Why can't CGA be art?

[Atari-Jess]

ZylonBane can rant against CGA all he wants, but no one can tell me I'm not making it look *good*

 

(All photos are either mine or rights to use were given to me, incase anyone is curious)

Edited May 29, 2006 by Atari-Jess

[Seob]

I don't think the first to are cga graphics. they may have just 4 colors but that doesn't make it cga.

If i recall it correctly cga had white, black, magneta and cyan as possible colors. I was really glad that we didn't have a color monitor whit our first pc. It was a 286 with a whole megabyte of memory and a whopping 20 mb harddrive, and a 3.5"hdd diskdrive and cga. I allways looked at the monochrome colors and was thinking how much better the graphics where in monochrome over color in cga. Ega was a lot better with colors. That was the first card where the graphic started to look nice on a pc.

[Happy_Dude]

I wouln't call a simple filtered photo art.

Now if you print these on a billboard that would be really cool

[Lord Thag]

Most mediums can be used in an artistic sense very creatively, and look good (nice pics BTW). However, when it comes to games, I completely agree with Zylon and say CGA sucks the big one. I didn't even like it back in the day. After all, why should I? I could play games in four hideous colors, or in LOTS more on my Atari 800. Not much of a competition...

[bedouin]

Well, a static graphic with CGA is one thing -- a game looking decent with it is quite another. There were some people who knew how to make things look acceptable though, but more often than not colors were just substituted from the EGA/PcJr version.

 

When I moved from my c64 to a Tandy 1000 in 1989 I was very disappointed by the crappy sound and lackluster CGA graphics I was forced to use when Tandy 16 Color/PcJr graphics weren't available (which was just about every game except Sierra's).

 

CGA sucks. It was for business machines who wanted a step up from green, not great graphics or gaming. At least on the B&W Macs games were made knowing that the majority of the audience was limited to B&W (until the late 80s, anyway), producing some works that looked decent, and weren't just downgraded versions of their color counterparts.

[Cybergoth]

If i recall it correctly cga had white, black, magneta and cyan as possible colors.

 

Well, you don't recall it correctly then.

 

CGA has 2 different pallettes, one with white, magneta and cyan, the second with red, green and yellow. Also, those 2 palettes each exist in "high" and "low" intensity versions.

 

The 4th color in each of those 4 modes is choosable out of a range of another 8 (high/low) colors.

[supercat]

CGA has 2 different pallettes, one with white, magneta and cyan, the second with red, green and yellow. Also, those 2 palettes each exist in "high" and "low" intensity versions.

 

The 4th color in each of those 4 modes is choosable out of a range of another 8 (high/low) colors.

 

There are six palettes total:

• red/green/brown
  
• lightred/lightgreen/yellow
  
• magenta/cyan/lightgray
  
• lightmagenta/lightcyan/white
  
• red/cyan/lightgray (will appear as three shades of gray on composite monitor)
  
• lightred/lightcyan/white (will also appear as three shades of gray on composite monitor)
  

The background color for the displayed portion of the screen may be any of 16 colors; that same color will be shown in the overscan region.

[LocalH]

There's also CGA composite, which is what you alluded to with your last two choices. Some games did it by using 640x200x2 but turned the color burst on, essentially forcing the composite monitor/TV to see the high-resolution bit patterns as different colors.

 

Also, "brown" is technically yellow (in that it's generated by enabling R and G only) but monitors have circuitry to detect this yellow and drop the G component partially, leaving you with brown output.

Edited May 29, 2006 by LocalH

[jbanes]

ZylonBane can rant against CGA all he wants, but no one can tell me I'm not making it look *good*

 

1. Those *do* look good. Great work!

 

2. You let ZylonBane get you riled up? As I can tell you from personal experience, he visits these boards for the sole purpose of getting people worked up. You're probably wasting your time by arguing. He really doesn't care.

 

(Not that it stops me from trying to make a friendly gesture every once in awhile, but I'm starting to think it's a lost cause.)

[supercat]

Also, "brown" is technically yellow (in that it's generated by enabling R and G only) but monitors have circuitry to detect this yellow and drop the G component partially, leaving you with brown output.

 

IBM uses the terms "brown" for color 6 and "yellow" for color 14, even though they are really "yellow" and "lightyellow" respectively. The so-called "lightgray" is really dark white, and "darkgray" is really bright black, but I didn't want to confuse people.

 

On most monitors, color 6 is a bit too dark to really be called "yellow", but is too greenish to really be "brown". Perhaps "gold" (as with Atari's color $1x) would have been a good name.

[Atari-Jess]

You let ZylonBane get you riled up? ... You're probably wasting your time

 

Haha, thanks for the advice!

[LocalH]

IBM uses the terms "brown" for color 6 and "yellow" for color 14, even though they are really "yellow" and "lightyellow" respectively. The so-called "lightgray" is really dark white, and "darkgray" is really bright black, but I didn't want to confuse people.

 

On most monitors, color 6 is a bit too dark to really be called "yellow", but is too greenish to really be "brown". Perhaps "gold" (as with Atari's color $1x) would have been a good name.

But still, CGA monitors are supposed to drop the green component partially such that the generated color is closer to brown than dark yellow. This is handled in the monitor, but the signal sent from the CGA card would indeed represent dark yellow if it weren't for the additional monitor circuitry.

 

OK, so why the odd name for color 0 1 1 0? Well, we now turn to the schematic of the CGA monitor. The 4 bits come in, and are buffered by 74S05 chips, Q201 and Q253 on the schematic. Now for the interesting bit: There are 4 of the open-collector inverters -- Q201d, Q201f, Q253e and Q253f -- whose outputs are connected together. This common signal will only be high if the input signals are... wait for it... I=0, R=1, G=1, B=0. That is, for this particular color 6. For that color, Q206 (a normal NPN transistor) is therefore turned on, and this will reduce the level of green in the final display. In other words this color is a little redder than you might expect.

 

So there's the magic: IBM intentionally turned #6 brown in the monitor.

[Great Hierophant]

Read this document to find out all you ever wanted to know, and more besides, about the CGA's abilities.

 

I don't think the first to are cga graphics. they may have just 4 colors but that doesn't make it cga.

 

If you want to be truly technical, none of those pictures are CGA graphics because they are in a 640x400 resolution! You have to reduce the picture down to 320x200 pixels, using a method that eliminates the second horizontal and vertical pixel, to obtain true CGA graphics. However, all the pictures are within the limits of the CGA.

CGA___The_Three_Facets.txt

[Atari-Jess]

If you want to be truly technical, none of those pictures are CGA graphics because they are in a 640x400 resolution!

 

actually they ARE in 320x200 pixels, I just resized the images to 640x400 , thats why the pixels are oversized.

[supercat]

This is handled in the monitor

 

I worked with an early IBM CGA monitor, and the "brown" was sufficiently greenish that I would not have guessed IBM did anything special with that color. I've certainly seen other monitors that treated that color specially, but IBM's handling seems pretty close to 'neutral'.