Yeah, CGA was really absurd, I'm glad I've never had a computer with that

I never understood the choice of default CGA palette colors. amber and green wasn't much nicer to me, and it was even more rare in games.

though, "The Eternal Castle Remastered" (2019) used the same palette, and it was pretty good.

The CGA palettes were designed with three main objectives: good contrast on composite and black and white displays, high contrast productivity UX, and simple ttl circuitry. There was a limit of 16 colours, but if you wanted to step up resolution you had to compromise by selecting fewer colors. A major compromise choice was resolution vs colours. High resolution cost you your magenta and yellow. Have a google for the mode 4 and mode 5 pallets and mathematically why they are the way they are, it’s super interesting if you’re in to retro tech.

In the later era, as EGA and VGA gained, I think CGA became a bolt on by some game devs, to accommodate that dwindling audience, so the problem was compounded by it being very second class citizen.

Ditto. My first ibm compatible was CGA, and those pallets represent a really specific era in my memories. I actually jumped from CGA to VGA (DOS to Win3.1 as well!) and it was like somebody had switched on all the lights in a precisely dark room.

*previously

Not graphics, but even the PC speaker intro had some significant effort put into it, considering how limited it was as a sound source.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IOL4q5tDDQ

Hearing the Monkey Island theme played how it would have been on a high end sound card is crazy. PC speakers did their best but it was composed as a damn symphony.

https://youtu.be/a324ykKV-7Y?is=Dn0qcERhEasBjloQ

Having grown up gaming on PC speaker I only knew the wavetable MIDI miracles from hearsay. Now any time I touch some DOSbox retro memory I'm nothing but disappointed becausr those MIDI tunes? They are just that, tinny voyages through the general MIDI instrument set where well made PC speaker programming can have awesome roughness.

You should be able to force pc speaker only if you go through the config.

Many MIDI things sound better on old hardware than they via modern reproduction. FM chips were very different from wavetable, and there's quite a lot of variation besides. It's no wonder some music sounds goofy, now --it was written with a very different palette of sounds.

Games which were made especially for CGA did often look really cool.

Possibly not the best example but I do feel like Alley Cat looked great in CGA: https://i.ibb.co/wNDvgzQ8/alleycat.gif

I played that game and couldn't understand why someone would do that. Games on my Commodore 64 looked much better.

The CGA version of Defender of the Crown also looked quite good for what it was, although most other conversions looked better.

Jim Sachs 320 x 200, 32 color art for the original Amiga version was amazing.

Jim Sachs is an incredible talent.

I came to comment on the same... I grew up with CGA graphics for my first games, too. It was, in many ways, worse than no color at all. But the jarring visuals and the feeling of it will always stay with me.

I don't know why this site calls CGA "16 color" (the size of the CGA palette, of which 4 could be used at a time at this game's resolution), while also calling EGA "16 color" (when EGA uses 16 colors at a time from a palette of 64).

I fed this question to Gemini (compare CGA vs EGA) and it made the same category error in its distinction, calling both "16 color". So, to the human that didn't check their slop site, maybe you should fix that.

You could see all 16 at once in CGA text mod3, and in "graphics" modes derived from that: https://youtu.be/G66KL-hxxKI

There were two PC floppy versions - 16 colour and 256 colour. The 16 colour version had fallbacks for CGA and Hercules, the 256 colour version had a fallback for EGA. So the CGA screenshot is the 16 colour version running with CGA fallback, and this is also why there's a set of "256 colour EGA" shots. It's a little confusing, but it's correct.

There was 16-color CGA. It was called PCjr or Tandy mode in games.

I remember it being a fine substitute for “real” EGA, which AFAICT was something of a unicorn owing to its high price.

A friend has a composite extra monitor for the CGA output and I was amazed to discover that it used composite to generate more color for supporting games.

On composite, the game can display more colors. I never knew at the time and was only aware of that a decade ago. ScummVM and DOSBox but knows how to render composite.

This while fully understandable, has one have to go back even further to what it felt like to actually be able to display any graphics at all and what that felt like ...

Lucky you that at least you had a CGA monitor. The were very expensive in my country. I used a Hercules monitor with SIMCGA; it was probably one of the first DOS programs I learned to run.

Hey! I had a CGA monitor for 10+ years. While I did mildly envy the EGA friends, it never felt bad to me while I had it.