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Comment by fullstop | Hacker News Reader

Last Crusade supported CGA. I don't know how it was implemented, though -- it looks like dithering was used at least to emulate some of the EGA colors. [1]

That wasn't the only change, through. I remember that there is a rotisserie in the castle which rotates in EGA/VGA, but does not in CGA, so they likely knew that the computers with CGA could not handle the animation as well.

1. https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/indiana-jones-and-the-las...

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CGA looks worse in modern screenshots though. The colour palette could be awful but the monitor would add some blur between the pixels and that helped. EGA had the same. VGA 320x200 was pixel doubled (640x400 was fed to the monitor) so it looked much blockier.

And if the colour palette wasn't to your taste... For years I had CGA with a monochrome composite monitor. So it was all shades of green. The old LucasArts and Sierra games were fine on mono CGA.

Also we walked uphill both ways to school, etc, get your 4k displays off my lawn...

I had a greyscale VGA and Fate of Atlantis looked pretty good too.

Yep, CGA in monochrome is quite pleasant. Black, amber, and two intermediate shades of amber, what more could one need?! It's really much nicer than any of the garish CGA colour palettes. [With the possible exception of the black-red-cyan-white undocumented palette.]

EGA is great though, 320x200x16 is just one of those natural sweet spots that many different early computers eventually settled on.

CGA color looked even better on a composite color monitor (like a standard TV). Developers were able to abuse NTSC color artifacts to get a surprising amount of color out of their games. The downside was that text became generally unreadable.

Frankly those screenshots in CGA look like 90% dithering and are pretty hard to take in.

Yes, to me those are examples where CGA didn't work well. It wasn't suitable for this kind of scenes. This cyan-magenta-white default palette was also pretty jarring; the green-red-yellow one was better looking.

but when viewed on a composite monitor, you see something quite different.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors

Yeah, it feels like someone was told that they needed to support CGA a few weeks before the final deadline.

IMO, nothing looks good in CGA. It's not just that it's 4 colours, it's 4 awful colours.

I'd take a 1-bit Mac game over CGA.

This is obviously highly subjective, but you might be thinking of CGA's default palette (magenta-cyan-white-black). The device had more than one palette, and many games used the red-green-yellow-black palette, which looks much more pleasing to me.

Here's an example where it's used, and it looks cool to me: https://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/defender-of-the-crown/scr... (the text is hard to read, but that's because of the low resolution).

> I'd take a 1-bit Mac game over CGA.

Those indeed look pretty cool, but that's a matter of higher resolution which allows for cool dithering effects. CGA color modes were pretty low res, so it's likely that's the actual problem you have with them, not just the 4 colors. Or rather, the combination of both factors.

That's the low intensity dark green-dark red-brown-black palette, not the high intensity light red-light green-yellow-black palette. The high intensity mode was about a quarter as garish as the cyan magenta mode, which won't make your eyeballs bleed, but it's still a mite bit uncomfortable.

The dark green dark red brown black palette was indeed probably the least bad palette, but it suffered severely from a lack of contrast. That's why the text is hard to read, because it's black text on a brown background, not because of the resolution.

The reason the cyan magenta white black palette was so common is because it had both black and white, meaning the text was easy to read.

The Tandy graphics adapter allowed a programmable palette. It was still just 4 colors, but the programmer could choose which 4 colors they were. (out of the 16 colors a CGA monitor could display) This was such a minor increase in complexity for a 10x improvement in usefulness it's shocking to me that IBM didn't include that in the CGA.

First things first: thanks for the insightful reply!

Yes, I meant the low intensity palette, you're correct. I disagree with you in that I don't find it "the least bad", but actually beautiful. It has a kind of "wood engraving" vibe to me.

> That's why the text is hard to read, because it's black text on a brown background, not because of the resolution.

I respectfully disagree. It's true that the contrast is lower than with a brighter color, but it's still not a problem for my eyes. For me, it actually has to do with the blockiness of the low res font; also there's some aliasing with the "m" and similar characters that confuses my eyes and I have to make an extra effort the parse the characters -- the same would happen were this black font on white background.

The Tandy fascinates me since I saw that video by The 8 Bit Guy. Sadly, I never owned one!

Bare in mind the displays of the time would have blended the pixels.

Likewise those who complain that CGA is “only 4 awful colours” have clearly never used a proper CGA system the way it was originally intended.

The following YouTube video does a good job describing what CGA was really like back in the day: https://youtu.be/niKblgZupOc

This is largely cherry-picking revisionism. I saw CGA on the displays of the time at the time with the games of the time, and can confirm it was mostly terrible. EGA couldn't come fast enough.

You’re missing the point. I wasn’t suggesting CGA was brilliant. I was just saying that CGA actually works best when differed because the screens of the time blended the pixels to create new colours. And that the reason CGA uses the colour scheme it does is because that allows for more colours to be created via blending.

EGA was definitely a massive step up, no question. But people also miss the point of CGA when they look as sharp screenshots rendered on a pixel perfect LCD display.

Good point. Fiddling with blur in Gimp does remove plenty of that dither noise. Though of course now my eyes keep trying to refocus, just like in the olde times.

This is fascinating. I never realized it was meant to be used that way.

In practice, (and I saw plenty of ugly CGA) I don't think I ever came across one of these composite outputs/monitor combos.

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