alt Hacker NewsI see a few people saying they couldn’t get used to CGA, that it was absurd, or worse than no graphics at all.
I can relate to that. But as I’ve aged I’ve appreciated just how much was done with less back. I mean that literally: we couldn’t afford a computer so my dad would haul home his work computer each weekend. We’d call BBS’ on it, print stuff. Play shareware games. It pissed my mom off because it took up half the dinner table. But my brother learned to code this way too.
So later on when my friends got EGA and VGA, CGA meant “poor.”
Fast forward many years and I have kids and were in better financial circumstances than my dad and mom back then. My kids have MacBooks. One of their friends was over one night and was visibly embarrassed that all she had was the school assigned Chromebook. She and my daughter were doing homework and her friend said that she wished her family could afford better laptops.
I didn’t want to embarrass her but then next morning after I made pancakes and I was sitting at the table I was like hey let’s take a look at these Chromebooks (we had an old one sitting around) and the three of us sat there and in about an hour and a half they’d put together a very simple farm game in the spirit of Stardew Valley on PICO-8.
Point being, we live in a world where especially with AI, it’s easy to think we can do everything. And it can feel like that, which means that when you can’t, you feel worse that you can’t because it would appear everyone else is doing amazing things with no limits.
But maybe we need more limits on things. Maybe that 4 color palette forced devs and artists to be creative back then in ways that make things better for everyone.
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> ....as I’ve aged I’ve appreciated just how much was done with less back [then].
As a kid and teen CGA and EGA looked absurd to me, even when that was the best one could get at home. So I waited until VGA to get into PC gaming. Now in middle age and having tried my hand at VGA+ art, it is delightful to see well rendered at at every color depth.
Constraints foster creativity and creation, and from that experience learning and pride in one’s achievements springs.
Before it was a dumpster fire Twitter’s 140 character constraint made it fun. An infinity of possibility leaves most of us motionless.
It was CGA specifically that was terrible, though. I'd take 4-shade grey Gameboy graphics over that color palette. There's nothing wrong with 4 colors per se, but there's a lot wrong with those four colors.
A couple more registers to have some kind of selection of the colors would have gone a long way.
The 'could not get used to CGA' requires context. Back then I had a PC with Hercules and CGA (with a hardware switch at the back of the computer), so that was the maximum and I did not know better for a few years. When I moved to VGA then of course I preferred it over CGA, but for several years I did not 'get used with CGA', I only knew CGA. Yeah, today I would not go for a CGA graphics in a game ... so what? That's irrelevant.
Does anyone else remember the (at the time) searing brightness of CGA and EGA monitors? It’s something I always noticed when compared to my Amiga monitor and to VGA that followed. I kinda miss it :)