EGA cards were truly funky beasts. There was a "64 color" stunt where you could switch the 16 color palette fast enough to have up to 4 different palettes visible on screen at once.<p>There were fringe flavors of compatibles, with extra capabilites. 400 scanline modes that enabled 43 and 50 lines text modes hover in my memory.
This reminds me that, back in the eighties, a friend of mine made a super cool EGA BBS terminal program with split screens and smooth scrolling - but it also used the vertical retrace interrupts. It's a shame there wasn't more compatibility around a lot of this on PC since it would have enabled some very cool software that everyone could use.
Id Software managed to get smooth scrolling working on EGA - a mind blowing achievement at that time.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_tile_refresh</a>
YouTube video of this program. Not sure what hardware (or emulation) it's running on but it doesn't appear buggy. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRnHzt7X0OE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRnHzt7X0OE</a>