/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5142478
no. composite mode is hideous too.

Eye rape

so this is the power of pc

>>5142484
Naw that's just a display screen.

I lived with CGA as a primary display for like seven years. About the only game that ever really used it well was Chopper Commando 2

>>5142478
>muh vaporwave
It's easy to like something you didn't have to tolerate for a lack of other options, I suppose.

https://int10h.org/blog/2016/05/dopefish-goes-ntsc-commander-keen-4/

The CGA colors look a lot better through composite, and early PC games took advantage of this. Later ones stopped using the composite out of the original CGA cards, though.

>>5142730
Another example of composite CGA. I always wondered why so many early DOS games had those ugly vertical lines. It turns out this is a well known exploit of the artifacting you get with composite signals. In fact the Apple II used this technique extensively for color generation.

>>5142730
>>5142742
We only ever had RGB out as my dad bought it for work-related shit so I never got to see any of the artifact color abuse in action

It doesn't look as bad as >>5142478 in reality. OP just fucked up the scaling. Here's a better attempt, but note that it's impossible to make CGA look good at the correct aspect ratio with such a small scaling factor.

>>5142761
You didn't have a TV?

>>5143002
I did, but not one with a composite input or an easily reachable generic RF adapter. I was like 6, after all

>>5142730

>>5142478
Daily reminder CGA isn't an "aesthetic", but a simple engineering choice devoid of any artistic rationale: they decided to choose colors with only maximum contrast as a working criterion, just like they just picked even RGB intervals for EGA's 16 colors

>>5142478
So why the fuck did CGA graphics use fucking magenta and cyan as their default colors? They couldn't have done a worse job. It's like they went out of their way to pick colors that will look terrible and not go with anything, period.

>>5144316
they wanted high contrast so even old fucks could use lotus 1-2-3

>>5142478
I'm more of a VGA guy myself

>>5144464
The VGA mode 13 was a revolution that forever changed PC gaming because it was 100% linear instead of some snarled mess the way bitmap graphics were on prior hardware.

Some games are optimized to take advantage of CGA composite artifacting although most don't and often look as shitty as the RGB colors. Indy and the Last Crusade fills everything with red and blue bands.

>>5144292
Still looks badass imho

>>5142478
Oh God, no. It was a terrible standard that looked like puke even then, and still looks that way today.

>>5144464
I'm more of an HDMI guy myself.

>>5142742
damn, that's crazy
do you have any more comparison pics?

>>5144784
It's a bit better on a real CGA card and monitor than the (essentially) emulation mode that VGA cards use.

>>5144472
They still couldn't get good framerates and 60 fps animation until VESA, but it was a definite step forward.

>>5142726
Try fixing Maniac Mansion. The composite support there is a ruse--it just dumps the Tandy mode graphics data into CGA video memory. It seems like someone at LucasArts vaguely heard somewhere that it looked like the Tandy low-res mode and didn't bother testing it on a real CGA card/monitor.

Archon actually looks pretty nice on composite but DOSBox doesn't support the low-res version of that.

A little know secret is that games often set Mode 5 which produces a cyan, white, and red palette that looks not as eye rape as the pink and cyan colors. It's not supported on VGA cards though.

>>5142780
It should be 4:3 and on a real CGA monitor, the pixels aren't square.

Real CGA and EGA cards and monitors run at 60Hz, but VGA displays those modes at 70Hz which throws things off.

>>5144948
You will die

>>5145173
640x480 is 4:3. >>5142780 takes into account the non-square pixels, >>5142478 does not.

>>5144464
>go through here with speed maxed out because trying to train sneak
>night falls at just the wrong moment entering screen
>instantly turbo molested to death by ghosts

>>5142730
>>5142726
The composite colors do look a little softer and not as eye-blaring as the EGA RGB palette.

It uses the same technique as the Apple II where the NTSC burst is kept constant from line to line while it flips 180 degrees every line on broadcast NTSC. On many TVs and monitors, you'll get noticeable jailbars due to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc

>>5145810
That's a good overview and well presented, cool.

>>5145810
Thanks for the link 8-bit Guy. I'd still take (S)VGA over CGA any day of the week but it was interesting to watch at least.

some new demos do some nice things but california games did a nice trick to simulate ega

>>5145182
is that why commander keen has bunged scrolling on some hardware

>>5144784
>b-but muh vaporwave aesthetic
Please don't trigger the kiddos with posts like this.

>>5145914
Commander Keen came out in 1992, they probably never even tested the game on a real EGA card. Someone on VCFED did and found that it runs at a painfully slow clip (VGA cards are quite a bit faster than EGA), also the graphics fucked up because he had a card with 128k of video memory and it turned out that CK requires 256k.

>>5145810
The Pac-Man game in the video is using the 160x100 mode. This is a clever hack of text mode done by setting the character height to half its normal value and using block characters (ASCII 119) for pixels. It works on VGA too, you just have to set the character height register to 8 because VGA has 9x16 text (CGA is 8x8, so 4 is used there).

>>5145810
The composite colors on that thing are a little different than how they appear on a real IBM CGA card also he has the enhanced Maniac Mansion which removed the (fake) composite support from the original version.

>>5145936
it's not THAT bad anon