The Polygons of Another World: IBM PC
fabiensanglard.net
fabiensanglard.net
CGA had a 16 color palette. In text mode, every character could be rendered with the background and foreground of any of the 16 colors. In graphics mode, you had to select one of two horrible combinations of 3 colors, and could pick any color to be the fourth color. It was awful for games, being mostly oriented around having brightly colored text on a black background.
TGA's graphics mode had 4 bit color, which gave it the complete 16 colors of CGA. It was less terrible, but still pretty garish as you can see from the screenshots in the article. It inherited the overly bright colors designed for differentiating text on a black background.
I believe that both CGA and TGA used the a digital connection to the monitor, and they were compatible with each other. There were on/off RGB lines and a half bright line that made stuff half as bright, with additional logic for another independent grey instead of duplicating another black.
EGA had 4 bit indexed color into a 6 bit palette. I honestly think its 6 bit palette is passable for the darker, moodier environment of Another World, unlike the CGA palette. But relatively few games used it. Most games (including, apparently, Another World) used the CGA palette, because then you would still be compatible with CGA monitors. IMHO the developers would have done their users a favor by making a third EGA only palette.
I don't recall how EGA's cable worked, whether it was analog like VGA or used a six bit digital scheme not unlike CGA.
It's always so crazy how creative and bespoke all the early PC tech was, because the hardware limitations were crippling, in every single dimension. And that in turn makes it so fascinating to read these articles, because the limits of the hardware was so well-known, that you could do things like counting actual cycles and basing your timing off of that or similar.
The whole PC market was a bloody confusing, incoherent mess for a while. A quagmire for a not fully clued up buyer.
I had an old PC (I bought it used from some guy advertising in the local paper) and when that fancy new Windows 95 came out, I wanted to upgrade the old 486 processor.
There wasn't any Microcenter at the time and I didn't know about any of the catalog sales companies like TigerDirect yet. What I did know was that summer there was a "Computer Show and Sale!!" at a local event space so I took what meager cash I had on hand to see what I could buy.
Knowing nothing about CPU sockets or brands, I was happy to find a shiny Cyrix 6x86 CPU that was clearly like a Pentium, but better (because Pentium was 586 so 686 is more 86's obviously). 133Mhz was double what my 486 ran at! Plus this thing was so much cheaper than the other stuff they had for sale. Got that and a compatible motherboard and headed home to work on my new amazing PC (holy crap Doom and Dark Forces were gonna look so good!)
So, you can imagine my disappointment when I got home and found that I could no longer slot my video card or internal modem into the new motherboard. I was so disappointed. It would be another month or so before I managed to save up more money to buy a compatible video card from some other guy selling parts. I forget what I did about the modem.
I'm also surprised I didn't need new RAM as well but the old stuff worked for the time being. Before it was all said and done, I'd at least learned what to research (and that it even needed to be researched) before upgrading anything again.
It's gotten so much easier to research online, part out a desktop PC, and drive 20 minutes to Microcenter where I can be back at home assembling everything that afternoon. I don't have to do it very often anymore as they remain useful for a lot longer (although it helps that I have more than a couple hundred bucks to spend now). But it's still useful to know how it all fits together when some friend or family member wants a basic workstation or something to edit family photos/videos on.
I can't justify upgrading my current i7 3770k system yet because the damn thing still just works as well as I could ask after 7 years, but sometimes I secretly wish it would crap out in some minor way so I could have an excuse to build a new one.
At least with VGA everything converged, and you got the VESA standards, and by then it was just a matter of adding more and more VRAM to increase resolution and colour space.
But it's insane to think about how far we've come. Those old video cards had kilobytes of VRAM, VGA started going into megabytes, and my current graphics card has gigabytes.
If done correctly and with composite output, it looked passable. 99% of the time though people just used the default pallet with magenta and cyan on TTL display.
Any colour? Wow! :-D :-D :-D
It's quite telling that with the recent popularity of pixel art games, none of them really restrict themselves in colour space like the games of old had to do. Having a limited amount of pixels to convey something is a fun challenge, having a limited amount of colours, or a limited palette, is just not fun. It's miserable, and having to do dithered graphics is fucking miserable.
The sound wasn't ahead of its day, but it was still quite good, even with the PC speaker rendering music, alien language, and effects in a better-than-average rendition. Nobody had high expectations for PC-speaker output.
Only a few years after its release, it was sad to look back and not find that any new action games using similar methods. Did I miss any good knock-offs over the next few years of its PC release, or was it just as much ahead of the curve for years to follow?
Another World was different in that it was carefully made to not blit too many polygon scanlines over the background. In that way, it had more in common with the Sierra/Lucasarts adventure games of the day.
In terms of gameplay, Flashback or Prince of Persia are probably the most similar.
But nothing really matches the art style other than 2016's Hyperlight Drifter, which is excellent.
Formula 1 Grand Prix, 1988: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLVkS7TMl9I
And Grand Prix, 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4fC9CAjJPE
Gunship, 1986: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCZUc0d8ol8
Mechwarrior, 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuxySqjb5X8
Although to be fair, I played these games on an XT with monochrome Hercules CGA emulation at 10 fps, so I don't know what they were supposed to run like on a computer modern enough to have EGA or VGA.
Weirdly, Return of the Obra Dinn captures that 3D CGA emulation motif in a way I never expected to see.
Such nostalgia. The UX was horrid but we didn't know any better back then.
The drawback of the SNES version is there are a few parts where it suffers from slowdowns. I wonder could they somehow be addressed in an emulator.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tiq0OL8rzso&t=2m
More stuff along those lines: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/
Nope. The SNES also had tracks on it that no other version had. The "Danger" music was what really set the SNES version apart from the others, it really set the atmosphere of danger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzWbMj5s78&list=PL8x7wHq_i5... - this song.
Indeed, had IBM been successful at this and the "computer as appliance" would already been settled during the 90's, as the OEM PC market got to be the exception to how everyone else was doing home computers.
It looks someone painfully down-converted a series of scenes from early in the game. The original sound seems completely thrown out. The system required trickery (usually hand-crafted) to gain more than 4 colors at once in high resolution. It's been a while since I looked at it, but I seem to recall the use of independently colored player-missile graphics (sprites) to bring more fidelity to the main character?
For reference: https://youtu.be/PCa_0nXvfDg?t=6