+Lazy Game Reviews This video is wrong though, this is not making colors due to NTSC artifacts, he's actually demonstrating Tandy Graphics, or TGA, which was an extension of CGA that allowed it to show the entire CGA palette. Notice how he says it's a Tandy computer he shows it off with.
+Nukle0n No.. as I said clearly in the video, this Tandy laptop did not have Tandy graphics.. It was standard CGA. Every CGA system could do exactly what I showed.
It had to do with the quirky way in which the (NTSC) display would separate out the image's luminance (brightness) and chrominance (hue & saturation) information from the incoming composite signal. By placing pixels in certain alternating color patterns, the software could "trick" the display into outputting a completely different color that wasn't simply a mix of the two original colors. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors
@@supermasterPIK *Commander Keen was a LOT of fun...one of the later chapters had a level that was hard to get to...there are play through's online that are well worth viewing ...especially on how to get to this particular level...you'll have to use/find an emulator since the the game was for DOS Operation machines*
....When you said Total Eclipse and i saw the pyramid im like, "Wow , that reminds me the game i played that you had to explore pyramids that i was trying to find for 2 years". And the name is Total Eclipse...Dude....i really have no words right now . THANKS
When I was 3 years old I used to play a SNES game that I can now barely remember, it was about driving an alien spaceship at low altitudes over the ground or something… I would feel like you if I get to play it again somehow
+TheGeekGuy if you're the geek guy maybe you can answer my question. I watch RUclips on my iPhone 6. Why is it when replying to someone's comment that has an apostrophe in it does it read ' instead. Like yours reads "+Mother's Basement" instead of "+Mother's Basement".
+Ryan Amberger The reason is that TheGeekGuy has edited their comment after posting. When you post a comment, RUclips converts some punctuation into its (Unicode i think) code - in the case of an apostrophe, "'". This code doesn't show up when the comment is viewed, however. When you edit a comment, it doesn't convert it back into the character, leaving it instead as the code. This means that if someone edits the comment and doesn't change the code back, RUclips just views it as regular text when the comment is updated, so it doesn't convert it back into the character it's supposed to be when it's viewed again. Hope this helps. I just guessed this was the case when I edited a comment a while back and noticed this happening. (sorry for the long response, wanted to be as clear as possible)
fun fact there is a actule ghost named kinky in the game pacman argment whoes gimick is to asirb the other ghost to make them more powerful. he is a ornge ghost with glases and actully kinda looks like the 🤓 emote
Man everytime i come here and see your videos in my subscription box, i fell like i got a lot smarter... even though i used a lot of that old retro tech and still have some, i don't know much about them, just how to use them... You are like the cool teacher i've never had :D
+Andreas Indelicato Your last sentence nails the entire appeal of this channel. Well put. I wish school had been like this. I wish it was like this now. I've shown this channel to my kids (teenagers) and they loved it, even though they weren't around for all of this stuff originally.
Man i have subscribed him when he was the Ibook guy... got bored after some time and unsubscribed.. then like last year he completely changed everything... since then i subscribed back and was never let down.. He is awesome and his show is epic... i also subscribed to his "Keyboard" Channel 8bit Keys which is also reeaaaaaaaaaaallllllyyyyy awesome! =)
@@oaajbs my neighbours 52 inch thing does, had to try the component input as the other inputs were in use for other devices and worked perfectly , colour came up nicely on just the Y
Love the way you present things, visually and verbally. It is informative without being dry and boring. Exactly the format I'm looking for when I want to delve into obsolete tech that I can barely remember using in my childhood.
PCs just weren't designed for games, and CGA was one of the best/worst examples of that. It wasn't until EGA and VGA that you could take advantage of things like hardware latches to slightly improve blitting speed. CGA relied on you pushing pixels, and those pixels were not only packed per byte (320x200 4-color mode meant 4 pixels per byte), but they were also interleaved (meaning all your even rows of pixels were contiguous in memory, followed by all the odd rows.) The awkward memory layout required calculations to be done to know where exactly in video memory to read and write. And since the pixels were packed, you would have to read what's there and mask out the bits you're changing to avoid changing neighboring pixels. You wasted a lot of CPU time on just dealing with the display. This is how an NES, which had a slower and less advanced CPU than the PC XT, could run circles around a PC in regards to games, because the NES had a dedicated graphics chip designed for drawing tiles and sprites. So while CGA was still significantly more advanced than what prior pieces of hardware had to deal with (such as drawing every scanline yourself every frame on Atari 2600), it was still a pain in the butt to develop anything for without still carefully planning your game around display optimization. This all played a part in a dev's decision on which mode(s) to support, and is part of why you generally only saw modes like CGA composite used on less intensive things like adventure games.
Standard VGA double buffering (320*200 256 colors) used again some latches. Select one of 4 columns, and put your pixel. Then, to optimize the display you must draw column 0,4,8,12,16,20,etc... restart with columns 1,5,9,13,17,21,etc ... restart with columns 2,6,10,14,18,22,etc ... and finally restart with columns 3,7,11,15,19,23,etc ... Just to reduce the number of "out" instructions. In this mode, memory is not directly mapped on the processor bus. You need to use "in"/"out" instructions to access video memory, and it was a serious bottleneck. Intel 286/386 processors was more powerfull and faster than 68k or 8bits processors, but use PC video cards was a joke.
It's sad that they couldn't make it 5 colors instead of 4 (alas, 5 does not multiply evenly into 16). With Cyan, Magenta, YELLOW, black, and white, it would've looked TREMENDOUSLY better!
it is for me. the black, white, cyan and magenta color scheme always brings back these feelings of nostalgia from when most of my games looked like that.
I remember a game called Test Drive which we played in 1988. It was cool, but I hated those 4 colors alrwady then and couldn't understand why they at least could make games with 16 colors as a minimum.
I remember when my dad came home with one of those EGA graphic cards, I couldn't even tell the difference between it and CGA(at that time). As games started using it, the difference was huge, obviously. My dad was in the gaming industry during the 80's.
Man, I love CGA--It looks so unique in the landscape of retro graphic styles and uniquely limited graphics are one of my favorite parts of early gaming. I never knew what the whole *mostly cyan and pink* style was before now. Cool video.
+Jim Leonard The 8088MPH demo inspired me to make this video. Unfortunately, the demo wouldn't work on the Tandy 1400. It would get stuck on the first plasma demo part.
Wow, this is the best kind of video you should watch at 3:00 AM when you're bored. It's both interesting and you learn some cool new stuff. Keep up the good work mate
Hey so I am blown away at how big this channel has gotten. I started watching this channel maybe 2ish years ago, just kinda stumbled onto it. And kinda fell away for about 6 months, this video popped up on my feed, and decided to give it a watch. I looked down and it said over 1M views and almost that many subscribers! Thats awesome! I was born in 87, and I always wanted a computer growing up, I always thought learning about this stuff was so cool. But we didnt get one until the early 2000s, and the golden age of the C64 and AppleII were long gone, and I didnt know enough about them, or even what they were to know what I wanted. I asked for a computer for years and I always got a stupid VTech toy. I'm glad I can watch this now, and learn just a little of what I missed out on as a kid.
