While true, VGA only did that at 320x200, HAM6 was 360x576 with sprites, and iirc split screen with other modes was already possible.
It is not directly comparable, not being pixel addressable, but was incredibly useful for anything that wasn’t fast moving and had some time to optimize the displayed image.
It also took a while for anything actually use 256 color VGA for more than mostly static pictures.
I wrote a side scroller in 1993 for the PC. I had to resort to a weird mode whose name escapes me now, where you could only address every 4th pixel without a bank switch - without this. Scrolling was too slow and there was no double buffering on VGA. It became the norm around 1994-1995 but without it, screen updates were severely limited by CPU speed.
I remember being able to get VGA to run at 360x480 with 256 colors in mode-x.
"I had to resort to a weird mode whose name escapes me now, where you could only address every 4th pixel without a bank switch"
That's mode-x. You could also for example set all 4 pixels to same color with a single write, write mask was a 4-bit value. It was great for filling polygons.
It is not directly comparable, not being pixel addressable, but was incredibly useful for anything that wasn’t fast moving and had some time to optimize the displayed image.
It also took a while for anything actually use 256 color VGA for more than mostly static pictures.
I wrote a side scroller in 1993 for the PC. I had to resort to a weird mode whose name escapes me now, where you could only address every 4th pixel without a bank switch - without this. Scrolling was too slow and there was no double buffering on VGA. It became the norm around 1994-1995 but without it, screen updates were severely limited by CPU speed.