Some neckbeard at IBM actually thought this was a good color

Name a better four color scheme.
IBMs were intended for business, not fun.

Teal and pink are a very 80s color scheme. In fact the Commodore 64's bright pastels are also distinctly period.

With a limited palette, pink and cyan isn't the worst combination for readability/contrast. How well it would work with complex graphics in games for one and a half neckbeard to play wasn't even an afterthought, that was back when computers were first of all work machines.

>>2805753
http://www.metafilter.com/150617/How-one-paper-cup-designer-created-the-look-of-the-90s

That color scheme was very common in 80s graphics design. Conjurs up images of Miami Vice.

You can have any color you want as long as it's cyan or magenta.

>>2805763
Yeh but teal and pink were used in everything all through the 90s as well.

>>2805796
>>2805763
Pink and aqua were popular in the 50s as well. It comes and goes. Just like in the 70s, everything was brown, green, and orange which came back in the 2000s.

>>2805735
Pretty sure those were the only colors the intended computer could display at the time.

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Almost nothing in CGA looked good. The color palettes were picked more for their shade than their hue. Cyan/Purple probably used more since it had white available.

>>2805834
The CGA cards had 16 colors, but why IBM chose these two puke-tastic palettes for Mode 4 is a mystery.

>>2805845
Well that thumbnail doesn't look so ba- JESUS CHRIST

>>2805735
Because it wasn't for games. It's a great color scheme for text.

>>2805857
That's the secret to CGA, you just don't look very close and it's fine.

>>2805735

I actually kind of like it.

>>2805750
Black, white, light gray and dark gray

>>2805845
Is that golfing with The Vision?

>>2805735
because of word processors, spreadsheets and other business apps

>>2805960
CGA is too low-res to be useful for business graphics anyway; that's why Hercules was introduced.

>>2805972
I think the IBM people probably intended it to be a traditional home computer display. Remember that they originally envisioned the PC as an all-purpose computer for home, school, or office use.

You also have to factor in the memory limitations at the time CGA might have 16 colors, you can only display 4 colors at a time

>>2805986
Yeh but the 4 colors they chose were just...no. The PCjr/Tandy display is what CGA should have been.

>>2805972
640*400>720*350
NEC > IBM

>>2806120
>le punctuation police
Hello, /v/

>>2806120
You're posting in a thread that could have been on /r/games on a board that might as well be a subreddit on a site that might as well be reddit

why are you surprised? find a better site, but for the love of fuck don't post about it here, because then you're just dooming it to the same fate

I don't even come here that often anymore but every time I do there's always someone bitching about how bad the site is. just leave like everyone else with any sense of self respect

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Looking at the CGA palette the R G and B of each colour are either 00, 55, AA or FF

I'm guessing to make the hardware as cheap and simple as possible they limited the value of each component to one of four values which probably simplified the digital->analog conversion a hell of a lot.

You only need 4 bits for 16 palette colors, and then for each RGB component the palette itself is only looking up one of 4 different colours (00/55/AA/FF) which is 2 bits.

>>2806134
It's not the punctuation, I love a good ellipses but that phrase is one of the most millenial things in the world, right between "literally" and "I can't even". Every time someone uses it I'm doubtful they were even born when this site was created.

A E S T H E T I C S

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This thread is so painfully dumb and full of people who haven't a fucking clue in the goddamn world what they're talking about. It's so cringeworthy.

>>2806154
There's a difference between calling someone out on being a retard and actually caring that they are a retard. You're just a retard but it's no skin off my nose

>>2806137
Oh man I actually read properly and it gets even better

It's based on RGBI which is like 4 bits total - red, green, blue and intensity (light or dark). So you end up with eight colors that have light and dark variants

As for the hex values

#55 is a third of #FF
#AA is two thirds of #FF

They just divided by three for the intensities of the colours!

It's a classic engineering over aesthetics thing where they just went as simple as possible

>>2806164
so retarded amirite. y didn't they just use an >9000 core gpu and a few gb of ram. i'm totally old enough to post here.

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>he fell for the business meme and bought an expensive IBM PC instead of an Amiga
top kek

>>2806147
The irony in this post is almost palpable.

>>2806140
>millenial
Stop.

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I still use a CGA card and I see no reason to upgrade.

>>2805856

Because they despised all life.

>>2806552
nice retort

>>2806164
It's beautiful and clever from an engineering standpoint and the colors don't look terrible, I really don't understand the point of this thread at all

>>2806716
>I really don't understand the point of this thread at all

OP just found out about CGA today and wanted to tell everybody about his discovery.

