Loom EGA/VGA Comparison | Hacker News Reader

Loom EGA/VGA Comparison

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190 pointsingve77 comments

The same is true for Monkey Island 1. The reason the VGA versions are inferior is because they replaced Mark Ferrari's amazing dithered EGA backgrounds. Additionally, the VGA versions used scanned art in spots, so it feels less sharp and detailed. I'm not sure who did the VGA treatments, but I doubt it was Ferrari. Ferrari did many (if not all) of the backgrounds in Thimbleweed Park. The guy is incredible. I'm lucky that I played and beat both Loom and Secret of Monkey Island before they went VGA as a kid. We were kind of brainwashed back then to think more is always better. I always preferred the EGA versions but never really knew why until I was much older.

I'm working on a few game concepts and made the decision to solely use the EGA pallet. It has to be one of the worst pallets out there, but when done well the results can be astonishing. You have to use dithering and you have to use some unusual colors (cyan and magenta come to mind). This creates a very unique, nostalgic feel that only EGA can produce. I also love adding interesting technical constraints to my game ideas.

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." -- Orson Welles

Ditto on being a Ferrari fan. Been re-reading this article for years, I think you'll enjoy it if you haven't seen it yet. http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Old_School_Color_C...

That was a fantastic read - especially the linked Q&A with Mark Ferrari contained therein.

Thanks for sharing!

Edit: Here is a direct link to the Q&A for those that are interested (but courtesy of course to the person above for the original source link): http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Q_A_with_Mark_J_Fe...

Fans of Mark Ferrari should get the Living Worlds app. You can have his art as your wallpaper. https://pixfabrik.com/livingworlds/

I played Monkey Island directly on VGA, so the EGA version just looks too old fashioned for me :-/

I think you mean CGA palette. The EGA had a 64 color palette but you could only use 16 at a time.

"It's supposed to smell like a Wallmart electric force field generation unit, but we could only do 16 different odors in EGA, so it smells a lot like the time pod."

I was referring to the default EGA pallet which is what games used back then.

Yes, that would be the CGA palette. It's also the default in EGA and VGA (the first 16 colors).

I think you're technically correct, but that's not how these games used those graphics modes.

A game with "CGA graphics", used the 320x200 mode, which had one of two fixed four-colour palettes, red/green/yellow/black or cyan/magenta/white/black. It was godawful.

A game with "EGA graphics" used the 320x200 mode, and the 16 colour fixed palette. This mode overlapped perfectly with graphics modes on the Atari ST and the Amiga 500, which allowed game developers to make games that looked exactly the same on all three.

So all the classic LucasArts games, from Maniac Mansion to Monkey Island simply ran on a port of SCUMM on each platform, and re-used the graphics assets straight up.

Sierra did the exact same thing in this era, they had their own game engine, and games like Police Quest II, Quest for Glory and King's Quest IV looked exactly the same on all three platforms.

Standard EGA didn't support the extended palette for 200 line modes, because it would break backwards compatibility with CGA monitors. Some EGA monitors had a switch to enable it, but software support was very limited.

EGA could show only 16 colors on screen at once; CGA, 4.

VGA was capable of 256 colors in 320 x 200 mode, as well as in the undocumented 320x240 "X mode", the latter had the perfect square pixels.

CGA can show up to 16 at once, depending on the mode.

Loved Loom on the Amiga, always felt the lower color versions of Monkey Island and Loom looked better.

You can tell the color limitations led some of the atmosphere direction. Same deal with both the island at the start of Loom and the town at the start of Monkey Island, the EGA versions feel like they're night but the VGA feel like early evening.

Actually, the EGA version has a sunset background at the dock and the VGA version is after it has set.

EGA definitely has a charm to it. The main limitation is that the viable color ramps are pretty awkward and only slightly improved with dithering:

* Grey values * Grey-blue * Grey-yellow * Grey-green * Yellow-red * Yellow-brown * Yellow-grey * Blue-brown * Blue-green * Blue-purple

With this setup, you often have to live with a harsh transition between extreme color saturation and no saturation. You can see the result in the way Ferrari's backgrounds are formed - usually only one or two color ramps plus dither, ignoring a lot of the palette, heavy shadows and rim lighting to indicate the color without a hue shift.

It's actually really great if you are going for a warm-cool contrast because you can run lengthy ramps of reds and blues.

Here's a great interview with Ferrari https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-aJ8YNSYGs

It feels like the VGA version got painted over by a non-artist. Look at the trees in the graveyard scene, the pillow shading is inexcusable. The EGA is still great though. Mark Ferrari's other work is good too, check out http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

Many people think the charm of Loom is due to pixel art, but that's not true. The aesthetic was consciously borrowed from Eyvind Earle's work on Sleeping Beauty, which was very much high res and full color. The main antagonist is based on Maleficent.

