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I'm using DOSbox to play really old games I had on my PC XT with a green monochrome monitor. D-Fend Reloaded is set to run these games on CGA mode, it has colors, is there a way to make it more similar to the experience of a green-on-black monochrome screen of an old computer?

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The short answer is to set the emulated graphics card to Hercules, and in-game use F11 to toggle between the color schemes.

If you're using DOSBox, you'd want to change the machine entry in your dosbox.conf file.

For D-Fend Reloaded, you'll want to:

  • Right click on the game in question and choose Edit...
  • Find "Graphics" in the left hand tree and click it
  • Switch the "Video card" dropdown to "Hercules"
  • Click the "Ok" button to save the changes

You can then launch the game and enjoy the monochrome graphics.

NOTE: In order for it to work, the game needs to provide support for Hercules video cards.

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I have tested this in one single game, and apparently it doesn't support Hercules graphics. I will try in other games and see what happens. – ruda.almeida Jan 3 at 21:39
@ruda.almeida, yes, this sort of thing is going to depend on the program, to an extent. I believe that certain games also have different versions (ie, a version that only contained the color graphics, or only the monochrome, etc) so this won't work for every program. It's the only way I know to get the "green and black" effect you're describing, though. – agent86♦ Jan 3 at 21:46
Well, it does work on games with Hercules support. Is there any way to cycle color on games with CGA/EGA/VGA support only? – ruda.almeida Jan 4 at 21:04
@ruda.almeida, not really, no. Past the Hercules days, the color palette was set by the game designers. The best you can do is to find a version of the game with different graphics support, which can be challenging - there's less interest in the lower res/color versions of games than their more beautiful counterparts. – agent86♦ Jan 4 at 21:17

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