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no-name-heretoday at 5:55 AM4 repliesview on HN

Comparison: https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8

Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.


Replies

wk_endtoday at 6:03 AM

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.

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haspoktoday at 7:23 AM

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.

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rustyhancocktoday at 9:45 AM

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.

canpantoday at 7:04 AM

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.

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