Hercules Graphics Card - Technical Specifications

Technical Specifications

Its monochrome text mode could display 80×25 text characters and was MDA compatible. As such, it rendered characters in a box of 9×14 pixels, of which 7×11 made out the character itself (the other pixels being used for space between character columns and lines). This amounted to markedly clearer text display than the competing CGA adapter could offer. The total theoretical resolution of this text mode was 720×350 pixels. This number is arrived at through multiplying the character width of 9 pixels by the number of text columns possible on screen (80) as well as multiplying the character height of 14 pixels by the number of text lines (25). In the MDA compatible text mode, however, these pixels were not individually addressable.

The Hercules card's single monochrome graphics mode simply made all pixels directly addressable. This translated to a resolution of not 720×350, but only 720×348 pixels (at 1 bit per pixel) because, for technical reasons, the screen height had to be a multiple of four.

The Hercules card supported two graphic pages, one at address B0000h and one at address B8000h. The second page could be enabled or disabled by software. When it was disabled, the addresses used by the card did not overlap with those used by color adapters such as CGA or VGA. This made dual screen operation possible simply through installation of a Hercules card next to, for instance, a VGA adapter.

Hercules also made a CGA-compatible card, the Hercules Color Card, which could coexist with a monochrome HGC and still allow both graphics pages to be used. It would detect when the second graphics page was selected and disable access to its own memory, which would otherwise have been at the same addresses.