I know in 16-color modes, such as EGA (320x200 and 640x200) and VGA (640x350), you have normally have to put the bits in one bitplane at a time (using a register on the graphics card to set the plane that you are about to copy the image data to). However I also, know that some more exotic modes can be achieved by actually playing with some of the registers, doing things like chaining and unchaining the shift registers. Is it possible to do some of this hacky graphics register programming to achieve a bit-packed (not bit-planar) 16 color mode in EGA or VGA graphics? If so, it would make a lot of the rest of the graphics programing a lot simpler (programming for bit-packed graphics is a lot simpler than programming for bit-planar graphics).
