SVGA Games 640x480
This is a chronological list of the most technically notable computer games on IBM PC MS-DOS that were coded to display in and take advantage of Mode 101h SVGA, which is an IBM-originated graphics mode that supports square-pixel 4:3 aspect ratio 256-color 640x480 as opposed to 16-color 640x400 SVGA and 640x350 EGA. In the sphere of computer games square-pixel SVGA began gaining traction in 1994.
Warlords of 1989 for IBM PC is a notable early example of a computer game that features a 16-color 640x400 viewport, but this article is only concerned with square-pixel 640x480. [1]
SVGA 640x480 was not just about 4:3 square-pixel resolution in hi-color, true-color or 256 colors from a palette of 256K. It was also about hardware cursors, extended page flipping, increased clockspeed and increased display memory (1-4 megs of vRAM). Line-draws, square-fills and poly-fills -- they were 30 times faster in SVGA.
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. DirectX Windows games are square-pixel.
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?
[*]
[1]
Note that IBM's Professional Graphics Controller of 1984 supported 640x480 and could display 256 colors from a palette of 4096, but PGC was not employed for computer games because PGC was a workstation graphics controller. As a rule, from 1984 to 2000 expensive workstation video monster-boards and cheap game-based video cards were completely different worlds with zero cross-over.
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