Hercules Graphics Card

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HGC was one of the earliest alternatives to IBM's MDA and CGA cards. It offered high resolution text and graphics modes at the expense of color support, making them especially viable for business use. It became very popular in the early 80s and spawned its own market of compatible clones. The high resolution graphics mode used by Windows is 720x348 monochrome. Later cards, such as Hercules InColor Card from 1987, added color support. The cards worked with IBM's Personal Computer Display (model 5151) or any other monochrome RGBI monitor.

Windows shipped with a Hercules driver early on, at least since Development Release 5, where it was called HERCULES.DIN (with the associated cursor routines file HERCULES.CIN). In the Alpha release, it was renamed to HERCULES.EXE (with the HERCULES.GRB grabber file), with the Beta adding the HERCULES.LGO logo file. The final 1.01 release renamed the driver to HERCULES.DRV. In setup, Hercules is usually the second option called "Hercules Graphics Card (or compatible) with Monochrome Display".

Windows 1.0 running in Hercules mode looks noticeably sharper compared to CGA's high-resolution mode and even offers more screen space than high-resolution EGA mode of 640x350 pixels, though without any color support of course. Emulators generally support at least the original HGC card with varying degree of accuracy, usually enough to run Windows 1.0. It seems there was also a Windows 1.0 driver for the InColor card that allowed it run in color at 720x348, but it remains to be found.