I've been playing some games through ScummVM, and there's a cool feature that lets you load the game using whichever graphics mode the software originally supported. It also lets you use shaders to simulate a CRT, because these bare pixels were never meant to be seen with human eyes. I thought it was fun to compare the art from the different versions.
The posted image is from the EGA version
Here is the CGA:
And Here is Hercules(Amber):
What's weird is - I could swear Hercules had higher resolution. Didn't it?
Hercules used to play in 720 x 400 or thereabouts.
And that CGA palette looks wrong to me, haha. All the games I ever saw were either cyan magenta black and white, or black red green yellow. First time I see a mix like this.
CGA had a number of modes, but one of the 4 color 320x200 modes was most often used in game; these look like they're supposed to by white, black, cyan and magenta. The thing is, it could use NTSC color artifacting to actually show more colors on a composite monitor through the use of dithering.
CGA was 4 colors out of 16 I believe, with the two default color sets like you say. But I only see 4 colors in the images, too. Maybe the white in the black green red yellow is actually yellow?
CGA has some complexities. I haven't gone over everything, but I think the pictures are correct.
Check the wiki section on color palettes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter
And as another poster said, VGA conversion is a problem all its own. See the 8-bit Guy's video: https://youtu.be/niKblgZupOc
VGA let's you pick a palette of 256 colours out of 262144, which is because the RGB components were actually on 6bit, not the full 8bit we would come to expect later. The 320x200 resolution would also be a sore point for artists and that's how you ended with quite a few games sticking to the EGA palette and using dithering to simulate more colours while using a superior resolution (640x480, or was it 800x600?). I've some vivid memories of Cobra Mission for example, or the Commander Keen saga.
VGA was 640x480 but you could do square pixels at 768 × 576 but only in 16 colors I think.
SVGA (Super VGA) was the first time I saw 800x600 glorious pixels.
But since our hardware upgrade was slow at home we jumped right to XGA.
Oh dear, yes, SVGA! I had forgotten about that one, hahaha!
Oh man, I remember that brief time where games had a "256 color mode."
I think that bad CGA palette comes from quick & dirty VGA conversions. This was probably near enough to the changeover to EGA that it was worth doing a good job because there were still quite a few people still using CGA.
Just a guess though.
No, CGA had multiple color modes. It could only display four at a time, but there were a few palettes to choose from. Of course, some hackers went waaay beyond and made it do 1K colors: https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated/
Oh man! This is some brilliant trickery, haha! I love those. Back in the day, though, there was scant few sources of info so most people would rediscover this sort of stuff on their own, unless part of some group like the demo scene. Wish I could have read this sort of article back then...
Right, I meant that when doing the conversions the quick and dirty way was to default to the gross palate instead of picking bespoke colors and palettes for everything.
That's a very cool page that you linked, I'll have to read through it in detail.
This may open your eyes regarding CGA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc