Comment by bstar77 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bstar77 | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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

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...

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

"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."

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