I've tried it on a number of machines (from the 386 era to a modern PC)
and they all just end up showing garbage when this mode is enabled. I
cannot for the life of me find a reference to this mode existing
anywhere, but I assume it must have worked on *some* SVGA chipset of the
era since ID programmed in support for it. I'm guessing it was cut
because nothing else supported it (and because 160x200 must have looked
awful, even with lots of colors...)
VGA has analog RGB signals.
VGA card uses DAC chip, 8 bit would give the 256 color and 16 bit would
give the 65536, and 24 bit would give the 16.7 million color depth. RAM
was a big issue as well on these cards, since more memory needed to store
color info.
The one thing I would wonder is -- even if some video card had the ability
to sacrifice resolution for color depth (reconfigurable RAMDAC?) -- were
the textures and tiles in Doom supplied in true color/16 bit color or were
they 256 colors?
--
Ethan O'Toole