Great video, but I have to disagree with you about CGA being comparable or superior to a C64 or Atari 8-bit series. Those machines had dedicated graphics chips with hardware sprites, which made them ideal for gaming, and it wasn't really until the EGA/VGA era that most PC games began to exceed what the C64 and Atari were capable of -- or if you were lucky enough to have a Tandy 1000, the system which truly legitimized PC gaming.
+vwestlife Aside from needing EGA/VGA you also needed quite a powerful CPU compared to the humble 6502-derivatives in the C64 and Atari. The CPU had to bang all the pixels into memory the hard way. You'll need at least a 10 MHz 8088 or a 6-8 MHz 286 and a proper VGA card (the game is EGA, but real EGA cards tend to have very slow memory) to enjoy Commander Keen, where C64 and Atari did similar games with ease on a much slower CPU.
I think the superiority of CGA was in its dedicated 16K-on-the-card video RAM. The Atari, Apple ][, C64, and all the others had to share system RAM with the graphics subsystem. I do agree with you that the dedicated hardware sprites, like those available in the C64 were most definitely excellent for gaming, and made what *would’ve* been a far inferior system much more useable. I’m a big C64 fan, no doubt, but I definitely give IBM some big credit here - they created a graphics subsystem that was excellent for its day.
Inclined to agree, what I just witnessed was not comparable to the C64. If I had seen that back in the day, I would have cringed and run back to my 64.
Krasen Makes Content oh you think you're So Great don't you you think you can just posted them slightly witty comments and nobody will respond well guess what I responded bro I responded real hard look at this response I'm responding all over the place you won't even know how hard I'm responding all over your somewhat redundant comment watch me watch me bro watch me watch me watch me yeah ok stop watching me now
Thanks for uploading these kind of vídeos! It is very interesting to know how the games used to work when I was growing up with them. Cheers from México City!
ck 5 has a lit soundtrack idk about the others tho coz im yest to play them. i actually only clicked on this video because i saw commander keen on the thumbnail lol
That's a GREAT video. As a developer, I really like to learn how things were back in the day. Limited resources and a lot of genius ideas to work with it. It really makes me respect (even more!) what software development was back then. Keep up the good work.
@ Like C64 in "green monitors". Was bizarre for me to see videos of games I have never seen in colours. Green Monitors give a metallic aspect of games, and it was good for me because I have some problems of vision with colors. And black and white is not bad too: see MADWORLD on Wii.
5 лет назад+1
@@193819441974 oh yeah, we had one of those greens for our Enterprise 128 too
The composite artifact is a trick that has been exploited on game consoles as well. For example in Sonic on Megadrive/Genesis, the bubble shield looked transparent when we were playing it on the console plugged to a CRT TV but when we play the game on an emulator on a flat screen, we notice there is no transparency at all but only 1 of 2 sprite columns of the sprite showing up.
It's also the sprite flickering trick, like they did for the water surfaces to hide how the background palette was changed at a certain point on the screen the put the level underwater.
A lot of Genesis games used a technique called dithering to create new colors using NTSC artifacts. You see that in backgrounds with sunsets. Its amazing how programmers were able to get around the limitations of hardware back then to create these effects.
Careful, this is quite the heavy debate in certain retro communities; whether or not retro games were meant to be shown in composite video or the RGB signals wired up in most consoles, and what was the original artist's vision.
There was also Super Mario World for the SNES. On levels where water appears, the water isn't actually transparent, but is just checkered with clear and blue tiles. on a crt you wouldn't notice and it would look transparent.
This brings back memories. Like when I couldn’t finish kings quest until we upgraded to an ega equipped computer. It turns out that it’s impossible to find a golden egg when gold isn’t one of the 4 colors available to you.
man this reminds me of back in the day when i was young and used to play King's Quest in glorious CGA. (VGA existed but my father didnt think it was necessary lol thanks dad)
And I always thought how awful the CGA was, especially the choice of purple/magenta, but now I see how it would've been with composite. I never had the chance to use the composite, when I had an old PC. Thanks for the info.
"Woah is this shitty. Is this really how CGI is supposed to look like or is it a compatiblility issue?" You just answered questions I had since early childhood. Thanks man!
We called it crappy graphics adapter LOL. I still remember when my dad bought a vga card and a monitor that could utilise it and we were all "WHOA" like it was the best thing we'd ever seen bahahaha.
+ViolentSh4de Looks like a normal guy making a informative video, about as far removed from the sensationalist and pompous "AVGN" and his clones as possible.
Oof chill, This person probably just doesn't have much experience with retro tech on youtube. I feel like you guys are just using it as a chance to attack the AVGN channel and it's fans.
+Marcopolis Neko I dunno, does it make you feel smart when you say shit like that? Like a mature, sensible, intelligent adult? Is that what you think you're being? Because if you do think that... well... I've got bad news.
Marcopolis Neko I take it you havnt seen the 2 minute long segments where he explained console and companies history before the game came out. Plus they both do (did) Retro tech stuff. There were a couple similarities between the segments that AVGN did and these videos no reason to be hostile.
One laugh I had about the fractal generator "Fractint".... It had a list of nearly all kinds of graphics hardware we had in the last stage of the DOS era, including CGA. Where all cards were described with the resolutions and amount of colors, the description of CGA was just "UCH-YUCK-BLER!" -- I guess their vision on CGA was clear. Now when I began in DOS PCs I had to do with an amber screen and as such the lack of colors didn't really get me. The first computer I had after that already had SVGA. Now I can't find the link anymore, but I did once see a kind of challenge in which coded tried to make a completely rendered 3D landscape out of CGA, and yes the white-magenta-cyan variant, and I was surprised with how realistic they could still make it look... Back in the day I was actually happy to have something that could do graphics...
+algi To be fair, that was running under DOSBOX when I captured the video. When I ran Total Eclipse on the old Tandy laptop it ran about the same framerate as the C64 version.
+manfreed That card was considered "esoteric" at the time. Some of us had them, Most didn't. (like reel-reel tape decks,Known, but considered unusual.)
***** I don't know, maybe because it wasn't color. I wasn't happy about it when my dad bought his first PC, but after all it wasn't that bad and most stuff worked (including Windows).
Hercules (well, clones) were extremely popular over here in .nl. They used the same (cheap) mono monitors as the old MDA and so they were the natural upgrade option for businesses.
Seeing Commander Keen in CGA surprised me since I recall reading that the "smooth scrolling trick" John Carmack developed (and used in Commander Keen) was "only possible on EGA". How did they make it work on CGA?
I have watched this several times. A couple of times with my 8 year old son. This is some of your best work David. You have one of the best channels on YTube!
I wish I knew about this when I was a kid, would have tried to convince my Dad to try some games in Composite mode. I was so happy when we finally upgraded to EGA though. lol
***** This was months ago. You're going to have to let posts go sometimes. I'm sorry somebody dropped you on the head as a child so you can't recognize that...actually no I'm not since you're being an ignorant bitch. I'm not personally offended, but someone reading the comment might be, so I owe you that much, as you are certainly dumb.
Interesting graph on the video standards. Didn't realize I must have had one of the first SVGA computers when I got my first PC in 1992, a Tandy Sensation. 1024 x 768 non-interlaced was a glorious marvel to a 12 year old kid moving up in the world from an Apple 2 clone.
