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):
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