was like magic playing Populous in hi-res in 1993. And in Populous who needs more than 16 colors?