Such a complex mix of emotions watching these awesome vids. Super fun nerdy and informative. Inspire me to learn some 8-bit coding and play around building simple games But then I can never help but wonder why I want more motivated and captivated by this as a kid. Why wasn't I learning this stuff when I was 14, instead of 34.
7:14 how do you get blue out of green, red and yellow? And speaking about that, why did they make 2 versions of the objectively ugly palettes instead of, say, at least one mode featuring red green and blue?
Same way you get yellow out of green and red. Pretty sure most TVs are still only Red Green Blue. Someone (Sony?) made a big stink of adding yellow a few years ago, but considering our eyes don't really see yellow to begin with... :P
The only explanation I could think of is somehow the pattern was chosen so that the light bleed through to the neighboring blue pixels on the monitor and the R and G elements cancel- but I have no idea how that would work. I'm also scratching my head trying to figure it out, since there's no additive combination of R and G that could produce B
That commander keen is running in EGA, not VGA. It was my fav game in the late 80's and I ran it on an EGA monitor/card so I remember exactly what it looked like.
I know this is an old video, but I jumped and yelled for joy when you referenced ZZT. I spent SO many hours playing ZZT in my youth - still one of the most underrated games especially with the plethora of custom maps and creative puzzle design.
Using NTSC artefacting to simulate in-between colours is great if you live in North America. I'm not convinced it's as much of a help for those of us in the PAL regions.
+Malidictus Good point. Though composite still smeared details (old SNES and Genesis/Megadrive actually simulated transparency effects with that. Composites only plus over SCART or S-Video) be it PAL or NTSC I'm not sure if PAL TV would change colors like that. Somebody needs to test this out. I never knew this about CGA and Composite but if this effect does not even work with PAL TV's then yeah, nothing was really lost in my childhood days.
This wikipedia article says the color blending did not work on PAL. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors Maybe this contributed to the vaning interest in supporting composite since large part of the market could not use it. I live in a PAL country and don't remember ever having a CGA output for composite.
I'm not very well-versed in PAL vs. NTSC, but I do know there are considerable differences between the technologies. Any software which relies on specific aspects of one standard tends to break to different degrees on another standard. Since PAL and NTSC seem to differ in pretty much every aspect possible while still doing roughly the same thing, I don't think that kind of "trick" would work. And again - using colour aliasing to generate more colours is pretty clever, no doubt. I remember there was a CGA game which attempted to switch modes dynamically as each pixel was being drawn or some such and display its full 16 colours that way, but that only worked with specific processor speeds or some such.
God I never new that about composite . I carried around a Toshiba T1000 for a few years. It was only an 8088 but it had a rom dos. I could load up some cheap games on the 720 drive and not worry about dos taking up space. But it had a composite output and I had NEVER tried it:P Now I got to load up some of these games off my laptop. Humm. Makes me wonder if there are any emulators that support composite CGA.
Everything x86 before the 80386 used a 16-bit instruction set. An 8-bit ISA bus was used before the PC/AT (80286), at which point 16-bit ISA was introduced.
Trying to remember the chip, but they first released it as 16bit bus and 16 bit IS. The motherboards boards were so expensive they released a revision with 8 bit bus, 16 bit IS. 8086 was 16/16 and 8088 was 8/16.
As a matter of fact, "Kinky" is the name of a ghost in an *official* Pac-Man game, too (Pac-Man Arrangement). I wonder if they just assume kids will overlook the meaning of the word, and that adults will chuckle and ignore it.
I modded my Genesis for S-Video output a couple years ago, and most of it looks fantastic but things things like clouds and waterfalls are so sharp now you can see the individual pixels clearly and it loses a bit of the transparency effect.
CGA would be a lot better if devs could pick the 4 colours they wanted to show on-screen from that palette of 16, that way I'm sure most CGA games would look a lot better, both in Composite mode and in RGB mode... Looking forward to the Tandy Graphics video!
But that requires more data because this was all 0s and 1s, binary, on or off. That would need many more "channels" to send on if it was still binary, otherwise there would be conflicts.
WolfLeader116-2 It couldn't require THAT much data to pick 4 colours to show on-screen from a palette of 16... I mean, the C64 could pick 4 colours to show on each 4 x 8 tile, and I'm inclined to believe it could handle 4 of those palettes on-screen at a time (It's 16 colours after all) and that's just on the BG layer, not counting the sprites, yet the C64 was a contemporary of CGA PCs...
This was an excellent video. It has brought me memories of being a teen and fiddling with my father with our old computer. Truly a piece of computer history!
Thanks, i used C128 few times, but in C64mode only, and unfortunately i never had my own C128. But... I still have C64, on which I play on every Chritsmas Eve. Eyes are bleeding when you play on 42" HDTV, but the games... games are still awesome :)
+Polikarpov Mosca I use a nice new HDMI monitor and an old VGA monitor and the color difference is crazy... Before Microsoft fixed it, I had one monitor with scroll bars, and another without in Windows 10 because the old monitor literally turned the scroll bar gray into white..........
Very interesting! I've heard about that CGA composite effect before, but you explained it well in detail. That dual-input monitor you have was really useful for demonstration.
+Maro Strifezza If I had to guess I'd say the video capture frame rate was just synced up properly. On top of that slowing down the capture of each frame to allow the entire frame to scan from the monitor onto the sensor of the camera. Be cool to know exactly how it was done for this video though.
Do you have more information about the game Flash Attack shown at 2:51? It looks really familiar but I can't really find anything useful on the internet bout it.
+Robert Morris It was a multi-player game back in the 1990's, but it required to be connected to a "MajorBBS" system. However, it was based off of an earlier game written for the Commodore PET.
Playing games in CGA mode was all I could do back then in the late 80's to early 90's. That's what my dad had and I was simply in awe of it. Going through the whole line from text based games, to CGA games and then later EGA and VGA games was endless fun for me. I get really nostalgic when I see those graphics now. Thank you for the great video about it.
I keep getting this video in my recommended And every single time, I watch it :) I know this is an old video but it’s one of my favorites, so keep up the good work 8-bit guy!
Ok so i know why CGA had 4 colors, because of small vram but why it had Black, C,M, White and not Black, R, G, B. It is still 4 colors and cost the same amount of vram. So why they choose that terrible pallete. BlRGB would be better than BlCMW.
+Huderlord Here's my guess: The CGA's designers knew they had two bits from the pixel data to play with and 4 output bits (R, G, B and I). They assigned R and G to the two pixel data bits because differences in R and G are more visible than differences in B and I. The B and I bits just came from two spare bits of the palette register, giving a choice of 4 palettes (dark red, dark green, brown; dark magenta, dark cyan, light grey; light red, light green, yellow; light magenta, light cyan, white). The low 4 bits of the palette register (which control the overscan colour in text modes) also control the colour of bit pattern 00 in the 4-colour graphics mode, giving an extra dimension of colour. The BIOS is set up to make the black/light magenta/light cyan/white palette the default in order to enable white text on a black background, but lots of games use one of the other 64 possible palettes. Actually 96 if you count the red/cyan/white palettes that you get if you turn off the colour burst (that was most likely done in an attempt to make 4 different shades of grey on monochrome composite monitors rather than to give more possible palette combinations).
