Comment by HarHarVeryFunny
15 hours ago
CGA was very limited, and didn't even support full per-color indexing - instead you got to choose one of two palettes (i.e. one of two different sets of 4 predetermined colors).
CGA was followed by EGA which supported 16 individually indexed colors (with a palette of 64 colors). With dithering you could display "faded polaroid" quality photos.
CGA is even more nuanced than just two palettes. You can choose from three palettes, and each can be set to low intensity or high intensity, so you can effectively choose from six. On top of that, the background colour for each palette (colour 0 which defaults to black) can be set to any colour from the full CGA 16 colour palette! I wrote a sample program for a friend recently to demonstrate this https://github.com/samizzo/cgasample