Category: CGA

CGA can output 16 digital RGBI colors, and there's a well-known standard palette which translates them to (s)RGB values - but that palette isn't a very good approximation of the colors you actually get on IBM's original CGA monitor.  Why is that, and can we do better?

Believe it or not, it's possible to transport ancient CRTs across continents, even with today's shipping services pulling out all the stops on incompetence.  Here's how an IBM Color Display was packed, shipped, and lived to tell the tale.

Using a TV set as a CGA display device has its issues, especially horizontal centering and color in 80-column text mode.  These utilities should help.  There's a bootable version too, so you can throw it at your favorite booter games.

A few techniques derived by trial-and-error, and some obvious pitfalls to avoid.  May prove useful to you other amateur CRT photographers out there.

A fully-equipped IBM 5160 braves the rigors of international shipping and gets here in one piece (just barely).  As will be pictorially demonstrated, 30+ years after leaving the factory, this steel warrior is still one tough SOB.

After giving Keen 4's CGA version a 16-color composite overhaul, I figured I'd have a go at the next episode.  More custom code and graphics for the artifact-color aficionado.

This game is a pretty impressive piece of CGA programming, but there's one thing it doesn't do: exploit NTSC quirks to get 16 colors on a TV/composite monitor, instead of the familiar 4.  Here's how you can change that with a patch and a custom set of converted graphics.

Another installment on CGA display tricks - covering the final version of 8088 MPH, determining the model of your CGA card in wetware, the extended 1024-color palettes supported by both models, and some artistic considerations.

Can you take the original IBM PC color graphics board, and force it to display 32 times as many colors as it's officially capable of?  Believe it, comrade!  Here's the in-depth write-up on how we did that in the 8088 MPH demo, complete with illustrations.

An exercise in taking "modern" graphics software and dragging it kicking and screaming back to the glorious days of clean, simple, 2 bits per pixel raster graphics.  Plus a time-lapse video of the whole process.