To simplify andrewmjenner's explanation, in the 4-color CGA graphics mode, only the R and G channels could be controlled by the programmer. The B and I channels were set globally by the choice of graphics palette. The I channel was always set on to produce a bright image. If the B channel was off, the four R and G combinations gave you a Black, Red, Green and Yellow palette. If the B channel was on, it combined with the R and B channels to give you a Black, Purple, Cyan, and White palettte.
More likely chosen for clarity. Sharply contrasting colors made better edges. Plus you kinda wanted white to pair with black leaving 2 different colors for drawing attention to objects.
The funny thing about CGA graphics was that it seemed like 90% of the color palette usage was cyan.
My most vivid memory of them days was streetrods lol, loved that game
CGA literally stands for "Cyan Graphics are Awesome"
Cyan is my favorite color
@@majorpropane *cryes with purple tears*
@@effinawesome3088 ea: am i a LIE to you?
Excellent video, sir! Burgertime and Ikari Warriors are two of my favorites for demonstrating composite CGA.
"""""
+Lazy Game Reviews This video is wrong though, this is not making colors due to NTSC artifacts, he's actually demonstrating Tandy Graphics, or TGA, which was an extension of CGA that allowed it to show the entire CGA palette. Notice how he says it's a Tandy computer he shows it off with.
+Lazy Game Reviews I had not heard of those two. I'll check them out. I had a whole bunch of others i wanted to show, though.
+Nukle0n No.. as I said clearly in the video, this Tandy laptop did not have Tandy graphics.. It was standard CGA. Every CGA system could do exactly what I showed.
+The 8-Bit Guy +
"If you mix black and cyan you get blue"
Cool, got it.
"And if you mix black and magenta you get DARK blue"
No wait what?!
NOT purple, Dark blue
he typed dark blue ?? U is blind.
It had to do with the quirky way in which the (NTSC) display would separate out the image's luminance (brightness) and chrominance (hue & saturation) information from the incoming composite signal. By placing pixels in certain alternating color patterns, the software could "trick" the display into outputting a completely different color that wasn't simply a mix of the two original colors. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors
I'd call it indigo, not dark blue.
@@banhammer3904 Somebody went batshit Technology Connections mode
Seeing footage of Commander Keen and battle chess in CGA brought back some wonderful childhood memories.
Good video. Very informative!
*Commander Keen was an awesome set of games*
@@scottmantooth8785 i´ll check on EBAY if there´s the full version of the games, because I only played demos.
@@supermasterPIK *Commander Keen was a LOT of fun...one of the later chapters had a level that was hard to get to...there are play through's online that are well worth viewing ...especially on how to get to this particular level...you'll have to use/find an emulator since the the game was for DOS Operation machines*
@@scottmantooth8785 really? Lived Commander Keen, had so much fun as a child with it!!
@@scottmantooth8785 Totally, those rainy summers when you can't go out and play were solved with commander keen and duke nukem.
5:34 That laptop looks like a thing to fire nuclear rockets !
Well, Yes. But Actually, No.
I call the two palettes "80's Ski Fashion" and "Bodily Functions".
I had a pair of Rossignol skis that were exactly those colors. I called them my CGA skis.
HAHA That's hilarious and so correct!
LOLZ
1st one being used by +Pyrocynical, vaporwave and ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ
If there's pink fluid coming out of you, seek help. Like, right now.
....When you said Total Eclipse and i saw the pyramid im like, "Wow , that reminds me the game i played that you had to explore pyramids that i was trying to find for 2 years". And the name is Total Eclipse...Dude....i really have no words right now . THANKS
I know I'm a year late but congrats on finally finding it! :D
I played that way back when. I was surprised that it had voice synthesis from the PC speaker!
ha! OMG I literally just went through the exact same thing today, except Ive been trying to remember what that game was for about 15 years :P
When I was 3 years old I used to play a SNES game that I can now barely remember, it was about driving an alien spaceship at low altitudes over the ground or something… I would feel like you if I get to play it again somehow
man, your videos are always fascinating. the nitty gritty of how old hardware works is so cool
+Mother's Basement Agreed
+TheGeekGuy if you're the geek guy maybe you can answer my question. I watch RUclips on my iPhone 6. Why is it when replying to someone's comment that has an apostrophe in it does it read ' instead. Like yours reads "+Mother's Basement" instead of "+Mother's Basement".
+Ryan Amberger The reason is that TheGeekGuy has edited their comment after posting.
When you post a comment, RUclips converts some punctuation into its (Unicode i think) code - in the case of an apostrophe, "'". This code doesn't show up when the comment is viewed, however.
When you edit a comment, it doesn't convert it back into the character, leaving it instead as the code. This means that if someone edits the comment and doesn't change the code back, RUclips just views it as regular text when the comment is updated, so it doesn't convert it back into the character it's supposed to be when it's viewed again.
Hope this helps. I just guessed this was the case when I edited a comment a while back and noticed this happening.
(sorry for the long response, wanted to be as clear as possible)
Yeah, something I was confronted with as a little kid and didnt really understand. And to learn in depth about it 30 years later is pretty cool.
I can't get over how lovely the cabling work in the background is. So soothing.
4:11 they thought, “What should we replace pinky’s name with?”
And someone was just like, “Trust me I got a good idea.”
KinGK
i'm more fascinated by the choice to make inky's nickname SCHIZO
red sus
@@Extramrdo amogus
fun fact there is a actule ghost named kinky in the game pacman argment whoes gimick is to asirb the other ghost to make them more powerful. he is a ornge ghost with glases and actully kinda looks like the 🤓 emote
I clicked because of the Commander Keen thumbnail. Stayed for the great content.
same
me too
i ended up subscribing
+Matthew McDanel , Keen lured me here as well.
+Matthew McDanel Ditto.
+Matthew McDanel Yes! :D My favourite childhood PC series.
I was floored when you connected it to a TV. I had no idea it could do that.
Monitors were expensive, but TVs were probably already in people's homes by 1982. Same reason Commodore computers hooked up to TVs.
Ditto. Of course I only ran CGA on my VGA card, there was no composite jack to plug into a TV.
Man everytime i come here and see your videos in my subscription box, i fell like i got a lot smarter... even though i used a lot of that old retro tech and still have some, i don't know much about them, just how to use them... You are like the cool teacher i've never had :D
+Andreas Indelicato Your last sentence nails the entire appeal of this channel. Well put. I wish school had been like this. I wish it was like this now. I've shown this channel to my kids (teenagers) and they loved it, even though they weren't around for all of this stuff originally.
budgetguitarist.com :D
+Andreas Indelicato His voice kinda reminds me of the Warlock dude in the old World of Roguecraft videos ;-)
Man i have subscribed him when he was the Ibook guy... got bored after some time and unsubscribed.. then like last year he completely changed everything... since then i subscribed back and was never let down.. He is awesome and his show is epic... i also subscribed to his "Keyboard" Channel 8bit Keys which is also reeaaaaaaaaaaallllllyyyyy awesome! =)
"Most modern TVs still have a composite video port on them."
