Comment by no-name-here
6 days ago
Comparison: https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8
Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.
6 days ago
Comparison: https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8
Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.
Well, I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version. The rest of the game seems a bit of a wash; some of the backgrounds are a little more striking in EGA, some look much more refined in VGA. And the sprites look much better and more colourful in VGA. I don't think it suffered as much moving to 256 colours as Loom did (what that original thread was about).
And we should also remember that looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT; neither of them really looked the way that video suggests, so it might be a bit misleading.
> I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version.
I'd personally say the EGA portraits look far more uncanny, resembling early CGI, while the VGA version looks like a hand-drawn book illustration. https://youtu.be/86O3PxdLrg8?t=181 Still, opinions can differ.
> looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT
That may be true, yes.
There are great CRT-shaders these day that would remedy this.
Great video. I think both ega and vga look good, depending on the scene (I prefer ega backgrounds but vga close up).
The music however, floppy is best and the cd version is the worst. I played with the internal speaker myself. The cd music sounds off to me, but cannot pinpoint why exactly.
Cga seems to be 1-to-1 conversion of ega. It only looks bad because of the strong cyan and magenta. But thats a hardware limitation not an artistic choice.
> Cga seems to be 1-to-1 conversion of ega
I'm not sure. The dithering is obviously different, not only harsher but in different places in many scenes. Also, the splash screen doesn't have scrolling clouds in the CGA version. And there are other subtle changes.
Call me weird but there's a certain charm to the CGA version, though it's obviously the worst of them. My favorite is the EGA version.
This comparison is a bit misleading, as you are not watching the game full screen, but at 1/4 screen size with video compression artifacts. This helps the EGA dithering tremendously.
In reality, dithering can only help you so much, when you have gigantic pixels and 16 colors... It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.
Old CRTs helped blur the image. For that matter, C64 games on TV screens (which is how most people watched them, even though there existed dedicated Commodore monitors) blurred the image so much, the games barely resembled what you can see now with an emulator and a modern screen. Graphics were designed with this in mind.
> It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.
In many cases, especially in the early days, artists didn't know what to do with so many colors, and produced inferior versions. Loom is a good example. The conclusion is that it's less about hardware capabilities and more about artistry, and technical limitations often force artists to be ingenious.
Well yeah, the good old CRT monitors (the worse, the better in this case) also helped with the EGA dithering, while viewing the EGA graphics fullscreen on an 1080p LCD display, you'll have ~30 pixels for each original EGA pixel.
The visuals are clearly better but honestly what worked best for me was the Floppy Audio.
Even the internal speakers actually made the intro theme great.
The CD was nicer to listen to overall but I do think the floppy audio just has something about it that I prefer.