joeygreco1985
Member
Had ega and cga PC's growing up. My dad brought home a laptop from work once that had a black and white screen but it ran vga games for some reason. That was pretty rad
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Best looking EGA games?
- Thread starter lazygecko
- Start date
Then you should see this.. Uses the same idea for 1024 color mode.I used to think the reason early CGA games made such poor use of the meagre four colours available to them was because they were all designed by artless nerds with thick, coke-bottle glasses. While that may be true, it's still only half the story.
Since most PCs at the time were connected to television sets instead of RGB monitors, clever developers would take advantage of imperfections in the TV-out to mix colours directly on the display device. Dithered black and magenta, for example, could be smeared into either solid red or solid blue, with which one you got coming down to the specific dithering pattern used.
Here's the title screen from Ultima II, courtesy of Wikipedia's article on artifact colours:
Left: RGB. Right: composite. My mind: fucking blown.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
How it's done.
http://8088mph.blogspot.fi/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated.html
Description of every effect.
http://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-all-your-emulators/
SatelliteOfLove
Member
I used to think the reason early CGA games made such poor use of the meagre four colours available to them was because they were all designed by artless nerds with thick, coke-bottle glasses. While that may be true, it's still only half the story.
Since most PCs at the time were connected to television sets instead of RGB monitors, clever developers would take advantage of imperfections in the TV-out to mix colours directly on the display device. Dithered black and magenta, for example, could be smeared into either solid red or solid blue, with which one you got coming down to the specific dithering pattern used.
Here's the title screen from Ultima II, courtesy of Wikipedia's article on artifact colours:
Left: RGB. Right: composite. My mind: fucking blown.
Impressive! CRT trickery never ceases to amaze me.
And then there's this wizardry, using the high res 640x200 monochrome mode:
What. The. Fuck. Mind blown.
What a work of art...
my man
Thanks for this thread, awesome to see some of these games again. There were some great EGA games. Graphics got the job done and a lot of those were just fun, and funny. But man, when VGA came out... It was so real!
Having lived through this generation of games is another reason we naturally hate too much brown, and dark games in general. Not all the time, and there are of course great "dark" games. It's just, nostalgia will always slightly nudge me into liking games with big solid primary colors, while darker games don't get that nostalgia-advantage.
Having lived through this generation of games is another reason we naturally hate too much brown, and dark games in general. Not all the time, and there are of course great "dark" games. It's just, nostalgia will always slightly nudge me into liking games with big solid primary colors, while darker games don't get that nostalgia-advantage.
That is definitely true
Herbspiceguy
Member
Where are the throwback EGA indie games?
That is incredible! Old-school devs were geniuses!
Ahhhh. We might be in the same boat, I'm in Australia so maybe it's that Euro thing. I thought it was really only the C64/ST/IIe (ie. "lo res") computers that used TVs.
I can't remember where I first saw that (it was on GAF, but not sure of the thread) but it's bloody incredible. Makes me sad my old PC is no longer up and running. I miss that thing
Side note of sorts: my holy grail when I had that PC was trying to find a MOD player that would work with 8MHz and potentially over an AdLib. Upgrading to a SoundBlaster Pro didn't make it much easier.
I did find a MOD player eventually that worked... it was called Galaxy Player (or GPlay).
So here's a GDC talk from Mark Ferrari who did the art for all those old LucasArts games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
My first computer was a CGA.
There's a dial you can turn to choose which three colours you wanted.
White+Cyan+Purple for life.
Can't remember games that had only EGA mode off the top of my head. Tongue of the Fatman looks pretty good (and plays pretty bad). Quest for Glory and Space Quest still hold up pretty well, I think.