This is largely cherry-picking revisionism. I saw CGA on the displays of the time at the time with the games of the time, and can confirm it was mostly terrible. EGA couldn't come fast enough.
You’re missing the point. I wasn’t suggesting CGA was brilliant. I was just saying that CGA actually works best when differed because the screens of the time blended the pixels to create new colours. And that the reason CGA uses the colour scheme it does is because that allows for more colours to be created via blending.
EGA was definitely a massive step up, no question. But people also miss the point of CGA when they look as sharp screenshots rendered on a pixel perfect LCD display.
Good point. Fiddling with blur in Gimp does remove plenty of that dither noise. Though of course now my eyes keep trying to refocus, just like in the olde times.
Yes, to me those are examples where CGA didn't work well. It wasn't suitable for this kind of scenes. This cyan-magenta-white default palette was also pretty jarring; the green-red-yellow one was better looking.
This is obviously highly subjective, but you might be thinking of CGA's default palette (magenta-cyan-white-black). The device had more than one palette, and many games used the red-green-yellow-black palette, which looks much more pleasing to me.
Those indeed look pretty cool, but that's a matter of higher resolution which allows for cool dithering effects. CGA color modes were pretty low res, so it's likely that's the actual problem you have with them, not just the 4 colors. Or rather, the combination of both factors.
That's the low intensity dark green-dark red-brown-black palette, not the high intensity light red-light green-yellow-black palette. The high intensity mode was about a quarter as garish as the cyan magenta mode, which won't make your eyeballs bleed, but it's still a mite bit uncomfortable.
The dark green dark red brown black palette was indeed probably the least bad palette, but it suffered severely from a lack of contrast. That's why the text is hard to read, because it's black text on a brown background, not because of the resolution.
The reason the cyan magenta white black palette was so common is because it had both black and white, meaning the text was easy to read.
The Tandy graphics adapter allowed a programmable palette. It was still just 4 colors, but the programmer could choose which 4 colors they were. (out of the 16 colors a CGA monitor could display) This was such a minor increase in complexity for a 10x improvement in usefulness it's shocking to me that IBM didn't include that in the CGA.
First things first: thanks for the insightful reply!
Yes, I meant the low intensity palette, you're correct. I disagree with you in that I don't find it "the least bad", but actually beautiful. It has a kind of "wood engraving" vibe to me.
> That's why the text is hard to read, because it's black text on a brown background, not because of the resolution.
I respectfully disagree. It's true that the contrast is lower than with a brighter color, but it's still not a problem for my eyes. For me, it actually has to do with the blockiness of the low res font; also there's some aliasing with the "m" and similar characters that confuses my eyes and I have to make an extra effort the parse the characters -- the same would happen were this black font on white background.
The Tandy fascinates me since I saw that video by The 8 Bit Guy. Sadly, I never owned one!
