<story><title>The Polygons of Another World: IBM PC</title><url>http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_PC_DOS/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nwallin</author><text>The EGA color situation isn&amp;#x27;t as bad as the author described.&lt;p&gt;CGA had a 16 color palette. In text mode, every character could be rendered with the background and foreground of any of the 16 colors. In graphics mode, you had to select one of two horrible combinations of 3 colors, and could pick any color to be the fourth color. It was awful for games, being mostly oriented around having brightly colored text on a black background.&lt;p&gt;TGA&amp;#x27;s graphics mode had 4 bit color, which gave it the complete 16 colors of CGA. It was less terrible, but still pretty garish as you can see from the screenshots in the article. It inherited the overly bright colors designed for differentiating text on a black background.&lt;p&gt;I believe that both CGA and TGA used the a digital connection to the monitor, and they were compatible with each other. There were on&amp;#x2F;off RGB lines and a half bright line that made stuff half as bright, with additional logic for another independent grey instead of duplicating another black.&lt;p&gt;EGA had 4 bit indexed color into a 6 bit palette. I honestly think its 6 bit palette is passable for the darker, moodier environment of Another World, unlike the CGA palette. But relatively few games used it. Most games (including, apparently, Another World) used the CGA palette, because then you would still be compatible with CGA monitors. IMHO the developers would have done their users a favor by making a third EGA only palette.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t recall how EGA&amp;#x27;s cable worked, whether it was analog like VGA or used a six bit digital scheme not unlike CGA.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Polygons of Another World: IBM PC</title><url>http://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_PC_DOS/index.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jmccorm</author><text>As someone who played it on the PC back in the day, the visuals were nothing short of amazing. Why? The whole experience was both &lt;i&gt;different&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;beyond&lt;/i&gt; what other titles delivered. What made it so memorable for me? Consistently smooth animation even with large sections of the screen being updated from frame to frame. Its polygon graphics which were solid-fill and not wireframe, which was a big leap. They&amp;#x27;re right. Ordinarily, the early PC was a real turd when handling full-screen animation.&lt;p&gt;The sound wasn&amp;#x27;t ahead of its day, but it was still quite good, even with the PC speaker rendering music, alien language, and effects in a better-than-average rendition. Nobody had high expectations for PC-speaker output.&lt;p&gt;Only a few years after its release, it was sad to look back and not find that any new action games using similar methods. Did I miss any good knock-offs over the next few years of its PC release, or was it just as much ahead of the curve for years to follow?</text></comment>