Team Droid Now Supports Hercules Graphics!

Wednesday, 10th January 2024

Hercules graphics support has now been added to Team Droid! The new version 1.01 will automatically detect a Hercules monochrome graphics card and output the graphics correctly if one is detected. Previously, anyone wanting to run Team Droid on a Hercules-equipped machine would have to run a CGA emulator like the SIMCGA or HGCIBM TSRs before loading the game, and take a performance hit as the TSR constantly reformatted the game's CGA graphics to a Hercules card.

What's Hercules? It was a third-party graphics standard for the PC. IBM's Monochrome Display Adapter supported crisp monochrome text on a high resolution green screen, but didn't support bitmapped graphics. The only other choice to PC users was IBM's Color Graphics Adapter, which supported blocky text and graphics at a modest resolution and colour depth, requiring an expensive colour monitor. Hercules graphics would output crisp high-resolution graphics on the monochrome monitor, and was a very popular choice for budget PCs up till the early 1990s.

The Team Droid graphics haven't been altered for this update. The new version of the game simply takes the existing CGA graphics and outputs them to the Hercules display, looking a little bit like the monocrhome graphics output by the game's '-m' command line option. Note that the '-m' parameter isn't necessary for Hercules users; the Hercules card is detected automatically and tmonochrome is the only graphics mode that the card supports.

Updated version of other games, and of CGALIB itself, will be uploaded to this site over the coming days.