CGA thread

>>3276906
Remember that upscaling to 1600x1200 can give the proper ratio to DOS games without any non-integer multiplying artifacts.

I was born in 92', so I never saw this kind of display, was it as hard on the eyes back then as it is looking at it now? I figure there might be a difference between those really old tube displays and modern flat screens.

I get that the idea for the color choices for CGA and the Apple II was to allow for contrast for displaying text, for business purposes, but sometimes I see images done on these old limitations and I'm amazed that some people managed to make images as good looking as they were with what little colors they had at hand.

The TGA and EGA standard sure was a gargantuan leap forwards though.

>>3277068
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors

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Back in the day, I played many CGA games on my IBM-compatible XT. It had an EGA card but some games didn't support EGA, like Defender of the Crown.

I remember a magazine writer calling the two CGA color modes the "palettes from hell".

>>3277068
Nice GameFAQs copypaste, dude.

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>>3277068
>I was born in 92, so I never saw this kind of display, was it as hard on the eyes back then as it is looking at it now?

Yes, it does suck. Very much so. 8x8 text at 640x200 resolution is...

How Amigafags did stand looking at this every day for 8 hours is a mystery to me.

>>3277068
>The TGA and EGA standard sure was a gargantuan leap forwards though
You wouldn't say that if you tried to program the things.

>>3277084
I remember reading about that actually, pretty clever.

>>3277247
Easy there, Rando.

>>3277260
Well I meant visually, mainly (since you have so many more colors to work with), but what's the drawback? Was it restrictive in some way or did it have some particular quirk that made it really annoying to get to work?

>>3277426
>Was it restrictive in some way or did it have some particular quirk that made it really annoying to get to work?

EGA modes are planar and planar modes always suck. Just ask any Amigafag. Except that EGA doesn't even give you any help for sprites or moving the screen around. CGA has interlaced graphics memory which is also a nuisance. That wasn't until the linear VGA Mode 13 could you program a PC graphics card in a non-headdesk way.

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>>3276906
I shit on the ZX Spectrum's graphics without even remembering that we grew up with the tri-color nightmare of CGA graphics.

My eyes hurt now.

>>3276923
>1200 lines
you mean 320x240
4x 1280x960
since isnt it more common displays with 1080 lines?

or 960x720 for older LCDs with 1440x900

or let the window overflow 30 pixels up and 30px down for 4x upscale
but if its 640x480 youre fucked, only fullhd tv can 2x it and on most laptop you gotta contend with non intenger, i just use 1x in small view, for my 768lines 15" laptop, its close enoiugh to eyes

>>3279359
The clue is that each pixel gets scaled to a group of 5x6 pixels.
Though I disagree that 4:3 is the proper aspect ratio for everything.

>>3279790
>a group of 5x6 pixels.
:O ah ok, so i incorrectly assumed that an ancestor to SVGA was 4:3 and square pixels

i thought the 1600x1200 was 5x5 scale of 320x240, so i guess it was 5x6 for 320x200

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>>3280050
320x200 fits in 64k, 320x240 doesn't. Non-square pixels were fairly common back then, some even quite extreme

>>3280050
>4:3
Indeed. That was the de facto aspect ratio of 320x200 and many other video modes, leading to the non-square pixels. Unfortunately developers didn't always account for them, so when configuring DOSBox one has to decide on a game-to-game basis whether to enable or disable aspect correction. There are even a few games that assume square and non-square pixels in the same video mode. There's no good way to show them correctly

The colors of my childhood

>>3283242
which ones? cyan, magenta and white, or red, green and yellow?

>>3280076
4:3 is the only way to display them correctly. Vertically stretched pixels just come with the territory in DOS.

>>3284670
you read the post?

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>>3284673
I did. Widescreen monitors didn't exist on the consumer market back then, other than weirdass non-standard ratio LCDs on some laptops.

>>3283242
>The colors of my childhood
>>>/420chan/

>>3284681
widescreen monitors didn't exist, but correction knobs on the monitors did. Also, there's nonstandard exceptions like Jazz Jackrabbit running letterboxed

>>3284689
Jazz Jackrabbit used a tweaked VGA mode to run in 60hz instead of 70, and the letterboxing was a pleasant side effect since 320x199 wasn't a resolution used by any other game. Most of the time games would run in 320x200 70hz, which would then be adjusted to 4:3.

>>3284694
and yet in quite a few games the artwork assumes square pixels. So you're left with the options to stick with 4:3 just because, or adjust the height of the output

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heres a collage i put together of a game i have that had support for multiple displays

interesting how Hercules resolution is so much bigger

>>3285214
>bigger
next time scale all three images up to the same size, use integer scaling and account for aspect correction

>>3285218
i didnt touch the images other than placing them in. they are native resolutions

vga/ega is 320x200 and hercules is 720x348

>>3285260
right, and that's the problem. What you call bigger is a different dpi, and especially extreme resolutions like hercules need some aspect correction

>>3285263
ah i understand now, sorry about that

>>3285284
my math is probably off somewhere, but assuming hercules is 4:3 the pixels are roughly 29:45. So integer scaling the hercules picture to correct aspect would be 20880x15660.

CGA/VGA works fine at 1600x1200, but to be comparable would have to be upscaled to around 20800x15600. Compensation for the remaining 80 and 60px difference would require even higher resolutions.

>>3285296
alternatively assume hercules pixels are 2:3 and don't fill a 4:3 screen completely. Minimum integer scaling for that would be 2160x1600.
I can't be arsed right now to make it match up with the 5:6 pixels of CGA/VGA

>>3285326
The resolution you come from is 720 wide.
20880 / 720 is 29, which is prime. Any smaller resolution than that and you're not integer scaling anymore, leading to scaling artifacts

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>>3285214
California Games supported pretty much everything, also.