alt Hacker NewsThis 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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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.