I don’t know why I did it, as honestly I didn’t like it on CGA back when it was a thing. Also, thankfully the hard disk speed on PCem is way faster than the real thing. And I’m not complaining.
Text mode is all the same setup wise, but on reboot the installer goes forward in glorious CGA ‘high res’ mode. Which is pretty terrible.
Yuck. I guess at the time I just felt lucky that I could at least run it. Although once I got lucky enough to score an EGA card + monitor. Anyways let’s continue the horror!
Yep, there is the desktop! .. barely. The desktop constantly want’s to jump around which is annoying, just as command prompt’s cant decide if they should be black or white. And the font’s get truncated. It’s almost as if nobody cared about actually supporting CGA. Which honestly I’m more surprised that it even made the cut.
Sure, I could have changed the default font, but why should I? I know Word 1.1 is very primitive but wow.
To be fair, Windows in CGA is pretty terrible as well.
Not to mention solitaire on both is nearly impossible between the lack of colour, and the lack of any high resolution. I suppose the Wyse 700 display ought to be much nicer, if only they had gone through the hell of making OS/2 device drivers.
One neat ‘feature’ of PCem is that it’s CGA emulates the single ported memory, so that the card & host cannot properly share the video memory so for programs not watching the retrace line you get the snow effect. (here is a demo, GP-01 by Genesis Project with snow, and here without snow).
but of course in this day & age all of this really is moot.
v14 is out 😛 :^)
read emails pls