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by zamalek 3630 days ago
My 386 didn't have a color graphics adapter, which required using a program called "Phix" - a terminate-stay-resident that emulated VGA on monochrome. Sadly this completely broke QBASIC (the editor was just a black screen), so I had to reboot the machine (to remove the TSR) in order to hack on GORILLAS.BAS. Compilation times nowadays are still longer than that rigmarole.
1 comments

But it should have some kind of display adapter, what was it, Hercules? I didn't know of any 386-class computers that didn't carry EGA or higher.
Hercules definitely rings a bell. The Wikipedia page[1] actually explains how the TSR [probably] worked, which seems to not be much as the Hercules seems to be quite elegantly designed.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card#CGA_Emu...

Well I clearly remember using an Hercules emulator with my SuperVGA card so that it could run some old DOS games, so the other way around also worked.