The 256 Color Revolution | Retro Dream 

Precisely.

Precisely. These were artists, though not recognised as such. Very important

Oh yes for me too Ultima VI was one of the first.

Most early Amiga games were 16 colours (and maybe use the copper to give more, but I'll get to that) but what makes it look better is the palette of 4096 colours. Most systems were locked to a colour set but not the Amiga, it was capable of changing colour palette whenever it wanted which gives the illusion of having more colours on screen. On top of that the sprites can have a completely different palette in addition to the screen depth. But even the earliest Amigas (A1000) were in fact capable of more with HAM mode going to the whole 4096 colours (on static screens) but even under normal screen modes up to 64 colours. Copper could be used in a way that the Amiga was capable of changing colour palette on a per line bases (take a look at many Amiga games and the background has colour gradients that have colours that far exceed the screen mode into the hundreds) There are many games that defy the colour count on the Amiga but a recent one that is outstanding is a new one called Hamulet, it uses the HAM mode as a display. But when most games use HAM mode it's for static screens, but this game goes way beyond that with the full 4096 colour HAM mode and to quote the developer "Sprites are being recolored by the copper: 12 colors per scanline to be precise. This means a theoretical limit of 2880 colors could be displayed just for the sprites." and thats on up to 104 sprites on screen. Lets not forget that's on a system with 512K from 1985. Most systems from this era were easy to figure out what you could get out of them, but the Amiga just keeps showing that it was far more capable even today that was ever thought to be.

most of those games were reduced to 16 colours, being the Atari ST ports they were, cross dev and assets portability was often an economical necessity until the early 90s.

Thanks for sharing and for your interest!

Did you update monitor only or video card also ?

@@andreylapshov9418 both, monitor and video card. Hercules video card was not compatible with VGA monitors, only with Hercules monitors. So I had to upgraded the videocard to a Trident VGA with 512K of VRAM and a Samsung VGA monitor (there were no SVGA monitors yet).

Agree!

Exactly.

In 1991, 386 + vga cost huge money.

That's right, but there were some really great EGA games, like Loom

Thanks man. Like Orson Wells said: the enemy of art is the absence of constraints. Meaning that with all those technical constraints, developers from the past had to become more creative than modern ones to achieve masterpieces as they did in the 80s.

Thanks for sharing

And thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Thanks for the extensive and very interesting feedback, Ben! I could have done a better job demonstrating how poorly was VGA used prior to 1991 although it existed for several years already. And also to compare pretty EGA dithering with poor VGA. Didn't choose the right screens, will do best next time :) You're absolutely right in your assessment. I didn't know there still were CGA games in 1991, very interesting. Good point with Budokan, indeed it's from 1989, and the VGA is very good in this one, as opposed to others from the same period. Need to check if this was really the case in 1989 or if they just made another release later with better VGA layout. See you soon for another episode!

@@RetroDream Budokan was VGA right out of the box in 1989, unlike Loom and many of those other LucasArts games before 1991. Budokan was still backwards compatible with EGA and CGA but VGA wins in this case. Star Trek V has some very impressive VGA graphics but limited animation and the play scenes looking rather primitive (compared this to Star Trek 25th Anniversary from 1992 during the height of VGA). As for CGA in 1991, Crosscountry Canada was originally ported for the Apple II in 1986 and when it appeared on the PC in '91 they decided not to update the graphics and use CGA so it looks very outdated in '91. They probably figured many Canadian schools in 1991 likely had outdated PC machines still equipped only with CGA.

Whatever the reason, the VGA version was not as good as it could, especially for Loom. For Indy it's less visible (there was a couple of very ugly screens, but the rest is better).

Thanks for sharing that interesting info

@@RetroDream The high color card that came out in the early 80s was for CAD. I don't think there was ever any games created for it. The problem with early VGA gaming is that ISA is slow and doesn't have any gaming abilities built in like say the SNES. 256 colors requires 8bits per pixel. At 320x200 64000 pixels. At 8 bits per pixel that's 1,920,000 bytes per second at 30fps and double that double that for 60fps. That is well beyond was ISA is capable of. So you have to use trickery and limitations to reduce the data rate. Vesa Local Bus helped a lot, but it didn't come out until the 90s.

That was the turning point for sure.

Yes, I hung on to my Amiga until 1992, but then caved in and bought a 486 PC to play sim games

I miss the Amiga it was so far ahead of its time.

