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> Earlier, I also said that VGA games more frequently featured parallax, and that VGA was easier to program than EGA. This is primarily because in 256-color VGA
by gwbas1c 4y ago
> Earlier, I also said that VGA games more frequently featured parallax, and that VGA was easier to program than EGA. This is primarily because in 256-color VGA mode, each pixel always occupies one byte. So all the complexity caused by the need to address individual bits disappears. VGA still has a planar memory layout, but this applies to bytes instead of bits.
My dad picked up an old EGA computer from work in the early 90s. I was always frustrated that almost all games required a VGA at the time. Now I understand why... It was too much effort to be backwards compatible with what was increasingly becoming niche hardware.
- tdumitrescu 4y agoIt wasn't just coding, it was also a lot of design/art resources. Going from 256->16 colors would look terrible with automatic dithering. My recollection is that there were a few Sierra titles made for VGA that also supported EGA and that it looked like someone had gone through each screen by hand to make the low-color ones look acceptable-ish.
- the_af 4y agoEGA art specifically designed for EGA could look beautiful. For example, I love EGA Monkey Island. Most adventures with EGA support had different graphics for EGA vs VGA. But yeah, automatic dithering didn't look nice.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoInterestingly, original "Loom" by Lucasfilm looks much better in EGA [1] than its later VGA edition does. [1]: http://www.superrune.com/tutorials/loom_ega.php http://www.superrune.com/tutorials/loom_ega.php