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Comment by sigmaprimus | Hacker News Reader

Im pretty sure I have the retail box and floppies for this game. Going from 16 to 256 colors does seem to make the scenes look prettier but for me the 1st game that stands out in my memory showcasing the VGA improvement is a simple breakout game called Bananoid.

These images brought back some powerful memories, one in particular is hearing the chorus of the song Self Control by Laura Branigan comming out of my friends C64 in or around 1986. The next time I heard a simmilar example was a .wav file of the song Daisy but that was years later.

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The retail box came with a replica of Henry Jones’s grail diary. That was mind blowing for a ten-year-old who had just seen the movie. All in all still one of my fondest gaming memories.

The game's simple copy protection system required you to look up things in it too, a touch I loved. The later Fate of Atlantis game did a similar thing as well.

This is a small part of the charm of these old games newer players on ScummVM miss out on, as ScummVM (sensibly) removes the in-game copy protection questions. They were integrated into the game in a sympathetic way that made looking up the diary feel like Indy hunting for clues etc.

Bananoid was awesome because it could make use of the VGA offset registers for smooth scrolling. I was blown away when I saw it.

One VGA with multidirectional smooth scrolling that really impressed me, back in the day, was a shoot'em up called Zone66 [1]. It was hard to get running on DOS, but it was a beauty -- and fun, too!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_66

Do you remember "VGA ART" ?

https://archive.org/details/msdos_shareware_fb_VGAART

I remember being very excited for Zone66 since I had seen other things by Renaissance and it used protected mode to squeeze every ounce of processing power out of my PC. In the end, though, the game just wasn't very fun. It had a cool introduction, though!

The VGA versions of the games could be played on EGA hardware, the 320x200 x256colors graphics were displayed, dithered, in 640x200x16colors mode.

The EGA versions had distinct 16 colors graphics.

I guess you had the VGA versions

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