Compaq EGA Technical Reference Guide

A rater nice Compaq EGA Tech Ref recently turned up on archive.org, under the title COMPAQ Enhanced Color Graphics Board Technical Reference Guide. It’s from December 1986, relatively late in EGA’s life (given that it was about to be obsoleted by the VGA in just a few months), and it is rather good.

The Compaq Tech Ref is significantly more detailed and in-depth than the IBM Tech Ref. On the other hand, IBM supplied a BIOS listing which is very valuable, both when interfacing with the BIOS itself and when trying to understand certain details of the hardware. Compaq documented the BIOS well and provided nice examples, but that’s not the same as the actual source code. As is often the case, looking at both references is best.

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