>>2805735

I like it.

>>2805735
I grew up on this shit this is some familiar and reassuring like an old friend

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>>2805786
You can have your game painted in any color you want, as long as you're controlled by eyeball aliens.
Hey, at least the game is afFordable. Even if it's shit. And in 16 colors.

>>2805786
>>2806147

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How can you hate such a based color combo.

>>2805750
CYMK

>>2806716
they look horrible

>>2805986
>CGA
>only 4 colors at a time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y

>>2806274
The original graphics whore game. It's like Shantae - people will play any old boring shit if it looks pretty enough.

>>2806841
As the person who posted >>2806725 I'm not claiming anything, just saying.
Tried to make a point about lack of color, nothing else. Never played a game that was 4-color other than this one Dizzy game on the ZX, so I guess you're probably more of an expert than me.
Not the one who posted the YT link.

>>2806147
Most people didn't use composite displays because they weren't any good for 80-column text, besides many games did not properly support it.

>>2806130
But CGA is only 640x200.

>>2807065
And that's why NEC is better. A cheap PC-88 could handle 640x200 with 8 colors and 640x400 with 2. The more professional oriented PC-98 could handle 640x400 with 8 colors, later improved to 16.

>>2807067
That's real nice if this were Japan. Unfortunately it's not.

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http://deathshadow.com/pakuPaku

>>2805735
I remember games where I could choose the color scheme. I used to prefer this one as opposed to other, more complete, color schemes in some games. Should I feel bad anons?

>>2805926
kek... he did it.

>>2805735
I don't see how this is a problem.

It's basically CMYK except they had to take out 1 color to make it 4 colors. Yellow won't work well with cyan, magenta contrasts very well instead.

>>2806839
hey now, Shantae is actually a fun game. The GBC game, that is. The rest is trash.

>>2806704
Retort to what? Your entire post was wrong.

>>2806704
>>2809869
>nice retort
>Retort to what?
It's RETRO! sheesh, pay at least some attention to your spelling.

>>2806130
what did you say, bitch nigga

>>2806145
I don't think I'll ever not be able to hear that song when I read this word again

>>2805735
They used off the shelf parts for pretty much everything in the IBM PC. This is why it wasn't nearly as good for gaming as the c64 or other systems.

>>2806663
>320x240
CGA couldn't even do that resolution dipshit. Closest was 320x200; 320x240 was only introduced as part of VGA Mode X.

>>2809594
It's full of backtracking and farming, and the transformation dances take far too long.

>>2807165
This game uses the so-called 160x100 mode which is really a hack of text mode. Basically, you set the character box register to half its normal value (so, 4 on CGA, 8 on VGA), disable blinking, and then use character 219 (block character) for pixels. You can then have low-resolution 16 color graphics.

>>2810928
I actually did hack Moonbugs to display correctly on VGA. It was simply a matter of changing the character height value and then executing a little program beforehand that uses INT 10h function 1003h to turn the blinking off.

>>2806837
Well they tried with the sound track. Some parts were bearable, most of it wasn't.

>>2806725
The EGA palette is pretty ghastly, but then it's also very, very 80s (they loved bright pastels back then).

>>2810961
The EGA palette is a fairly uniform and neutral distribution. The problem is, that all the colors are very far apart. You can't do dithering or tones with it because of that. Games of the time used all the colors simply because it was the only way to get some contrast in there. Go try and reduce any present day screenshot to the EGA palette. You'll end up with a lot of colors being reduced to one of the four greys, or have large sections of the screen be a uniform color, because in the original screenshot these were all slightly different hues, that simply all map to the same basic color. If you want to retain any information, you got to crank up the saturation, or actually give different aspects of the screenshot different colors. That's how you end up with the "colorful" pics of the old times.

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>>2810961
As well as the Commodore 64 palette. Those colors are as 80s as it gets.

>>2810979
Kind of but the VIC-II has softer colors with lower saturation than the eye-burning EGA palette, also they're somewhat easier to shade.

>>2806274
You know that DOTC does support EGA.