This hits the nail on the head, I think. Other comments talk about limitations of EGA, but that really isn't the problem exhibited here. The problem here is not drawing things right.

The graveyard scene has the trees illuminated from the side opposite to the sunset. The original has them illuminated by the sunset. The scene with the pipes has several of the shadows wrong for the apparent light sources, compared to the original.

And where did the birds and the will-o'-the-wisps go?

> Look at the trees in the graveyard scene, the pillow shading is inexcusable.

Thanks for introducing me to the term (which led to an explicit definition) for something I've perceived before but never clearly.

The tombstones and sunset firmly establish the light source at the horizon. The foreground should be in silhouette (as it was initially) and there's no explanation for why the center of the trunks would receive more light than their edges.

(However, both versions of the dock, and the furnace with the angled pipes, are pretty terrible about light sources.)

Literally decades of trying to explain this to people and yet Google suggests that this is very thread is the first significant time that the pixel-art term "pillow shading" has been explicitly linked to the acronym "VGA".

That's weird because it's the defining characteristic of the cheap art of the VGA era.

Epic Games was big into pillow shading. Jill of the Jungle, Solar Winds, Jazz Jackrabbit...

They'd define seven hues, 8 shades of each hue, reserve the last 8 shades for monochrome, and then just paint things in from the side of the object.

The pillow-shading aesthetic stuck after we moved on to 16.7 million colors and there was no reason to think about color that way anymore.

A frustrating legacy.

I agree; it's just uninspired, poor artwork. Preferring the EGA style doesn't make the VGA art not bad. I might go so far as to say it's objectively bad.. You could almost certainly get a consensus on that from a group of talented artists..

I don't think they spent much money on the remaster. There are tons of these though all the way to now. Remasters that fail to capture the original art direction and substitute middling art.

Within the past decade there are more and more good remaster examples. Studios seem to be putting more money into them, and better talent is involved.

Like the remaster of The Day of the Tentace... The original has a vaguely German Expressionist (from 1920s films) look that I like. The artists of the remaster smoothed out many of the harsh edges, apparently assuming that they were only due to technical limitations. Technical limitations, like in the old movies, influenced the style, sure... but it works the way it was initially created and ignorant "improvements" don't do it any good.

Have a look at the second image (jail), especially the lamps and the grate. They should be more angular in higher resolution, not less. https://rebell.at/artikel/day-of-the-tentacle-bekommt-ein-re...

This kind of modernization can be done right... Jim Burton movies and Babylon Berlin borrowed from German expressionism, especially in certain scenes - often night scenes. Tentacle is somewhere in between - the artists could have taken their inspiration from looking at the Caligari (1920) - Batman (1989) - Babylon Berlin scale and some 30s cartoons.

Disclaimer: I cannot art for shit. I can only look and talk about it.

*Tim Burton

> The original EGA background art for Loom was made by Mark Ferrari

Obligatory recommendation for this talk by Mark Ferrari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 - truly an artist

Wow, that's amazing. Here is one of the galleries he's showing in the video: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

I couldn't find the one with adjustable time of day, though.

Just bought https://pixfabrik.com/livingworlds/ as a result of your post. It has multiple variants for each scene depending on time of day.

edit: Also found the web version: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/

The difference is striking. I only played the EGA version, and showed it to my children.

This is a great example why making things look realistic is not always a good idea in game design. There is a good reason why some games should not look like your daily life.

The dream-like rendering of old games is one of their principal attractive features. This is what I dearly miss in modern games, which sweat over hyper-realistic rendering and tend to look like a documentary with some haphazard CGI / AR effects slapped onto that. Some old games instead would take you to a visually impossible but utterly beautiful neverland, as shown so well in the article.

I hope some game designers will realize this, and try to make another explicitly visually unrealistic game which is a piece of art.

Yes. I remember playing the game in EGA because thats the most I had at the time and it was very iconic. Looking back, it and many games of the time remain iconic Lucasart/Sierra/etc. Modern games have advanced enormously but they’re lacking a certain aspect that is very hard to engineer and all that complexity anounts to something but in the end it all looks the same and lacks the personility games used to have.

There are billions of non-photorealistic games out there with every aesthetic imaginable, both retro and non-retro. It's not an exaggeration to say that there are far more options today if that's what you like. You just have to do a little searching.

https://obradinn.com/ http://www.antichamber-game.com/ https://www.supergiantgames.com/games/hades/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1057090/Ori_and_the_Will_... https://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/Papers_Please/ http://kentuckyroutezero.com/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/48000/LIMBO/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/557600/Gorogoa/ https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/

Wow, I remember this remaster… I definitely had a feeling of the magic being gone in the CD-ROM version. I blamed the C-list voiceovers and overly lush production of the music… the old “sound blaster” score had this delicate and deliberate (what we would later call “chiptune”) sound, whereas the CD was just _wrong_. But yes, the graphics were inferior too.

