4 ms·
CGA was the worst. EGA and VGA were huge improvements because CGA only had 4 ugly colors, while EGA had 16 (good), and VGA had 256 (much better). VGA also sup
by StressedDev 3y ago
CGA was the worst. EGA and VGA were huge improvements because CGA only had 4 ugly colors, while EGA had 16 (good), and VGA had 256 (much better). VGA also supported pallets I think (a way of allowing an application to use 256 colors out of 16 million supported colors).
- moefh 3y agoNitpick: the VGA DAC has 6 bits per RGB component (18 bits total), so each of the 256 colors is chosen out of 2^18 = 262,144 colors, not 16 million.
- duskwuff 3y ago> CGA only had 4 ugly colors 16 colors, technically. But only four at a time, and three of those were selected from two preset palettes, both of which were hideous (one green/red/brown, one cyan/magenta/white).
- rzzzt 3y agoAnd EGA had 64, because while its display output pins where still TTL, there was no longer a single intensity bit (RGBI) like in CGA but individual intensity bits wired for each color component (rRgGbB)
- glandium 3y agoAnd yet... https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated/ https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-... (this was resubmitted here a few days ago)
- mdip 3y agoYou nailed it with "4 ugly colors"[0] I remember the palette choices in CGA were downright bizarre; they'd be 4 colors that you couldn't possibly use to make anything look right. At the price of the card and the display, you're like "wait ... that's it?" [0] Ignoring all of the interesting things coming out of the 8088 demo scene, nothing that I'm aware of from the 80s was capable of anything close to that.