Frankly those screenshots in CGA look like 90% dithering and are pretty hard to take in.
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
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.
In practice, (and I saw plenty of ugly CGA) I don't think I ever came across one of these composite outputs/monitor combos.
I'd take a 1-bit Mac game over CGA.
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.
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.
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!