I would have expected the EGA and soundblaster approach to work great for a cartoonish game like Monkey Island, but Loom was more like a Rankin-Bass or a gothic Disney movie (think Black Cauldron). Everything about the themes indicate that lush visual canvases and a live orchestra would be the way to go.

Textbook case of severe limitations leading to great art, I guess.

… here’s a vid where you can see a live playback of both versions simultaneously. Yeah, the voices are as cringe as I remember. The music is lacking. Melodrama. It’s just bad. https://youtu.be/Tsmt29AJBaE

[edit] even that video doesn’t quite get the best score. They’re playing EGA with no soundcard at all. Here’s the game with an AdLib / SoundBlaster score, hardware standards that were just catching on when Loom was being developed. https://youtu.be/qxoRHAY3CM0

And here’s the Roland MT-32, the card that everyone knew was the best, and no 13 year old could possibly afford. THAT’S the premium experience. https://youtu.be/SVYI2logmXs

((It’s all Tchaikovsky, by the way))

Loom was the first quest game I ever played, and it still is a marvel. replayed it a couple of years ago and was really surprised how well it ages - way better than Monkey Island, I must say.

This comparison is a very good reminder that severe limitations sometimes produce greater results. EGA version looks so much better than smoothly colored VGA.

How appropriate. You weave like a duck!

Okay, I'm asking you about Monkey Island: Why do you think it did not age that well?

The interface. All that grid of available actions, just too many options. Later quests evolved to have fewer actions (see Full Throttle), and later the only option left was general 'interact' action.

In this regard Loom was already ahead, with all actions replaced by general 'cast' action, and the exact combination of notes was the puzzle.

I've heard Bethesda is working feverishly to remove all options from their games and just leave an "interact" button.

Your dream will come true in Elder Scrolls VI i guess.

It's not my dream per se, but in Monkey Island 1&2, when stuck and without an internet walkthrough, it was extremely frustrating to try out all the actions on all the objects. Full Throttle and Grim Fandango improved on that old model immensely, and Loom's interface turned out to be 10 years ahead of the curve.

You do remember you had to write down the songs right?

I think that type of thing can really enhance a game if done right. It engages more of your senses and gets you (literally) thinking outside the box. It makes you feel like you're learning and demonstrating a skill, but in actuality the skill is just being attentive. The original came with a booklet [1] where you could write down the spells next to explanations of what they did, seems like an excellent way to do it.

[1] https://youtu.be/WFl7Q1Io51c?t=370

Btw when I played it for the first time I just didn't understand that the pattern played backwards did the opposite. I thought that those are different spells, and it made things so much harder. Only many years later when I came back to replay Loom I noticed that some patters are suspiciously similar... oh boy.

Been probably 30 years since I played it last, but that would so make sense wouldn't it. I don't think I figured that out back then, wow. Still, the interface compared to all the other adventure games at that time was just so different and full of wonder, I kept coming back until I finished the darn game.

For the dancing skeletons?

Yeah, the hip bone connected to the arm bone. This song is etched in my mind forever.

Funnily enough Monkey Island was already redeuced actions, Maniac Mansion and Zak Mckracken had even more.

It is easy to understand, why. Graphical adventure games were direct successors of text adventure games, where players interacted with the world via text commands, and you could have dozens of them without cluttering the interface.

Reminds me of the sarcastic lick and smell actions they added to Space Quest when they were pressured to move away from the old text based input system.

They were the most memorable features of the game they were in.

I'm a big fan too.

Oh, pleasure to meet you, Transultimate Apostle!

I loved Loom but looking at what Wikipedia says were release platforms, I'm going to have to dig out the box because I didn't have one of those. It is one of the only old video games that I still have the box because it was so fun.

Is there a way to legally play the EGA version these days?

Once again the Internet Archive comes to the rescue https://archive.org/details/msdos_Loom_1990

Fans of Loom might want to check out Brian Moriarty's earlier masterpiece, Trinity. It lacks the beautiful EGA graphics, of course, but the atmosphere of the game feels very similarly moody.

Obviously in minority here (wonder if because never having played or seen I have no nostalgia, I’m 50 and played EGA games back then ).

But I don’t see it. The VGA looks fine. The space scene OA labels cheap looks way better to me. The EGA scenes aren’t worse or better, just highly stylized. They’re in different styles. You may prefer the minimal style but that doesn’t make the other style bad.

