this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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Valve’s Steam Controller stock shortage will last until next year after fans massively exceeded expectations (frvr.com)
submitted 15 hours ago by tal@lemmy.today to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] tal@lemmy.today 12 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Well...

https://www.pcgamesn.com/pc-retro-tech/ega-graphics

Pity the poor PC of 1983-1984, before EGA graphics changed everything. It wasn't the graphics powerhouse we know today. IBM's machines, such as the IBM PC 5150, and their clones might have been the talk of the business world, but they were stuck with text-only displays or low-definition bitmap graphics.

The maximum color graphics resolution was 320 x 200 on a CGA graphics card, with colors limited to four from a hard-wired palette of 16. Even at the time, you'd have a hard time convincing someone that this was really the best graphics card you could buy. Worse, three of those colors were cyan, brown, and magenta, and half of them were just lighter variations of the other half.

You can see in the screenshot from The Secret of Monkey Island below that 16 colors make all the difference, with EGA on the left and four-color CGA on the right.

However, EGA had one big problem; it was prohibitively expensive, even in an era when PCs were already astronomically expensive. The basic EGA card price was over $500 (around $1,400 today), and the Memory Expansion Card cost a further $199.

Go for the full 192KB of RAM and you were looking at a total of nearly $1,000 (approximately $2,900 in today's money), making a top-end EGA card way more expensive than the GeForce RTX 4090 today. What's more, the monitor you needed to make the most of it cost a further $850 (approximately $2,500 today). EGA was a rich enthusiast's toy.

[–] Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Yeah, but my 386 had a turbo button!

My first computer was a ZX81 with a mighty 1k RAM. Didn't do much with it. Then I got a Sinclair spectrum with 48k, you could do a lot with that. That's when gaming got good for me.