A video adapter provides the interface between your computer and your monitor and transmits the signals that appear as images on the display. Throughout the history of the PC, there have been a succession of standards for video display characteristics that represent a steady increase in screen resolution and color depth.

IBM pioneered most of these standards, but other manufacturers of compatible PCs adopted them as well. Today, IBM is no longer the industry leader it once was (and hasn't been for some time), and many of these standards are obsolete. Those that aren't obsolete seldom are referred to by these names anymore.

The sole exception to this is VGA, which is a term that is still used to refer to a baseline graphics display capability supported by virtually every video adapter on the market today. When you shop for a video adapter today, you are more likely to see specific references to the screen resolutions and color depths that the device supports than a list of standards such as VGA, SVGA, XGA, and UVGA.

However, reading about these standards gives you a good idea of how video-display technology developed over the years and prepares you for any close encounters you might have with legacy equipment from the dark ages. Today's VGA and later video adapters can also display most older color graphics software written for CGA, EGA, and most other obsolete graphics standards.

This enables you to use older graphics software (such as games and educational programs) on your current system. Although not a concern for most users, some older programs wrote directly to hardware registers that are no longer found on current video cards.

When IBM introduced the PS/2 systems on April 2, 1987, it also introduced the VGA display. On that day, in fact, IBM also introduced the lower-resolution MCGA and higher-resolution 8514 adapters. The MCGA and 8514 adapters did not become popular standards like the VGA did, and both were discontinued. All current display adapters that connect to the 15-pin VGA analog connector or the DVI analog/digital connector are based on the VGA standard.

Digital Versus Analog Signals

Unlike earlier video standards, which are digital, the VGA is an analog system. Why have displays gone from digital to analog when most other electronic systems have gone digital?

Compact disc players (digital) have replaced most turntables (analog), mini DV camcorders are replacing 8MM and VHS-based analog camcorders, and TiVo and UltimateTV digital video recorders are performing time-shifting in place of analog VCRs for many users.

With a digital television set, you can watch several channels on a single screen by splitting the screen or placing a picture within another picture. Most personal computer displays introduced before the PS/2 are digital. This type of display generates different colors by firing the RGB electron beams in on-or-off mode, which allows for the display of up to eight colors (2³).

In the IBM displays and adapters, another signal doubles the number of color combinations from 8 to 16 by displaying each color at one of two intensity levels. This digital display is easy to manufacture and offers simplicity with consistent color combinations from system to system.

The real drawback of the older digital displays such as CGA and EGA is the limited number of possible colors. In the PS/2 systems, IBM went to an analog display circuit. Analog displays work like the digital displays that use RGB electron beams to construct various colors, but each color in the analog display system can be displayed at varying levels of intensity—64 levels, in the case of the VGA.

This versatility provides 262,144 possible colors (64³), of which 256 could be simultaneously displayed. For realistic computer graphics, color depth is often more important than high resolution because the human eye perceives a picture that has more colors as being more realistic. IBM moved to analog graphics to enhance the color capabilities of its systems.

Video Graphics Array

PS/2 systems incorporated the primary display adapter circuitry onto the motherboard, and both IBM and third-party companies introduced separate VGA cards to enable other types of systems to enjoy the advantages of VGA.

Although the IBM MicroChannel (MCA) computers, such as the PS/2 Model 50 and above, introduced VGA, it's impossible today to find a brand-new replacement for VGA that fits into the obsolete MCA-bus systems. However, surplus and used third-party cards might be available if you look hard enough.

The VGA BIOS is the control software residing in the system ROM for controlling VGA circuits. With the BIOS, software can initiate commands and functions without having to manipulate the VGA directly. Programs become somewhat hardware independent and can call a consistent set of commands and functions built into the system's ROM-control software.

Other implementations of the VGA differ in their hardware but respond to the same BIOS calls and functions. New features are added as a superset of the existing functions, and VGA remains compatible with the graphics and text BIOS functions built into the PC systems from the beginning.

