56k warning
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:
i'm saying, my hat is off to anyone who's ever made something look nice with this palette. and people certainly have!
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 !
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.
nods and as a colorblind person i know i can trust you on this given that your pfp itself is another color palette
honestly the fact that yellow becomes orange/brown in "low-intensity" mode shows that there was at least a modicum of thought that went into this color palette way back when
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 😅
okay yeah, learning that there's such a thing as a brown knob on some tandy monitors is really funny
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.
