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IMO PC-98 is unique because it sits between EGA and VGA in capabilities; it is still a 16 color display, but from a much broader palette (4096 vs 64). EGA is very distinctive because of the limited palette.

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mrandish 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Indeed, starting with IBM's initial 5150 design, early PC graphics made cost, memory and capability trade-offs which would soon be seen as unfortunate from a graphics and gaming perspective. Although IBM specced the platform and chose Motorola's 6845 video display chip, I assign some blame to Motorola too for not having created a range of video chips with increasing capabilities to choose from. We'll never know if IBM would have ponied up a few dollars more for a chip with at least a 256 color palette or a few other niceties but it's always possible.

Strangely, Motorola did eventually decide to get serious about offering more capable graphics in the form of the RMS chipset but not until it was already too little and too late. They announced the RMS chipset in 1984 and tried to drum up interest among system designers but eventually cancelled it before release amidst lukewarm response and bugs in the early prototypes (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/10977/fat...). It certainly didn't help that other options like TI's 99x8 VDP chips were now getting cheaper and the pre-Commodore Hi-Toro company was shopping around their Amiga chipset to all the major consumer computer manufacturers in 1984.

	▲	flomo 30 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		IBM only gave maybe 1.0 shits about gaming, to the extent they needed "business graphics" like charts, and maybe just some extra fun shit. The primary competition was loads of CP/M "business micros" with not many real graphical games at all. IBM benchmarked the Apple II+ with a Z80 Softcard because that was the ultimate mullet machine, all the business software upfront, all the gaming party in the back. CGA was good enough for an Apple II game or a pie chart, and that's all they cared about.
	▲	michalpleban an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The Motorola 6845 CRTC chip is quite versatile, and one of its unique characteristics is that it knows and cares nothing about the resolution or number of colors on the screen. It is just a display address generator, which is meant to provide some external hardware with a memory address that contains data to be displayed at some part of the screen. What to do with this address and data is completely up to the computer hardware, which can interpret it whichever it wants. So there is nothing in the 6845 chip that prevents using it to display 256, 4096 or 16777216 colors on the screen.