Disappointingly, this isn't aging too well.
Most of the smart LCD TVs in my house have a composite port. I have a TCL and Samsung that are only a couple years old with those ports.
I have a Samsung smartv from 2017 that only has component cables. I would need an adapter 😢
@@NascarRacingFan5 try the Y socket of component with a true composite signal, some tvs can extract colour data from it ..
@@andygozzo72 Yes there are quite of few tvs that do exactly this but don't advertise that fact.
@@oaajbs my neighbours 52 inch thing does, had to try the component input as the other inputs were in use for other devices and worked perfectly , colour came up nicely on just the Y
Love the way you present things, visually and verbally. It is informative without being dry and boring. Exactly the format I'm looking for when I want to delve into obsolete tech that I can barely remember using in my childhood.
i was bored then i found this WONDERFUL channel. man... this is so Fantastic!
same!
same
Jędrzej Kawa
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Danieliznolcflb Souza 11/10 very creative comment
PCs just weren't designed for games, and CGA was one of the best/worst examples of that. It wasn't until EGA and VGA that you could take advantage of things like hardware latches to slightly improve blitting speed. CGA relied on you pushing pixels, and those pixels were not only packed per byte (320x200 4-color mode meant 4 pixels per byte), but they were also interleaved (meaning all your even rows of pixels were contiguous in memory, followed by all the odd rows.)
The awkward memory layout required calculations to be done to know where exactly in video memory to read and write. And since the pixels were packed, you would have to read what's there and mask out the bits you're changing to avoid changing neighboring pixels. You wasted a lot of CPU time on just dealing with the display. This is how an NES, which had a slower and less advanced CPU than the PC XT, could run circles around a PC in regards to games, because the NES had a dedicated graphics chip designed for drawing tiles and sprites.
So while CGA was still significantly more advanced than what prior pieces of hardware had to deal with (such as drawing every scanline yourself every frame on Atari 2600), it was still a pain in the butt to develop anything for without still carefully planning your game around display optimization. This all played a part in a dev's decision on which mode(s) to support, and is part of why you generally only saw modes like CGA composite used on less intensive things like adventure games.
This comment had me pondering how to write some routines for working with CGA. Well done!
Standard VGA double buffering (320*200 256 colors) used again some latches. Select one of 4 columns, and put your pixel. Then, to optimize the display you must draw column 0,4,8,12,16,20,etc...
restart with columns 1,5,9,13,17,21,etc ...
restart with columns 2,6,10,14,18,22,etc ...
and finally restart with columns 3,7,11,15,19,23,etc ...
Just to reduce the number of "out" instructions.
In this mode, memory is not directly mapped on the processor bus. You need to use "in"/"out" instructions to access video memory, and it was a serious bottleneck.
Intel 286/386 processors was more powerfull and faster than 68k or 8bits processors, but use PC video cards was a joke.
EGA blt latching was PITA to use; it's least what you think when games are the design goal. Hence why so many games used mode 13h.
This comment is severely underrated. Very informative. 👍
source?
The dark palette cyan\magenta is sublime. I dream in those colors.
It's sad that they couldn't make it 5 colors instead of 4 (alas, 5 does not multiply evenly into 16). With Cyan, Magenta, YELLOW, black, and white, it would've looked TREMENDOUSLY better!
I'm nostalgic for a lot of things, but four color games isn't one of them.
lol ikr :P
it is for me. the black, white, cyan and magenta color scheme always brings back these feelings of nostalgia from when most of my games looked like that.
king's bounty pallete, space quest pallete; king's quest used 2nd (with green)
Gameboy
I remember a game called Test Drive which we played in 1988. It was cool, but I hated those 4 colors alrwady then and couldn't understand why they at least could make games with 16 colors as a minimum.
I remember when my dad came home with one of those EGA graphic cards, I couldn't even tell the difference between it and CGA(at that time). As games started using it, the difference was huge, obviously. My dad was in the gaming industry during the 80's.
Man, I love CGA--It looks so unique in the landscape of retro graphic styles and uniquely limited graphics are one of my favorite parts of early gaming. I never knew what the whole *mostly cyan and pink* style was before now. Cool video.
This is like my 4th time watching this video now. It's really well done, and takes ya back.
Maniac mansion! 😲 Great memories!
ඞ
I'm getting it confused with Hugo's House of Horrors
Why did they name that game Upper Penis here in Austria? It maked no sense.
That game looks terrible
You're knowledgeable in retro gaming consoles. You've become a huge link in making me understand how the hardware worked.
As co-author of 8088 MPH, I approve of this video. ;-)
This video and your work have astounded me today. I had no idea CGA was not so disgusting!
+Jim Leonard The 8088MPH demo inspired me to make this video. Unfortunately, the demo wouldn't work on the Tandy 1400. It would get stuck on the first plasma demo part.
No worries, the demo breaks most emulators too :-)
I hope to make videos as well as you do someday. Glad you liked the demo.
Do you know any emulators that run the demo, without crashing?
+MCD456 pcem-x comes close, iirc
Wow, this is the best kind of video you should watch at 3:00 AM when you're bored. It's both interesting and you learn some cool new stuff. Keep up the good work mate
JeromeGamer currently 3:04 am and I have school at 8. Good work!
JeromeGamer to me its 05:34....
And now I'm watching it a second time by the looks of things... :/
3:11 am for me when I started watching :D
03.21 here. Just done watching. And very drunk :)
Wow! Amazing stuff, never knew about this.
Such old tech still holding secrets.
Thanks for doing this video!
.
Hey so I am blown away at how big this channel has gotten. I started watching this channel maybe 2ish years ago, just kinda stumbled onto it. And kinda fell away for about 6 months, this video popped up on my feed, and decided to give it a watch. I looked down and it said over 1M views and almost that many subscribers! Thats awesome! I was born in 87, and I always wanted a computer growing up, I always thought learning about this stuff was so cool. But we didnt get one until the early 2000s, and the golden age of the C64 and AppleII were long gone, and I didnt know enough about them, or even what they were to know what I wanted. I asked for a computer for years and I always got a stupid VTech toy. I'm glad I can watch this now, and learn just a little of what I missed out on as a kid.
This video just got recommended to me on both of my accounts today lol. Nice video by the way.
Great video, but I have to disagree with you about CGA being comparable or superior to a C64 or Atari 8-bit series. Those machines had dedicated graphics chips with hardware sprites, which made them ideal for gaming, and it wasn't really until the EGA/VGA era that most PC games began to exceed what the C64 and Atari were capable of -- or if you were lucky enough to have a Tandy 1000, the system which truly legitimized PC gaming.
+vwestlife Aside from needing EGA/VGA you also needed quite a powerful CPU compared to the humble 6502-derivatives in the C64 and Atari. The CPU had to bang all the pixels into memory the hard way. You'll need at least a 10 MHz 8088 or a 6-8 MHz 286 and a proper VGA card (the game is EGA, but real EGA cards tend to have very slow memory) to enjoy Commander Keen, where C64 and Atari did similar games with ease on a much slower CPU.
insert long comment here
I think the superiority of CGA was in its dedicated 16K-on-the-card video RAM. The Atari, Apple ][, C64, and all the others had to share system RAM with the graphics subsystem.
