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tjeerdnet • yesterday at 9:48 AM • 11 replies • view on HN

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.


Replies

beefsack • yesterday at 11:36 AM

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

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simonjgreen • yesterday at 10:55 AM

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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Kurtz79 • yesterday at 11:19 AM

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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Bluestein • yesterday at 4:22 PM

This while fully understandable, has one have to go back even further to what it felt like to actually be able to display any graphics at all and what that felt like ...

codesnik • yesterday at 10:36 AM

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.

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diegof79 • yesterday at 4:54 PM

Lucky you that at least you had a CGA monitor. The were very expensive in my country. I used a Hercules monitor with SIMCGA; it was probably one of the first DOS programs I learned to run.

vbernat • yesterday at 1:53 PM

On composite, the game can display more colors. I never knew at the time and was only aware of that a decade ago. ScummVM and DOSBox but knows how to render composite.

BeetleB • yesterday at 5:38 PM

Hey! I had a CGA monitor for 10+ years. While I did mildly envy the EGA friends, it never felt bad to me while I had it.

noduerme • yesterday at 12:26 PM

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 • yesterday at 12:44 PM

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.

g-b-r • yesterday at 10:35 AM

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