@Martincic2010 Unsure where you are from, but I can say for sure the UK and in most of Europe that's not true. The Amiga was still easily in the market right up to 1994 when Commodore when bankrupt. While I definitely saw an uptake in the PC market from 1992 it still hadn't taken the gaming/home market until Commodore went bankrupt.

@@daishi5571 In third world Brazil in 1991 no one used Amiga anymore, there is no way it could have been different in Europe

Thanks for sharing!

Interesting stuff Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing!

We were kids in a beautiful world :) Thanks for sharing!

Any time!

Thank you so much, sir! Let's hope this figure will increase ;)

They were all over Europe, especially in France

Thanks a lot for the super interesting precisions. Indeed it's a radical change in technology, a revolution rather than an evolution

The less colors it have, the more I'm interested ;)

Yes, there were a few scenes from Loom where I thought the 16 colour art had something that the 256 didn't (the stained glass window scene being a prime example).

Thanks for noticing. Actually it's my mistake, for some reason I took them from Ultima Underworld (where they belong) and put them with U7.

not the right samples yea

Thanks for sharing your experience! We got our 286 in late 1989 and in 1991 it was indeed already old

286 & Vga, you were lucky $$$ you can't imagine. i knew several people in europe, we had at max : pc xt & EGA@@RetroDream

That's correct

Sure

Yes games didn't exploit 640x480 at that time

Many systems were still CPU bound so 640 x 480 was not something that was practical. A good example of this is Syndicate (1993) while it did use VGA at 640x480 it also reduced its colour count to 16 so the system wasn't overwhelmed. Amiga version used 32 colours but at 320x200 and that was on a system from 1985.

Thank you, I appreciate! Glad you enjoyed

SVGA refers to a resolution of 800×600 as opposed to 640x480 of the VGA

SVGA is a mess. It is not 800x600 it goes far beyond that in a convoluted way. What you have to understand is that VGA is in no way a standard (except to IBM who created it) everyone around that time was basically emulating VGA. Some companies used the term SVGA (Super VGA) but it was meaningless as the term had zero standard. However VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) used that term to codify a "standard" for companies to use as the blueprint to create compatible video cards. As long as a video card had the main features of SVGA according to VESA it was good however this was BS as many cards bent the rules creating new modes and promoting them when they were proprietary. It was a mess that most people today have no idea about. TLDR SVGA is basically VGA but now a "Standard" so should work on any "SVGA" card. far TLDR Cross your fingers it should work but depending on card it may work from anywhere between pathetic to good.

And I'd also add that the gap from CGA 4 to EGA 16 was even greater.

@@RetroDream Yeah, I think you're right again.

the 256 colors PC atomized suddenly the Amiga with : Coutndown, Wing commander & Crime wave. Access software itself did the gap for PC.

Many thanks for this great information. Very, very interesting and I wasn't aware of the subtlety about vector graphics. But my point was indeed to explain that ega conversions to vga were bad, as opposed to native vga creations. And you're right to link it with data space, the turn was also that of the 3.5 disk.

@@RetroDream Prior to using compression they used a ton of tricks that all had a impact on graphical quality, So in a sense, you are right, the step from say 1988 EGA to 1991 VGA is enormous, but that is because there is a step missing between the two. This is also why 256 color adventure game from say 1991 and 1992 look so good, but games like Doom from 1993 had a lower color fidelity, because of the real time nature, they could not use palet optimization. There is hardly any EGA game that use pallet optimization, the only game i know of is Monkey Island. (that yes, its actually EGA, well the original is)

Many thanks again for these details! And "thanks" to RU-vid for the delay in my answer: they really should improve their reply notification system :(

I would replace the word "space" to a rather more complicated "storage/memory/bandwidth/CPU usage. EGA used Planar as a graphics mode when VGA is chunky/byte. HD floppies allowed for more storage, Faster CPU's allowed to push more colours per pixel, more memory..... Basically while VGA from 1887 may have been 256 colour capable the rest of the system wasn't ready (especially with end users)

Mainly IBM, PS/1 and PS/2

Yea this old video needs to be updated. I didn't have the right technique and setup two years ago.

and Ultima Underworld

Thank you so much for the excellent precisions. Indeed we take a shortcut calling VGA the early 90s games which were in fact MCGA. It's not totally accurate but people became used to it.

Yea, at this time it still ruled ;)

16 million to choose from but we couldn't display that many at once. The normal maximum was 256 colours, and AGA had lower maximum screen resolutions than VGA (without the interlaced modes) and in any case, the A1200 didn't come out until 1992 and none of this classic era of early 1990s games were made to take advantage of AGA, and barely any meaningful attempts to use AGA came until after Commodore folded, so none from the big developers. Even the few bones we got tossed, such as Colonization in 1995, were for OCS/ECS, because they believed that the A500 was still the biggest market.