I do agree with you that the dedicated hardware sprites, like those available in the C64 were most definitely excellent for gaming, and made what *would’ve* been a far inferior system much more useable. I’m a big C64 fan, no doubt, but I definitely give IBM some big credit here - they created a graphics subsystem that was excellent for its day.
Inclined to agree, what I just witnessed was not comparable to the C64. If I had seen that back in the day, I would have cringed and run back to my 64.
Krasen Makes Content oh you think you're So Great don't you you think you can just posted them slightly witty comments and nobody will respond
well guess what I responded bro I responded real hard look at this response I'm responding all over the place you won't even know how hard I'm responding all over your somewhat redundant comment watch me watch me bro watch me watch me watch me yeah ok stop watching me now
I used to have an XT with dual monitors - CGA and a hercules for doing AutoCAD work. Those were the good ole days!
Thanks for uploading these kind of vídeos! It is very interesting to know how the games used to work when I was growing up with them. Cheers from México City!
1:12 Commander Keen! I remember that little guy! Even though I never played it (but saw my uncle play it)
Fun fact: that game is where the Minecraft enchantment table language comes from.
ck 5 has a lit soundtrack idk about the others tho coz im yest to play them. i actually only clicked on this video because i saw commander keen on the thumbnail lol
@@snufkin8940 and theres a translator
That's a GREAT video. As a developer, I really like to learn how things were back in the day. Limited resources and a lot of genius ideas to work with it. It really makes me respect (even more!) what software development was back then. Keep up the good work.
CGA looked great on monochrome monitors.
Yeah, like when we had Hercules monitor and there was a CGA emulator for it
@ Like C64 in "green monitors". Was bizarre for me to see videos of games I have never seen in colours. Green Monitors give a metallic aspect of games, and it was good for me because I have some problems of vision with colors. And black and white is not bad too: see MADWORLD on Wii.
@@193819441974 oh yeah, we had one of those greens for our Enterprise 128 too
No.
The composite artifact is a trick that has been exploited on game consoles as well. For example in Sonic on Megadrive/Genesis, the bubble shield looked transparent when we were playing it on the console plugged to a CRT TV but when we play the game on an emulator on a flat screen, we notice there is no transparency at all but only 1 of 2 sprite columns of the sprite showing up.
It's also the sprite flickering trick, like they did for the water surfaces to hide how the background palette was changed at a certain point on the screen the put the level underwater.
A lot of Genesis games used a technique called dithering to create new colors using NTSC artifacts. You see that in backgrounds with sunsets. Its amazing how programmers were able to get around the limitations of hardware back then to create these effects.
Careful, this is quite the heavy debate in certain retro communities; whether or not retro games were meant to be shown in composite video or the RGB signals wired up in most consoles, and what was the original artist's vision.
and also, how did those games work when used with composite PAL video instead of NTSC, with (I presume) somewhat different colour artefacts
There was also Super Mario World for the SNES. On levels where water appears, the water isn't actually transparent, but is just checkered with clear and blue tiles. on a crt you wouldn't notice and it would look transparent.
many many more youtube channels should have the interesting information density of yours. Keep up the great work!
Belated "Thanks" (4 yrs later). As a computer graphics nerd from way back, I appreciate your efforts for this look into CGA and related.
P.S. I have watched/enjoyed a number of your other vids, too. All quite well done. Thx, again.
This brings back memories. Like when I couldn’t finish kings quest until we upgraded to an ega equipped computer. It turns out that it’s impossible to find a golden egg when gold isn’t one of the 4 colors available to you.
man this reminds me of back in the day when i was young and used to play King's Quest in glorious CGA. (VGA existed but my father didnt think it was necessary lol thanks dad)
I liked space Quest better. 😆
And I always thought how awful the CGA was, especially the choice of purple/magenta, but now I see how it would've been with composite. I never had the chance to use the composite, when I had an old PC. Thanks for the info.
love it how these videos take me back to a simplified world ☺
If there was super EGA, it would be named
*_SEEEEEGAAAAA_*
lol
S(uper)EGAAAA!
@Yannik Zinner makes sense
Super EGA = VGA.
Sega
U g o i
P g r
E p
R l
A
N
E
"Woah is this shitty. Is this really how CGI is supposed to look like or is it a compatiblility issue?" You just answered questions I had since early childhood. Thanks man!
We used to call CGA, "Chunky Graphics Adapter" back in the day.
We called it crappy graphics adapter LOL. I still remember when my dad bought a vga card and a monitor that could utilise it and we were all "WHOA" like it was the best thing we'd ever seen bahahaha.
I called it the Crappy Graphics Adapter myself. It' sucks when the radio shack TGA (Tandy graphics adapter) was far superior to the IBM CGA
It's like 2008-2010 Angry video game nerd without the swearing. I like this channel.
+ViolentSh4de Looks like a normal guy making a informative video, about as far removed from the sensationalist and pompous "AVGN" and his clones as possible.
Oof chill, This person probably just doesn't have much experience with retro tech on youtube. I feel like you guys are just using it as a chance to attack the AVGN channel and it's fans.
+Marcopolis Neko I dunno, does it make you feel smart when you say shit like that? Like a mature, sensible, intelligent adult? Is that what you think you're being? Because if you do think that... well... I've got bad news.
Marcopolis Neko I take it you havnt seen the 2 minute long segments where he explained console and companies history before the game came out. Plus they both do (did) Retro tech stuff. There were a couple similarities between the segments that AVGN did and these videos no reason to be hostile.
+Marcopolis Neko Why so rude?
Man, this is why I like RUclips. Great little shows like this one.
One laugh I had about the fractal generator "Fractint".... It had a list of nearly all kinds of graphics hardware we had in the last stage of the DOS era, including CGA. Where all cards were described with the resolutions and amount of colors, the description of CGA was just "UCH-YUCK-BLER!" -- I guess their vision on CGA was clear.
Now when I began in DOS PCs I had to do with an amber screen and as such the lack of colors didn't really get me. The first computer I had after that already had SVGA.
Now I can't find the link anymore, but I did once see a kind of challenge in which coded tried to make a completely rendered 3D landscape out of CGA, and yes the white-magenta-cyan variant, and I was surprised with how realistic they could still make it look... Back in the day I was actually happy to have something that could do graphics...
Every now and then I find a true informative video that actually is worth watching. thanks.
OMG, that Total Eclipse runs superfast compared to C64!
+algi To be fair, that was running under DOSBOX when I captured the video. When I ran Total Eclipse on the old Tandy laptop it ran about the same framerate as the C64 version.
+The 8-Bit Guy Oh, that sounds good, I might do that myself, too.
I own a eclipse mp3 player
+algi Check out my speedrun. :-) watch?v=hL90h4vvx_4
+Kurt Angerdinger Weren't the Mercenary games running smooth compared to Total Eclipse?
I'm watching this on hercules and can't see any difference.
LOL!
+manfreed That card was considered "esoteric" at the time. Some of us had them, Most didn't. (like reel-reel tape decks,Known, but considered unusual.)
