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I often thought that CGA could have been much better with very little change at the hardware level. If the colour displayed onscreen had the red level inverted
by Lerc 11y ago
I often thought that CGA could have been much better with very little change at the hardware level.
If the colour displayed onscreen had the red level inverted the options would have been much more erm... palatable.
For an output of (1-r,g,b) you would get some lovely options http://i.imgur.com/rMAr9mU.png http://i.imgur.com/rMAr9mU.png
If done at the Digital level flipping the R line of the RGBI You would remain in the standard 16 colours but with better combinations
http://i.imgur.com/2AWs9E7.png http://i.imgur.com/2AWs9E7.png
You get a nice blue gradient palette and an earth tone palette (brown,black and green).
- takeda 11y agoYes but wouldn't 16 colors in composite mode look worse then? It seems like these colors were chosen exactly because when you mixed them you would get nicer colors.
- ajenner 11y agoThe video is a bit misleading here - most CGA composite games didn't use the 2bpp mode at all but instead used the 1bpp mode. This gave 15 reasonably nice colours distributed roughly evenly through RGB space, and was also more consistent between different versions of the CGA card.
- rasz_pl 11y agoWhole RGBI output was a big mistake imo, monitors internally have fully analog RGB path, so why not use it? Imagine if CGA cards had full palette control from the start. Four 74189 16x4 bit SRAM chips connected to R2R resistor ladder providing programmable 5-6-5 RGB palette. Would add ~$30 to the BOM in 1981, but SRAM prices fell drastically at that time, two years later it would be single dollars.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]