@@danyoutube7491Its the same now, console pesasnt holding pc gaming masterrace back.

Sure

I wouldn't say many. Lemmings is the only one I can think of. All the adventures and RPGs he mentioned certainly started on PC, and I think all the flight sims probably did as well. The Amiga was a better value home computer up to this point, the A500 being able to run many of the games mentioned in the video (albeit it with fewer colours) for a fraction of the price, but clearly the VGA versions of Monkey Island etc. were more beautiful than the Amiga's OCS/ECS versions. Unfortunately the developers of such classics were already skedaddling out of the Amiga market by the time the A1200 launched, so we never got to see AGA versions of the top adventures. By the time the CD32 got established in modest numbers, which could have helped tempt some big developers back to the Amiga due to CD being far less susceptible to piracy, Commodore had gone bust and there was no hope of the biggest names in the industry coming back.

I vividly remember seeing a PC with VGA in a store. As an Amiga fan, I knew the Amiga was dead that day.

@@8BitNaptime the interleaved graphics the Amiga had was okay for home computer use, but it wasn't taken as something serious for the work place, as even big corporations didn't want go give their employees eye strain problems intentionally. VGA was a smoother, easier on the eyes kind of graphic standard. And the multi-sync monitors started appearing and then the world marched onward and upward in higher resolution graphics.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, guys.

I'm using a PS/2 mouse at work

@@8BitNaptime Which was completely bogus :P The VGA-Standard alone didn't make the PC much better. Of course it finally mitigated for the PC's biggest flaw up to the time, but there where so many things still lacking for making it a good gaming machine. Like sound, sprites, a decent operating system and a nameworthy library of games. And regarding the slideshows you could see in the shops: these wheren't really better than Amiga HAM images.And even later in games like Monkey Island, I actually preferred the Amiga version, because it was much less pixelated than the square-pixel 31kHz VGA standard. Also the mouse did not lag behind, which made games like Lemmings completely unplayable on the PC. The first games a PC could be actually better where vector based simulators, yes, because of the superior CPU performance. Bad the breakthrough was when ray casting came, as we all know.

Thanks for sharing, interesting stuff.

5 years later yes for sure

Sure

I had an Amiga back those days it was great.

There were a lot of good reasons to get an Amiga instead of a PC, but if you had the money and only wanted the best graphics and not in any way cut down versions of adventure games and flight sims (or any genre which was best on PC, so not things like Sensible Soccer) from 1991 onward, then VGA PCs were the way to go. I say that as an Amiga owner and fan until the turn of the millenium.

If everyone had been smart, everyone would got an Amiga as of 1985.

Absolutely, that's why this moment was a real turning point, as told here

@@RetroDream 1992 Amiga A1200 and A4000 had AGA which equivalent graphics colour mode.

@@daishi5571 According to Dataquest November 1989, VGA crossed more than 50 percent market share in 1989 i.e. 56%. Low-End PC Graphics Market Share by Standard Type Estimated Worldwide History and Forecast Total low-end PC graphic chipset shipment history and forecast 1987 = 9.2. million, VGA 16.4% market share. 1988 = 11.1 million, VGA 34.2%. 1989 = 13.7 million, VGA 54.6%. 1990 = 14.3 million, VGA 66.4%. 1991 = 15.8 million, VGA 76.6%. 1992 = 16.4 million, VGA 84.2%. 1993 = 18.3 million, VGA 92.4%. The estimate for the Amiga AGA install base is about 600,000 units. PC VGA crushed the Amiga AGA.

Absolument, monsieur :)

Absolument, monsieur :)

Absolutely

According to Dataquest 1989, VGA crossed more than 50 percent market share in 1989 i.e. 56%. Low-End PC Graphics Market Share by Standard Type Estimated Worldwide History and Forecast VGA 1987 = 16.4% 1988 = 34.2% 1989 = 54.6% 1990 = 66.4% est 1991 = 76.6% est 1992 = 84.2% est 1993 = 92.4% est Major SVGA clones are faster than the original IBM VGA.

That's great info thank you. Yet the fact that VGA equiped PCs didn't necessarily mean that games instantly made good use of it. For that we needed to wait until 91

Absolutely true. But strangely, Civilization didn't look that good in EGA. It's like all efforts were systematically concentrated on one particular version, EGA or VGA depending on the game, and the other version was always not so good. There's few games that we can say were excellent in both EGA and VGA.