Amazing Dithering in CGA and EGA Graphics (and how it works) 

It's funny that I stumbled upon this video today because last week I found that dither tool and messed around with it. It's really cool. Also, your mom's hat is awesome!

A good stable and fast imitation of Floyd Steinberg dithering is precomputed blue noise overlay. People have been working on magical spatiotemporal blue noises recently as well.

Who else lived a Hercules life in a CGA/EGA/VGA world? I didn't just see dithering, I LIVED it. Everything was dithered! From CGA emulators to Space Quest 3 (The start in the dump I couldn't see what the hell was going on! But I finished it eventually, ha ha.) and VGA images dithered down to a monochrome death. If you squinted your eyes from a few metres away, you could imagine it looked good. Good days though. I'm glad I grew up in that era where graphics and technology rapidly advanced and we were taught to program computers and not just use them like today.

Your GIMP workflow is bound to produce weird results because you change the palette colors after the actual reduction/dithering process. Don't let the indexed-mode conversion "generate optimum palette", but "use custom palette" with the destination colors. Just tried it with custom-defined CGA "ski fashion" and "bodily fluids" palettes, and the result is much better.

Defender of the Crown probably has the best graphics on most of the systems it was released on. I have the C64 version, and whilst it was a loading nightmare(it come on 2 audio cassette tapes, and you'll be switching tape/side quite often, with some load times in excess of 2 minutes) it looked amazing. It made full use of all 16 of the C64's colours and had great dithering.

pretty amazing review of todays effort mimicing old school graphics

Back years ago I did a Floyd-Steinberg dither converter for GIF images that output to an ink jet printer. It also worked quit well in hi res low color depth PC graphics modes. This was in the time frame graphic cards only supported 256 colors in the lowest res modes. There is a standard algorithm that down converts the color pallet, but I can’t remember the name of it.

Those images look amazing on the CGA monitor!

Great video - some of the most impressive examples of algorithmic (not pre-computed) dithering from VGA through EGA all the way down to CGA that come to mind are Golden Axe, Metal Mutant and Budokan

0:57 here is my project, Castle of Viana :) I did play around with some dithering while working on it. It was actually positional dithering applied in load time, effectively offering ~12 colours.

i remember Sonic doing some dithering tricks to exploit the crt monitor characteristics. i think it was to achieve transparent waterfalls. transparency was not really a thing on the early consoles

You got more than 500 likes. You're on the hook now! 😉Love your channel.

I really love the look of 16-color high-res VGA games. Games like Darkseed and various PC-98 ports look incredible on a CRT monitor, the scanline effect is awesome. Darkseed actually runs in EGA 640x350 resolution with a VGA palette, I think it can technically run on an EGA display but everything looks pretty messed up.

Amazing work!

Famicam 64 is a camera app for iOS. Also, don't forget the Tandy 1000 series could also do all sixteen colours at once at 320x200.

aww, thanks mom! :D

Thanks for explaining several basic dithering techniques, and yeah, 16 colour dithering is completely new level in comparison to 4.

Great video -- I can't believe what you can get with dithering on those old CGA cards. Love the beanie too :-D

I'm more of a Point or Positioned dither proponent because it's more compatible with traditional pixel art techniques and easier to rotoscope, break down into tiles, and layer composite. The other methods of dithering treat the image more as a whole where you can't really segment or optimize per screen block palette limits. CGA is a very interesting video platform, the traditional graphics, the background color vertical gradient trick, the Composite artifact colors, the 160x100 16 color mode, just a big box of options. :D

Monkey Island! Marc Ferrari did an awesome job in the original EGA release.

Hurray for you mommy! Nice work!

Congratulations on Your Mum programming skills! This ditherton looks very promissing! I'm gonna use it for my Amiga workbench backdrop :D

more dithering! :D

I vote Space Quest III having really good EGA dithering!

Great content! Love EGA graphics. If you're looking for brilliantly dithered EGA games check out Loom and games like Timequest and other (early) adventure titles released by Legend Entertainment. Their pixel art was the best imho as they squeezed everything out of what (enhanced) EGA had to offer: 640x350 and perfectly selected 16 out of 64 color palettes with dithering 👍👍

Cool video. Impressive what can be done when resources are limited

Good video , also get yourself a good channel icon art.

Have you seen CGAArt by reenigne and the video "Time-lapse CGA pixel art (8088mph)" by x86VileR?

640x350 EGA mode would have been even better. Ah, you didn't have access to real EGA monitor. Maybe later then.

you might look into the dithering used in Loom.

I just saw this...an 1981 IBM PC 4,77Mhz, CGA, 640KB memory and the team that have made it is working hard to fit it in a single 360KB disk if you can believe it. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--xJZ9I4iqg8.html 40 years later and we are still discovering what those machine were really capable of

more Plantronics stuff is needed :)

It's still #DOScember, right? I bet you could get a few more views if you added that tag to the description. I mean, this qualifies, doesn't it?

You completely missed the point of those purple CGA graphics.. Search for the video titled : "CGA Graphics - Not as bad as you thought!" you might learn a thing or two.

Funnily, some 8bit machines had somehow better graphical capabilities than the CGA, namely the amstrad CPC... from a basic CGAesque "Mode1" in 320x200x4 your could go full screen (384x256), have various "raster" palette changes on the screen (change inks for the next lines), set each 4 inks from 27 colours, perform some 25hz palette/screen flipping to soften some ditherings or add extra colours. But those machines also lacked RAM and CPU power to run proper 16bit games such as Populous (being 8bit machines). But the 320x200x4 can really displays some great Pixel arts if only the fixed palettes of the CGA could get more freedom... EGA's 640x350x16/64 mode often feels like some untapped potential awesomness and the Demoscene and Pixelart community should really give it some more love, but the strange pixel ratio and limitations and current rarity of the format won't help. A shame CGA and EGA lacked some decent character attribute graphical modes or CGA being sooo lackluster in palette/ink customisation (could only custom set the background ink ? srsly ?). Some colours from the palette were never to be seen by the average young gamer with a CGA computer. The 640x200 modes in 16 (or even 4 ) colours also have some massive untapped potential but EGA would often get bad case of very heavy scanlines in "vertical 200 pixels" modes (on EGA HD monitors especially).