***** I don't know, maybe because it wasn't color. I wasn't happy about it when my dad bought his first PC, but after all it wasn't that bad and most stuff worked (including Windows).
Hercules (well, clones) were extremely popular over here in .nl. They used the same (cheap) mono monitors as the old MDA and so they were the natural upgrade option for businesses.
Jasper Janssen A lot of us here in the USA used Herc. An awesome thing before VGA.
Seeing Commander Keen in CGA surprised me since I recall reading that the "smooth scrolling trick" John Carmack developed (and used in Commander Keen) was "only possible on EGA". How did they make it work on CGA?
I still have dozens of old '80 computers and software, your channel is beautiful, greetings from Italy.
I have watched this several times. A couple of times with my 8 year old son. This is some of your best work David. You have one of the best channels on YTube!
I never thought CGA graphics were "bad", in fact the pink and green CGA palettes are the most charming-looking things ever.
I wish I knew about this when I was a kid, would have tried to convince my Dad to try some games in Composite mode. I was so happy when we finally upgraded to EGA though. lol
+Dario Pervan Do go on.
+I do games just ignore assholes
***** This was months ago. You're going to have to let posts go sometimes. I'm sorry somebody dropped you on the head as a child so you can't recognize that...actually no I'm not since you're being an ignorant bitch. I'm not personally offended, but someone reading the comment might be, so I owe you that much, as you are certainly dumb.
This has been a great thread. I just wish Dario would elaborate on his comment, I love to see his brilliant intellect at work.
I knew about it, but never got it to work. Maybe you didn't miss much. :)
Interesting graph on the video standards. Didn't realize I must have had one of the first SVGA computers when I got my first PC in 1992, a Tandy Sensation. 1024 x 768 non-interlaced was a glorious marvel to a 12 year old kid moving up in the world from an Apple 2 clone.
When I played ZZT (the game at 2:44) on DOSbox, I always wondered if it was in EGA or CGA. You learn something new every day.
A monochrome, Game Boy-style of graphic display would have been better than the bad CGA palettes we got.
WOW these videos are friggin amazing.
My understanding of graphics (EGA, VGA and SVGA) was based on Leisure Suit Larry games!
I never got him out of that bar!
Played that on the Tandy 1000hx.The game supported tandy graphics
HELL YEAH!
In fact, it was with LSL1 that I found the game showed 16 colors when connected to a TV set 😳
LHX Attack Chopper!
My favorite game when I was 14!
Never heard anything about it since then!
Happy to see it again !
This was a great runthrough! And I'm glad that I stumbled upon this so I found your channel again :)
Such a complex mix of emotions watching these awesome vids.
Super fun nerdy and informative.
Inspire me to learn some 8-bit coding and play around building simple games
But then I can never help but wonder why I want more motivated and captivated by this as a kid. Why wasn't I learning this stuff when I was 14, instead of 34.
7:14 how do you get blue out of green, red and yellow?
And speaking about that, why did they make 2 versions of the objectively ugly palettes instead of, say, at least one mode featuring red green and blue?
ikr
Same way you get yellow out of green and red. Pretty sure most TVs are still only Red Green Blue. Someone (Sony?) made a big stink of adding yellow a few years ago, but considering our eyes don't really see yellow to begin with... :P
its more about light source than pigmented colour that we'd use in paint etc.
@@giin97 It is (was?) Sharp's Quattron, not Sony's.
The only explanation I could think of is somehow the pattern was chosen so that the light bleed through to the neighboring blue pixels on the monitor and the R and G elements cancel- but I have no idea how that would work. I'm also scratching my head trying to figure it out, since there's no additive combination of R and G that could produce B
That commander keen is running in EGA, not VGA. It was my fav game in the late 80's and I ran it on an EGA monitor/card so I remember exactly what it looked like.
This was crazy interesting! I wonder why you never showed up in my recommendations before... I wonder what else RUclips is hiding from me...
As always, you're super detailed with great visuals, awesome camera shots, and a super pleasant voice. Thanks for the video!
I know this is an old video, but I jumped and yelled for joy when you referenced ZZT. I spent SO many hours playing ZZT in my youth - still one of the most underrated games especially with the plethora of custom maps and creative puzzle design.
Using NTSC artefacting to simulate in-between colours is great if you live in North America. I'm not convinced it's as much of a help for those of us in the PAL regions.
+Malidictus Good point. Though composite still smeared details (old SNES and Genesis/Megadrive actually simulated transparency effects with that. Composites only plus over SCART or S-Video) be it PAL or NTSC I'm not sure if PAL TV would change colors like that. Somebody needs to test this out. I never knew this about CGA and Composite but if this effect does not even work with PAL TV's then yeah, nothing was really lost in my childhood days.
This wikipedia article says the color blending did not work on PAL.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors
Maybe this contributed to the vaning interest in supporting composite since large part of the market could not use it. I live in a PAL country and don't remember ever having a CGA output for composite.
I'm not very well-versed in PAL vs. NTSC, but I do know there are considerable differences between the technologies. Any software which relies on specific aspects of one standard tends to break to different degrees on another standard. Since PAL and NTSC seem to differ in pretty much every aspect possible while still doing roughly the same thing, I don't think that kind of "trick" would work.
And again - using colour aliasing to generate more colours is pretty clever, no doubt. I remember there was a CGA game which attempted to switch modes dynamically as each pixel was being drawn or some such and display its full 16 colours that way, but that only worked with specific processor speeds or some such.
God I never new that about composite . I carried around a Toshiba T1000 for a few years. It was only an 8088 but it had a rom dos. I could load up some cheap games on the 720 drive and not worry about dos taking up space. But it had a composite output and I had NEVER tried it:P
Now I got to load up some of these games off my laptop. Humm. Makes me wonder if there are any emulators that support composite CGA.
+warlockd Really? I've been wanting a T1000 for a while, but I didn't realize it had composite. Now I want one even more!
DOSBox does have composite support.
Wasn't the 8088 first 16bit then due to lack of mb support the dropped bus to 8bit?
Everything x86 before the 80386 used a 16-bit instruction set. An 8-bit ISA bus was used before the PC/AT (80286), at which point 16-bit ISA was introduced.
Trying to remember the chip, but they first released it as 16bit bus and 16 bit IS. The motherboards boards were so expensive they released a revision with 8 bit bus, 16 bit IS. 8086 was 16/16 and 8088 was 8/16.
Omg... the pink ghost at 4:10 is called Kinky... why...
I guess they ran out of 'inky' names? The originals were Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde.
I always remembered Clyde because he was the odd one out. I always forget either Blinky or Pinky.
As a matter of fact, "Kinky" is the name of a ghost in an *official* Pac-Man game, too (Pac-Man Arrangement).
I wonder if they just assume kids will overlook the meaning of the word, and that adults will chuckle and ignore it.
Well, that's one way to avoid a copyright lawsuit.
NK_20 how do you forget pinky
You had me with the Commander Keen preview!
This was fantastically nerdy. I loved it.
The Sega Genesis also uses the TV's pixel blending to create more colors and transparent effects. Like the waterfalls in Sonic 1.
I modded my Genesis for S-Video output a couple years ago, and most of it looks fantastic but things things like clouds and waterfalls are so sharp now you can see the individual pixels clearly and it loses a bit of the transparency effect.