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It really comes down to the game, and how much effort they put into the graphics. I personally think Defender of the Crown CGA looks pretty nice, given the limitations. And I tend to prefer EGA versions of games that were *properly* done to their VGA counterparts. By properly I mean the EGA version was given plenty of attention to detail, and not just the result of a crappy lossy filter from VGA or something. Lucasfilms did really great with Loom and The Secret of Monkey Island, for example. The dithering in those EGA games is nothing short of fantastic. Maybe it's an acquired taste, or maybe it's because I grew up on 80's computers, but I really love a well-done CGA or EGA game.

I also tend to prefer nice Adlib soundtrack to Roland, etc. To me, technically best doesn't imply artistically best, if that makes any sense. Listen to music in the Dune game, for example.

Never tried anything in Hercules mode though, but surely there must be some decent ones for that too.

>>2815226
EGA Monkey Island came out first though, it was not dithered from VGA.

>>2815226
>Never tried anything in Hercules mode though, but surely there must be some decent ones for that too

Hercules is something that unfortunately emulation doesn't do justice to, both due to the oddball resolution and the display type. Emulators can't replicate the ghosting effect of a genuine IBM 5151 monitor or get the phosphor color correct because it's outside of the RGB space.

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Double Dragon is a game I rather think is better in CGA mode because the EGA graphics are quite garish and also the scrolling is smoother in CGA.

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>>2810971
Sierra did an impressive job of working around the non-shadable palette.

>>2810947
It gets really good at 6:51

The Famicom still has one of the worst color palettes I've ever seen.

>>2815513
but you have seen it

>>2815513
It's even worse from a programming standpoint since color values are based on NTSC instead of RGB.

t

>>2805735
It was the 80s, purple and cyan were "in".

>>2818186
That was said like three posts into the thread.

>>2805750
Red, White, Black and Yellow

>>2815513
it's nowhere near the worst
the only particularly dumb thing about it is the lack of a good yellow

>>2806716
>the colors don't look terrible
but they do
It's a really clever trick, but the colors are really bad.
fuck, that light magenta is just one of the ugliest colors of them all

>>2810971
the EGA palette isn't quite so miserable, but you definitely need to be running at 640x350 to get good use out of it and have enough resolution to dither well (so most games were right out, you weren't doing much action at that res on machines of the time)

>>2820035
EGA has 64 colors, but it can't display any of the extended ones except in Mode 10 which in any case was mostly only used by applications software. Commercial games other than SimCity rarely used it although shareware/freeware did fairly often.

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>>2820035
>fuck, that light magenta is just one of the ugliest colors of them all
You do realize that you are fundamentally criticizing the way humans perceive light, mathematics, and the most logical manner in which to implement a color display, right?

The reason why 'light magenta' is part of the palette is thus:

1) The human eye has 3 types of cells (cones) sensitive to the intensity of 3 spectra centered on red, green, and blue.
2) Color displays need then only have pixels that can vary the intensity of red, green, and blue light.
3) Simplest strategy is to have a pixel's colors either be on or off, leading to 2^3=8 combinations of colors:
>>2806137
RGB color
000 black
001 blue
010 green
011 cyan
100 red
101 magenta
110 yellow
111 white

It seems CGA went a little further and tried to add some more color depth with the dark and light palettes, but the light colors are arguably the pure colors just described.

>>2805735
OP thinks the palette is gay, but OP couldn't handle the truth, which is prolly that from a hardware implementation perspective the palette is exceptionally easy to define, being composed of every other entry in the table above (including both black and white). The pattern is that blue is always on.

>>2805845
To drive my point home further, this appears to be an example an image using the complement palette, the pattern being blue is always off.

I'm honestly talking out of my ass on the subject of CGA, but I have confidence that the engineers at IBM weren't neckbeards, and that the only neckbeards are those who criticize technology without stopping to think that maybe something was designed that way for a reason.

>>2820306
>but the light colors are arguably the pure colors just described.
No, the pure colors are FFFFFF, 000000, FF0000, 00FF00, 0000FF, FF00FF, FFFF00 and 00FFFF

>>2820306
Then why do I see so many old Usenet posts cursing that damn CGA pink and aqua shit and how terrible Archon and Marble Madness were compared with the Amiga versions.

>>2820407
They were a bunch of tech illiterates who didn't understand hardware.

>>2820419
it's possible to understand the technical background and still hate the aesthetics

>>2820306
It being 3-bit RGB isn't the issue.

I'm criticizing the fact that the CGA graphics palettes are ugly, and the fact that FF55FF is an ugly color.
having a graphics palette that's white, cyan, and magenta (and one configurable color) is awful, even though there's a simple technical explanation for it, same with the red, green, and yellow one