I’ve been playing some games through ScummVM, and there’s a cool feature that lets you load the game using whichever graphics mode the software originally supported. It also lets you use shaders to simulate a CRT, because these bare pixels were never meant to be seen with human eyes. I thought it was fun to compare the art from the different versions.
The posted image is from the EGA version
Here is the CGA:
And Here is Hercules(Amber):
Hercules used to play in 720 x 400 or thereabouts.
And that CGA palette looks wrong to me, haha. All the games I ever saw were either cyan magenta black and white, or black red green yellow. First time I see a mix like this.
CGA was 4 colors out of 16 I believe, with the two default color sets like you say. But I only see 4 colors in the images, too. Maybe the white in the black green red yellow is actually yellow?
CGA had a number of modes, but one of the 4 color 320x200 modes was most often used in game; these look like they’re supposed to by white, black, cyan and magenta. The thing is, it could use NTSC color artifacting to actually show more colors on a composite monitor through the use of dithering.
I think that bad CGA palette comes from quick & dirty VGA conversions. This was probably near enough to the changeover to EGA that it was worth doing a good job because there were still quite a few people still using CGA.
Just a guess though.