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The "ultra-bright" color palette used for those online strips looks to me like the standard one that came with the original Paintbrush[1] in Windows 3.11 (and,

The "ultra-bright" color palette used for those online strips looks to me like the standard one that came with the original Paintbrush[1] in Windows 3.11 (and, probably, in other graphic tools of that time). I bet that this palette was chosen around that time, and it simply remained in place due to either consistency or lazyness (aka "if it's not broke, don't fix it"). [1] https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2b893e004a57aa11221c4a30a9cbda3b https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2b893e004a57aa11221c4a...

tyingq 6y ago
Guessing that was to suit 16 color EGA?
akx 6y ago
I booted up PCJS's Windows 3.10 image to have a better look. See here... https://i.imgur.com/l4WP44R.png https://i.imgur.com/l4WP44R.png The image uses the CGA color palette (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Color_palette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Color_p...) of 16 unique colors (`identify -format %k pb.png`), the first 8 columns. The other 6 columns are dithered colors.
- einr 6y ago
  Close, but no. Windows does not use the CGA/EGA palette (unless started in EGA mode, which is a thing that can be done) The Windows 16-color palette is based on pure, fully saturated colors (i.e. red is 255/0/0, lime green is 0/255/0, cyan is 0/255/255, etc) while the CGA/EGA hardware palette is a little bit softer and less saturated, as in your Wikipedia link. It also seems like your screenshot does not represent the true 16-color palette that Windows 3.x actually used. I have no idea what's going on with PCJS or what manner of weird graphics driver it's emulating but this is not what Windows 3 generally looked like if you had a VGA card. The first row does not have the correct color values, and the second row should be visibly darker. The difference between the lighter and darker blue is very small in your screenshot, for instance. This is not correct. This screenshot shows the true default Windows VGA palette (in true color mode, so the rightmost columns are not dithered): https://i.imgur.com/YR37uSO.png https://i.imgur.com/YR37uSO.png EDIT: I had to investigate. Yes, PCJS is doing some kind of weird color mangling and does not display the real color values. You can see in this screenshot I just took that what Windows running in PCJS considers to be pure green is actually not that. https://i.imgur.com/SpUJI8x.png https://i.imgur.com/SpUJI8x.png EDIT 2: For the sake of completeness, the following screenshot shows Windows 3.0 running in actual EGA mode. This was a very rare sight even back in the day since most hardware powerful enough to run Windows 3 satisfactorily would have had VGA/SVGA. Regardless, it is doable. You can see that the titlebar color is very different from the default VGA one. The default EGA fonts are also quite different and are a rare sight. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/6245486/41811800-6b2074e2-76cb-11e8-8b09-d0950eeded65.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/6245486/41811800-6...
  - akx 6y ago
    Huh, you're right. Running Paintbrush in a Windows 3.11 image in QEMU yields saner colors (such that they do actually have 255s in them), but I think there's some gamma conversion at play still, and QEMU and PCJS have different views on that. Here's the QEMU image and color palette: https://imgur.com/b1XGFB4 https://imgur.com/b1XGFB4 / https://gist.github.com/akx/f74b840f630fdc10219d9d5211a38c7a https://gist.github.com/akx/f74b840f630fdc10219d9d5211a38c7a
    - ChickeNES 6y ago
      PCJS has some kind of post processing done to the output image. I needed some pixel perfect screenshots of Win 3.1 the other day, and the ones I took from PCJS were blurred (maybe upscaled?) compared to the ones I took of VMWare.
      - akx 6y ago
        That's just the HTML canvas element and poor scaling. You can use your browser's inspector to clean up the `width`/`height` style attributes and add `image-rendering: pixelated`...
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Most 386s only had EGA. Windows 3.0 was not normally run in VGA.

tyingq 6y ago

Guessing that was to suit 16 color EGA?

akx 6y ago

I booted up PCJS's Windows 3.10 image to have a better look. See here... https://i.imgur.com/l4WP44R.png https://i.imgur.com/l4WP44R.png The image uses the CGA color palette (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Color_palette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter#Color_p...) of 16 unique colors (`identify -format %k pb.png`), the first 8 columns. The other 6 columns are dithered colors.

einr 6y ago
Close, but no. Windows does not use the CGA/EGA palette (unless started in EGA mode, which is a thing that can be done) The Windows 16-color palette is based on pure, fully saturated colors (i.e. red is 255/0/0, lime green is 0/255/0, cyan is 0/255/255, etc) while the CGA/EGA hardware palette is a little bit softer and less saturated, as in your Wikipedia link. It also seems like your screenshot does not represent the true 16-color palette that Windows 3.x actually used. I have no idea what's going on with PCJS or what manner of weird graphics driver it's emulating but this is not what Windows 3 generally looked like if you had a VGA card. The first row does not have the correct color values, and the second row should be visibly darker. The difference between the lighter and darker blue is very small in your screenshot, for instance. This is not correct. This screenshot shows the true default Windows VGA palette (in true color mode, so the rightmost columns are not dithered): https://i.imgur.com/YR37uSO.png https://i.imgur.com/YR37uSO.png EDIT: I had to investigate. Yes, PCJS is doing some kind of weird color mangling and does not display the real color values. You can see in this screenshot I just took that what Windows running in PCJS considers to be pure green is actually not that. https://i.imgur.com/SpUJI8x.png https://i.imgur.com/SpUJI8x.png EDIT 2: For the sake of completeness, the following screenshot shows Windows 3.0 running in actual EGA mode. This was a very rare sight even back in the day since most hardware powerful enough to run Windows 3 satisfactorily would have had VGA/SVGA. Regardless, it is doable. You can see that the titlebar color is very different from the default VGA one. The default EGA fonts are also quite different and are a rare sight. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/6245486/41811800-6b2074e2-76cb-11e8-8b09-d0950eeded65.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/6245486/41811800-6...
- akx 6y ago
  Huh, you're right. Running Paintbrush in a Windows 3.11 image in QEMU yields saner colors (such that they do actually have 255s in them), but I think there's some gamma conversion at play still, and QEMU and PCJS have different views on that. Here's the QEMU image and color palette: https://imgur.com/b1XGFB4 https://imgur.com/b1XGFB4 / https://gist.github.com/akx/f74b840f630fdc10219d9d5211a38c7a https://gist.github.com/akx/f74b840f630fdc10219d9d5211a38c7a
  - ChickeNES 6y ago
    PCJS has some kind of post processing done to the output image. I needed some pixel perfect screenshots of Win 3.1 the other day, and the ones I took from PCJS were blurred (maybe upscaled?) compared to the ones I took of VMWare.
    - akx 6y ago
      That's just the HTML canvas element and poor scaling. You can use your browser's inspector to clean up the `width`/`height` style attributes and add `image-rendering: pixelated`...
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Most 386s only had EGA. Windows 3.0 was not normally run in VGA.