The VGA can run almost any software that originally was written for the CGA or EGA, unless it was written to directly access the hardware registers of these cards.

A standard VGA card displays up to 256 colors onscreen, from a palette of 262,144 (256KB) colors; when used in the 640x480 graphics or 720x400 text mode, 16 colors at a time can be displayed. Because the VGA outputs an analog signal, you must have a monitor that accepts an analog input.

VGA displays originally came not only in color, but also in monochrome VGA models, which use color summing. With color summing, 64 gray shades are displayed instead of colors. The summing routine is initiated if the BIOS detects a monochrome display when the system boots.

This routine uses an algorithm that takes the desired color and rewrites the formula to involve all three color guns, producing varying intensities of gray. Users who preferred a monochrome display, therefore, could execute color-based applications. Even the least-expensive video adapters on the market today can work with modes well beyond the VGA standard.

VGA, at its 16-color, 640x480 graphics resolution, has come to be the baseline for PC graphical display configurations. VGA is accepted as the least common denominator for all Windows systems and must be supported by the video adapters in all systems running Windows.

The installation programs of all Windows versions use these VGA settings as their default video configuration. In addition to VGA, virtually all adapters support a range of higher screen resolutions and color depths, depending on the capabilities of the hardware.

If a Windows 9x/Me or Windows XP/2000 system must be started in Safe Mode because of a startup problem, the system defaults to VGA in the 640x480, 16-color mode. Windows 2000 and Windows XP also offer a VGA Mode startup that also uses this mode (Windows XP uses 800x600 resolution) but doesn't slow down the rest of the computer the way Safe Mode (which replaces 32-bit drivers with BIOS services) does.

IBM introduced higher-resolution versions of VGA called XGA and XGA-2 in the early 1990s, but most of the development of VGA standards has come from the third-party video card industry and its trade group, the Video Electronic Standards Association (VESA).

Super VGA

When IBM's XGA and 8514/A video cards were introduced, competing manufacturers chose not to attempt to clone these incremental improvements on their VGA products. Instead, they began producing lower-cost adapters that offered even higher resolutions. These video cards fall into a category loosely known as Super VGA (SVGA).

SVGA provides capabilities that surpass those offered by the VGA adapter. Unlike the display adapters discussed so far, SVGA refers not to an adapter that meets a particular specification, but to a group of adapters that have different capabilities.

For example, one card might offer several resolutions (such as 800x600 and 1024x768) that are greater than those achieved with a regular VGA, whereas another card might offer the same or even greater resolutions but also provide more color choices at each resolution. These cards have different capabilities; nonetheless, both are classified as SVGA.

The SVGA cards look much like their VGA counterparts. On the VGA cable connector that plugs into your video adapter, pin 9 is often pinless. Pin 5 is used only for testing purposes, and pin 15 is rarely used; these are often pinless as well. To identify the type of monitor connected to the system, some manufacturers use the presence or absence of the monitor ID pins in various combinations.

VESA SVGA Standards

The Video Electronics Standards Association includes members from various companies associated with PC and computer video products. In October 1989, VESA recognized that programming applications to support the many SVGA cards on the market was virtually impossible and proposed a standard for a uniform programmer's interface for SVGA cards; it is known as the VESA BIOS extension (VBE).

VBE support might be provided through a memory-resident driver (used by older cards) or through additional code added to the VGA BIOS chip itself (the more common solution). The benefit of the VESA BIOS extension is that a programmer needs to worry about only one routine or driver to support SVGA.

Various cards from various manufacturers are accessible through the common VESA interface. Today, VBE support is a concern primarily for real-mode DOS applications, usually older games, and for non-Microsoft operating systems that need to access higher resolutions and color depths.

VBE supports resolutions up to 1280x1024 and color depths up to 24-bit (16.8 million colors), depending on the mode selected and the memory on the video card. VESA compliance is of virtually no consequence to Windows versions 95 and up. These operating systems use custom video drivers for their graphics cards.