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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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