AKA: Hercules, HercMono, HGC

An extension to the ancient MGA, it provided two video modes: text at 80x25 and graphics at 720x348. An HGC (or a clone) will be an 8-bit ISA card with a female DB9 connector for the monitor, and usually a DB25 for a parallel port.

In text mode, the characters were defined by a ROM set that was 9x14 pixels. Actually, in ROM it was 8x14 and the 8th column was duplicated for the high-ASCII line drawing glyphs. Text attributes (instead of color) available were: blink, underline, inverse, and high-intensity (on some monitors).

The HGC sported 64k of RAM, enough to support 8 pages in text mode, or 2 in graphics mode. This memory was mapped to B0000h-BFFFFh in the main processor's address space, with B8000h-BFFFFh able to be turned off to allow simultaneous use of the HGC and a color video card. In graphics mode, memory is laid out in four banks per page, each holding every fourth scan line.

BIOS support for the HGC was nonexistant. Text mode operations were the same as for the MGA, but graphics was completely unsupported. Most programs that supported it used a TSR to do the low-level mucking about. There were also TSRs that would do a basic emulation of a CGA card.

I wouldn't know where to find such drivers anymore, so here's some code to do the mucking that I managed to swipe from a few places and bring together:
(pure C, flat 32-bit addressing)

/* 6485 controller mode data */
char hgcdat[2][12] = {
    { 0x61, 0x50, 0x52, 0x0f, 0x19, 0x06,
      0x19, 0x19, 0x02, 0x0d, 0x0b, 0x0c  },
    { 0x35, 0x2d, 0x2e, 0x07, 0x5b, 0x02,
      0x57, 0x57, 0x02, 0x03, 0x00 ,0x00  }
};

/* set mode:  0 = text,  1 = graphics */
void hgcmode(int ctrlmode)
{
   unsigned int reg,ctrl;
   ctrl = (ctrlmode) ? 0x82 : 0x20;
   outp(0x3bf,3);     /* allow graphics enable page 1 */
   outp(0x3b8,ctrl);  /* disable video and set mode   */
   for (reg = 0; reg <= 11; reg++) {
                      /* program the crt parameters   */
        outp(0x3b4,reg);
        outp(0x3b5,hgcdat[ctrlmode][reg]);
        }
   outp(0x3b8,ctrl+8);  /* re-enable the video        */
}

/* plot a pixel:  0 = off,  1 = on */
void hgcplot(unsigned short x, unsigned short y,int c)
{
  unsigned char mem=(unsigned char *)0xB0000;
  if (c) mem[((y&3)<<13)+(y>>2)*90+(x>>3)]|=128>>(x&7);
  else mem[((y&3)<<13)+(y>>2)*90+(x>>3)]&=~(128>>(x&7));
}
Mode switching code is from http://www.escape.ca/~bbuckels/kidstuff/ever.txt, should it still be around.