Scoth3
Yep. Only RF and NTSC composite creates this effect.
CGA would be a lot better if devs could pick the 4 colours they wanted to show on-screen from that palette of 16, that way I'm sure most CGA games would look a lot better, both in Composite mode and in RGB mode...
Looking forward to the Tandy Graphics video!
But that requires more data because this was all 0s and 1s, binary, on or off. That would need many more "channels" to send on if it was still binary, otherwise there would be conflicts.
WolfLeader116-2 It couldn't require THAT much data to pick 4 colours to show on-screen from a palette of 16... I mean, the C64 could pick 4 colours to show on each 4 x 8 tile, and I'm inclined to believe it could handle 4 of those palettes on-screen at a time (It's 16 colours after all) and that's just on the BG layer, not counting the sprites, yet the C64 was a contemporary of CGA PCs...
My father had that kind of Compaq laptop. He solely used it to play Solitaire. As he has ever since with all his laptops.
+akawhut Well, I suppose "Solitaire" with 256 colours still looks better than 4 colour mode and half the resolution and no animations
Target electronics worker here. I can confirm that the yellow port is starting to disappear.
This was an excellent video. It has brought me memories of being a teen and fiddling with my father with our old computer. Truly a piece of computer history!
i am so grateful that we have so powerful graphic cards now.
Ninja Shaw I'm not. They're boring now.
What is the name of computer in 1:46 ? Looks similar to Commodore64, but C64 had tape drive port instead of this RGBI, hmm...
Commodore 128.
Thanks, i used C128 few times, but in C64mode only, and unfortunately i never had my own C128.
But...
I still have C64, on which I play on every Chritsmas Eve. Eyes are bleeding when you play on 42" HDTV, but the games... games are still awesome :)
Gem Boy c
EGA screens have round pixels, not square-shaped like VGA screens, and it looks almost like antialiasing mode. :)
+Michał Górka Lol, and this is why I still prefer VGA
+Polikarpov Mosca I use a nice new HDMI monitor and an old VGA monitor and the color difference is crazy... Before Microsoft fixed it, I had one monitor with scroll bars, and another without in Windows 10 because the old monitor literally turned the scroll bar gray into white..........
Good CRT monitors have better colors than any LCD or LED!
@@MichalGorkaTruskaw My OLED would like to challenge that (100% color accuracy and perfect blacks, CRTs always made the blacks slightly grey)
Very interesting! I've heard about that CGA composite effect before, but you explained it well in detail. That dual-input monitor you have was really useful for demonstration.
I love this channel so much. I'm 27 but learning so much!
Holy crap, I haven't seen ZZT since I was a kid!
why doesn´t the TVs flicker?
+Maro Strifezza I went to great lengths to adjust my camera to get the best sync with the CRTs.
+The 8-Bit Guy Glad you did that, flickery monitors would have been so annoying
+Maro Strifezza If I had to guess I'd say the video capture frame rate was just synced up properly. On top of that slowing down the capture of each frame to allow the entire frame to scan from the monitor onto the sensor of the camera. Be cool to know exactly how it was done for this video though.
+The 8-Bit Guy
sounds like how to do that and why you have to would be a whole video unto itself!
+The 8-Bit Guy Bravo sir. that level of professionalism earned you a follower.
Do you have more information about the game Flash Attack shown at 2:51? It looks really familiar but I can't really find anything useful on the internet bout it.
+Robert Morris It was a multi-player game back in the 1990's, but it required to be connected to a "MajorBBS" system. However, it was based off of an earlier game written for the Commodore PET.
Thanks, I found it finally. I was really into MBBS back in my high school days. It's nice to see something years later I totally forgot about!
Oh, I really really wanted this game back in the day. Possibly saw it in Byte Magazine (Pet Version?)
Playing games in CGA mode was all I could do back then in the late 80's to early 90's. That's what my dad had and I was simply in awe of it. Going through the whole line from text based games, to CGA games and then later EGA and VGA games was endless fun for me. I get really nostalgic when I see those graphics now. Thank you for the great video about it.
Congrats on 1 million subscribers!! You earned it.
I like how you use gameplay footage from Ultima VI often in your videos.
+chaos407 It has always been one of my favorite games.
I hate that game GTA 5 is way better
I thought I recognized you, dude!! From AwesomeAirGuns!! I thought you disappeared years ago!! :D
Alpha wave for MS-dos has a pretty good CGA mode
Dude , I love these old tech videos!! 90% of the stuff you talk about was before my time , but it's still interesting!
I keep getting this video in my recommended
And every single time, I watch it :)
I know this is an old video but it’s one of my favorites, so keep up the good work 8-bit guy!
Ok so i know why CGA had 4 colors, because of small vram but why it had Black, C,M, White and not Black, R, G, B. It is still 4 colors and cost the same amount of vram. So why they choose that terrible pallete. BlRGB would be better than BlCMW.
Or they did it to catch the attention of children. Cyan is one of my favorite/favourite colours/colors.
+Huderlord Here's my guess: The CGA's designers knew they had two bits from the pixel data to play with and 4 output bits (R, G, B and I). They assigned R and G to the two pixel data bits because differences in R and G are more visible than differences in B and I. The B and I bits just came from two spare bits of the palette register, giving a choice of 4 palettes (dark red, dark green, brown; dark magenta, dark cyan, light grey; light red, light green, yellow; light magenta, light cyan, white). The low 4 bits of the palette register (which control the overscan colour in text modes) also control the colour of bit pattern 00 in the 4-colour graphics mode, giving an extra dimension of colour. The BIOS is set up to make the black/light magenta/light cyan/white palette the default in order to enable white text on a black background, but lots of games use one of the other 64 possible palettes. Actually 96 if you count the red/cyan/white palettes that you get if you turn off the colour burst (that was most likely done in an attempt to make 4 different shades of grey on monochrome composite monitors rather than to give more possible palette combinations).
To simplify andrewmjenner's explanation, in the 4-color CGA graphics mode, only the R and G channels could be controlled by the programmer. The B and I channels were set globally by the choice of graphics palette. The I channel was always set on to produce a bright image. If the B channel was off, the four R and G combinations gave you a Black, Red, Green and Yellow palette. If the B channel was on, it combined with the R and B channels to give you a Black, Purple, Cyan, and White palettte.
More likely chosen for clarity. Sharply contrasting colors made better edges. Plus you kinda wanted white to pair with black leaving 2 different colors for drawing attention to objects.
RGBI is for adults. Composite is for kids.
I was left confused about the "composite mode"...
HDMI is for babies.
so this is where the magenta-cyan 'aesthetics' come from
Yep. Half our culture's conception of cyberpunk Aesthetics™ is based on the technical limitations of one specific graphics card from the 80s.
I was thinking the same thing!
@@Sylocat wow. Just wow im so lucky to have bumped into this video.
@@quattro4468 Heck yeah
I find this composite demo very pleasant to watch. Seems like to have been done with passion.
Nice to see these old games.
I had forgotten few of them.
Thank you for this lesson😊
I hate CGA all days of My life, until now. Thank you for this great explanation.