List of home computers by video hardware

Systems in the personal computer category, except for Early Macintosh PCs, are generally based on the VGA standard and use a video chip known as a Graphics Processing Unit.

Very early PCs used one of the much simpler (even compared to most home computer video hardware) video display controller cards, using parts like the MDA, the Hercules Graphics Card, the CGA and the EGA standard).

Only after the introduction of the VGA standard could PCs really compete with the home computers of the same era, such as the Amiga and Atari ST, or even with the MSX-2.

The most important aspect of a home computer was how far programmers could push the hardware to create games.

When accessed by machine language programs, the graphic capabilities of this chip made it practical to develop arcade-style games on a home system.

[2] The comparatively large memory and the audio capabilities of the C64 also lent themselves well toward the production of larger games.

An example of the opposite is the Aquarius by Mattel which had such incredibly limited video hardware that it was retracted from the market after only four months due to poor sales.

For higher resolutions, the logic and the memory chips were barely fast enough to support reading the display data, let alone for dedicating half the available time for the slow 8-bit CPU.

That being said, one system, the Apple II, was one of the first to use a feature of the data-bus logic of the 6502 processor to implement a very early interleaving time slot mechanism to eliminate this problem.

Most other systems used a much simpler approach, and the TRS-80's video logic was so primitive that it simply did not have any bus arbitration at all.