Yeah, I also played both and I agree with you. This page also cherry-picked the examples. The EGA shading is ok but it doesn't work as well in the Glass city, Dragon cave or in the the last scene, for example.

Seeing the original EGA graphics gave me a wave of nostalgia I wasn't prepared for. The first time I saw an EGA screen was at Radio Shack, setting up a Tandy 1000 system on the sales floor. Having only ever used a television as a computer display I was absolutely blown away by the clarity of the screen. I ended up using my employee discount to purchase a Tandy 1000 TX and hacking some weird CRT connection together to get the Tandy 16 color CGA working in time for college. Couldn't afford EGA at the time but I eventually moved up to a Trident VGA adapter when I had saved enough. I sort of left gaming behind after Doom and Goldenaxe but the early 90s was a fun time.

My first computer was an original IBM PC XT. It had 8088, 640kb or RAM, 20MB Seagate HD, and a 360kb dd. Software was so lean that we would use smartdrive (or something like that), to use 360kb of RAM as a virtual disk and copy the games there so that they will load faster.

In 1995 I bought my first computer, a very old original IBM PC XT for about USD 100. That was my economic limit.

It had a MDA card, no graphics at all. The rest of the hardware was as you describe.

I was at least able to exchange the MDA card for a Hercules and play some very oldie games on a monochrome monitor.

The details are foggy, but Loom in particular had some way to be playable on monochrome graphics, perhaps with some kind of CGA emulator. I have vivid memories of playing through this game on my Compaq XT clone in black-and-yellow with no mouse. Similar time frame; my family got the machine around 93-94 on a pretty low budget, but I learned a TON on it until we managed to buy a Pentium 133 a few years later.

I remember playing some CGA games with some Hercules graphics card. There was two TSR programs which made it possible to run CGA color games with the yellow-on-black Hercules display.

Can't remember the name of the other one but one of them was definitively SIMCGA [https://www.pcorner.com/list/GRAPHUTI/SIMCGA41.ZIP/INFO/]

Without that awesome program my childhood would've been a lot less intresting.

Solid memory! It was definitely SIMCGA that I had and it worked awesome. Thanks for the nostalgia hit!

I remember playing some Spiderman game for PC with ega graphics (or at least had a 16 color palette) on the 286 of my father with monochrome (Hercules ?) display.

That IBM XT keyboard would be worth $100 today if you could find it.

Unfortunately it is long gone. Our living space back then was too limited to keep old machines around. Actually, it still is.

Same with my first PC. It was the around 1991 and that 20Mb harddrive seemed like an enormous space, I had so much software and games on it. And also had windows 3.0 which kindof sucked so I was spending most time in DOS.

I think this is a really good example of how adding constraints can really enhance creativity. Frequently the worst thing for creativity is giving people too much to work with rather than too little. The EGA version had to work within strict technical constraints, and so the end result is more nuanced than you would ever expect. The VGA version didn't have that problem, and so it's sloppier and less inspired.

Loom is arguably the best looking EGA game. I hadn't seen the vga version prior to this. There doesn't seem to be the coherency of style that the originals had

Nice comparison. I wonder what the differences between both would be on real hardware (graphics adapter+CRT screen), especially for criteria like vibrancy and apparent smoothness.

I‘m aware that emulators nowadays ship with tube distortion and scanline filters/shaders, but is there a more "physical model"-based approach that properly implements raster and pixel over-/afterglow?

I am always amazed as I look back at cga and ega graphics how incredibly versatile the designers were. Working with extreme limitations and still able to produce a mood and look that blows my mind.

Same with really good ansi artists.

> Hover the cursor over the images to see the remastered VGA version. If you're on a iOS device, you can simply tap the images.

I only see the remastered images for some of the images, is that as intended?

> If you're on a iOS device, you can simply tap the images.

Surprisingly it works on Android too and probability with every other mobile OS. s/iOS/touchscreen/ ?

How can I play the original EGA version?

Using ScummVM on any existing platform. The game should be easily... found online.

You can buy from Steam for pretty cheap, and then customize by loading in a recent version of ScummVM. This also works in 64-bit only versions of MacOS as where the base title is otherwise incompatible.

Beyond the graphical changes, I also seem to recall that the script is somewhat different in the EGA version. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a fix from the community for this, though.

Loom is easy to find, you can get it on GOG, is on reduced price several times a year. And then use SCUMMVM and you can even play it on your phone.

But does it include EGA graphics or only the remastered graphics like a lot of re-released old games do?

The one on GOG is the VGA version, for the EGA one you need to resort to other sources more on the spirit of Monkey Island :-) .

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Loom_1990

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