Every time I see CGA graphics in cyan, magenta, black and white it reminds me of my youth and how 'cold' it felt at the time to see those graphics, I could never really get used to it. When EGA/VGA graphics came along it felt so warm and in my experience games really started to come to life.

Respect for the graphics artists in general for that time to be able to make something out of almost nothing, four colors or less and/or black and white low resolution.

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simonjgreen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ditto. My first ibm compatible was CGA, and those pallets represent a really specific era in my memories. I actually jumped from CGA to VGA (DOS to Win3.1 as well!) and it was like somebody had switched on all the lights in a precisely dark room.

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beefsack 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Games which were made especially for CGA did often look really cool.

Possibly not the best example but I do feel like Alley Cat looked great in CGA: https://i.ibb.co/wNDvgzQ8/alleycat.gif

	▲	muro 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I played that game and couldn't understand why someone would do that. Games on my Commodore 64 looked much better.

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Kurtz79 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not graphics, but even the PC speaker intro had some significant effort put into it, considering how limited it was as a sound source.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ

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codesnik 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I never understood the choice of default CGA palette colors. amber and green wasn't much nicer to me, and it was even more rare in games.

though, "The Eternal Castle Remastered" (2019) used the same palette, and it was pretty good.

	▲	simonjgreen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The CGA palettes were designed with three main objectives: good contrast on composite and black and white displays, high contrast productivity UX, and simple ttl circuitry. There was a limit of 16 colours, but if you wanted to step up resolution you had to compromise by selecting fewer colors. A major compromise choice was resolution vs colours. High resolution cost you your magenta and yellow. Have a google for the mode 4 and mode 5 pallets and mathematically why they are the way they are, it’s super interesting if you’re in to retro tech. In the later era, as EGA and VGA gained, I think CGA became a bolt on by some game devs, to accommodate that dwindling audience, so the problem was compounded by it being very second class citizen.

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noduerme an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I came to comment on the same... I grew up with CGA graphics for my first games, too. It was, in many ways, worse than no color at all. But the jarring visuals and the feeling of it will always stay with me.

I don't know why this site calls CGA "16 color" (the size of the CGA palette, of which 4 could be used at a time at this game's resolution), while also calling EGA "16 color" (when EGA uses 16 colors at a time from a palette of 64).

I fed this question to Gemini (compare CGA vs EGA) and it made the same category error in its distinction, calling both "16 color". So, to the human that didn't check their slop site, maybe you should fix that.

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christkv 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A friend has a composite extra monitor for the CGA output and I was amazed to discover that it used composite to generate more color for supporting games.

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g-b-r 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, CGA was really absurd, I'm glad I've never had a computer with that