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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude
vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

imagine the above was the only piece of EGA artwork you'd ever seen. "wow", you'd say, "that looks amazing. i want to try making some artwork with that color palette."

then you open that bad boy up and see this nightmare of full blast somethin'-255-somethin' eyeball punchers:

the IBM EGA palette (16 colors)

i'm saying, my hat is off to anyone who's ever made something look nice with this palette. and people certainly have!

britown
@britown

If you're interested in some seldom-used EGA capabilities, the card could actually draw a 16-color palette chosen from these 64 available colors!!1

The palette we typically call the EGA palette was the 16 RGBI colors that the CGA could also render, the main difference being that CGA could only display 4 colors at once and EGA could display all 16 at once.

@cathoderaydude wrote a great post about how EGA was capable of so much more than it was ultimately remembered for.

  1. So long as you had a very pricey EGA Monitor and your game ran in 350-line mode 😅

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R-L-Z
@R-L-Z

It looks very close to the default colors on Microsoft Paint in Windows 95, 98 etc. I think there's a thing or two missing but it's close.
That's the stuff dreams were made of !

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sirocyl
@sirocyl

There's a tiny bit of history with that! 16-color VGA used the EGA palette colors as defaults. Windows 3.1 and 95 required EGA and VGA, respectively, and were both designed to work at 16 colors. Windows Paintbrush, and MS Paint after that, would use those colors as defaults.

Color text mode on EGA and VGA also makes use of these same sixteen colors.

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britown
@britown

This is some fun trivia actually! Following the CGA's bitwise color math, color 6 would be #AAAA00 Dark Yellow. This sucked so IBM monitors contained special circuitry to display it as #AA5500 instead. Cheap clone monitors would skimp out on the "Visually-Appealing Brown" and some Tandy monitors gave you a "BROWN ADJ" knob you could modify the amount of green in that specific color!

Starting with EGA, the better brown was hard-coded as color 6 of the RGBI palette and the rest is history 😅

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eub
@eub

And then there was CGA! Four colors, either black-cyan-magenta-white or black-brown-red-green.

Brøderbund's Ancient Art of War at Sea used the CMYK where all the ocean was magenta/cyan vertical striping, which composite video to a TV will smear into a blue, but on a monitor it was eye-rending.

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