CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought!
The 8-Bit Guy6 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2016–2024
explainer · general · evergreen · 2016–2024 on HN
The 8-Bit Guy covers IBM's 1981 CGA graphics system, including how composite output and artifacting produced extra colors beyond the nominal palette. He argues CGA looked better in period than it does on RGB monitors.
HN recommends it for showing how old developers exploited the smeary nature of composite signals and what CGA really looked like on period hardware.
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10 comments from Hacker News
If you want to see how this type of colour magic works in video form, the 8-bit guy does a GREAT video on this: ▶ this video He shows all the interesting artifacting that makes these extra colours possible.
Your comment got me thinking: "Wouldn't be nice if existed an 'awesome list' for this kind of content?" After a brief google search the best I could find is this [0] and it seems to be abandoned. Does anyone know a better source for this type of content? I'm leaving some random links to great channels that produce this kind of content: - CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought! [1] - DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive [2] - The Story of Super Mario Bros. 3 | Gaming Historian [3] [0] - link [1] - ▶ this video [2] - link [3] - link
Bare in mind the displays of the time would have blended the pixels. Likewise those who complain that CGA is “only 4 awful colours” have clearly never used a proper CGA system the way it was originally intended. The following YouTube video does a good job describing what CGA was really like back in the day: ▶ this video
The 8-Bit guy did a great piece on CGA that goes into detail about how old developers abused the fuzzy smeary nature of composite signals to output somewhat decent graphics. The tricks however didn't work when people upgraded to proper monitors and as a result a lot of CGA games look much worse today than they did on the intended equipment of the day. ▶ this video
CGA colors were designed for display on composite; the issue is most people were using digital cables, which had the garish colors. ▶ this video has a great overview of what was possible.
That's a thing more relevant on PC: this video has some more information on the phenomenon (I think) you're talking about: ▶ this video
Did you ever played a ms-dos game in CGA mode? It was not suposed to look like that! ▶ this video Developers did definitly took advantages of everything they could to show more colors on the screen, remember all those demos?
PC monitors with RGB were a different ballgame, at least at that low resolution there was no distortion or bluriness as you say. Even PCs had games for composite video: ▶ this video TVs though, especially on RF, were pretty darn blurry.
One thing about CGA is that it was meant to be output via composite video instead of VGA-style RGBI. This video demonstrates the difference: ▶ this video
▶ this video You can make funny tricks when passing image as composite. Where with those you can produce other colours. And state of computers were quite limited and primitive then. On other hand for business use, those are still acceptable, everything was text anyway.