Oh yeah, hand-drawn pixel art, refined to the last detail, can be so beautiful!

I think my favourite is the original Lemmings series - pretty much the last game of the 2D era, and true masterpiece!
See eg. this:

other levels are also full of perfection - https://www.neolemmix.com/?page=levels&game=33&rank=all

Soon after that there came the 3D stuff - which was also great in many cases! - but something got irrevocably ruined: no more care about single pixels...

VGA certainly was something.

I like to think that a big reason why "less is more" in these instances (and in many other cases of art, and programming as well) is that the time of the author is still fixed, so a "lesser" medium guides the author to focus more of that time on the smaller details of the art.

Aspect ratio notice: the DOS 320x200 VGA pixelart content was not intended to be viewed in 16:10 aspect ratio. So for example the above Dune 2 image was not viewed as 1:1 square pixels like this:

but rather in 5:6 aspect pixels, like this:

(320x200 framebuffer in 5:6 aspect pixels results in a 4:3 final output image)

Another wonder of VGA was that it consisted of 18-bit colors, i.e. a 6:6:6 format for Red, Green and Blue. So there was a tiny bit of color quantization still at play, and smooth gradients wouldn't be quite as smooth without dithering. By later VESA DOS and Windows 95 era, 8:8:8 of course became the norm.

Aui wrote on 2024-11-18, 13:20:

Even later, early cartoons were usually drawn in intense and simple colors. The attached image shows how (in my opinion) the use of enhanced coloration and color blending and gradients completely ruins the impression. Likewise a photorealistic Duck wont be any good.

Hi there! First off I would like to say that I'm really looking forward for this topic!
There's quite a bit that can be learnt from this kind of pixelart!

I also like the Duck reference here. I've been reading of Donald Duck comic books since when I was little - my dad, too! 😁

Speaking of artwork, I have fond memories of the colourful Duck comics with airbrush (?) style. The gradients looked so pretty!

The line art was still traditional, though, I would say. And the character Bubble Billy was often involved, I vaguely remember.

Source: https://inducks.org/story.php?c=I+TL+1795-A#scans

Edit: I don’t mean to spam this topic/thread, no worries. I merely meant to say hi! 😃

For me I always loved the 256-color VGA 320x200 or 240 graphics. I grew up with Monochrome and CGA, then EGA then VGA and finally SVGA. After that everything was so ....meh. Nowadays the "4K" and "HD Remake" graphics are actually so....boring. I still love all the classic graphics from CGA onwards, though my favorites are the EGA and VGA and early SVGA games. This is the reason I still treasure all the DOS games I grew up with and still play them to this day.

I think the first VGA game I ever played was King's Quest V. And the VGA graphics blew me away. That Crispin's home and the big tree south of the Crispin's home really made a deep impression on me.

Some nice VGA work in this EGA/VGA comparison of Loom: https://www.superrune.com/tutorials/loom_ega.php.

furan wrote on 2024-11-19, 04:33:

Some nice VGA work in this EGA/VGA comparison of Loom: https://www.superrune.com/tutorials/loom_ega.php.

Thanks! What I noticed is, hower, that the guy does complain a bit about added gradients in VGA/MCGA release. That's not understandable to me.
What else could the VGA artists have done to improve the graphics without touching the existing line art of the original artist? 🤷‍♂️
Adding more colours, light and shadows effects was all that could be done in PS/2 Graphics mode/MCGA without redrawing everything. 😟

If the EGA graphics had to be faithfully improved without adding more colour, then normal VGA in 640x480 16c would have been a cool alternative.
Or full EGA in 640x350 16c, at least. VGA systems could always display this (vs. EGA users with CGA monitors).

Many VGA cards from 1988 onwards also supported 640x400 256c and 800x600 16c with as little as 256KB of RAM.
Sometimes I really really wonder why classic EGA titles hadn't been remastered for 800x600 16c (original VBE mode). They would have been stunning! 😃

Anyway, these are just my two cents. I'm quiet now, I didn't mean to further reply to this thread originally.
It's just that the small complaints on that site do bother me a little bit. Edited.

PS: VGA in 16c allowed for custom palettes, too, if memory serves.
So it would have been possible to have a custom 16 colour palette for each room ("room" is an old school term for a location/site/graphics page in an adventure game).
On top of that, palette switching on the fly might have been possible, as well.
The game Ironman Racing had used this 16/64 colour trick, for example.

I think Loom is one of the rare examples, where the EGA version is actually better. The scenes are more abstract and evoke a more rough and sinister atmosphere. Some scenes, for example the forrest are stongly reminiscent of early 20th century papercut art. Have a look here (Lotte Reiniger)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TQdJOm2EOw0&pp= … WxhZGRpbg%3D%3D

or here (better turn down the music)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzzf2wq_0XI&pp= … XBpbmcgYmVhdXR5

256colors out of 262000 are really good indeed! But two things have to be considered:

1. If the artist uses software to create/draw the image it can be really good (depending on the artist of course) e.g. LAZUR /Demoscene
2. If it is a scanned or fotographed image it can be converted to a really good 256color image with some tricks. (you will mostly get a slighty darker picture)
a) takeout the noise (acdsee3 despectle)
b) apply sharpness (50-75%)
c) reduce to 256 colors.

I normaly prefer 1 because there were excellent artists you drawed pictures for every standard from MDA/CGA/EGA to VGA and of course outstanding images within the restrictions of the palettes of the machines (like C64,Atari, Amiga etc.)

Doc

dr.zeissler wrote on 2024-11-19, 09:25:

LAZUR /Demoscene

Yes, one of my favourite pixel artists...

Aui wrote on 2024-11-19, 09:01:

I think Loom is one of the rare examples, where the EGA version is actually better.

Yeah, he calls out where the EGA looks better - a few nice VGA cases, though.

EGA Hires 64colors was the best.

It always surprised me how many 256 color vga games into the mid 90’s continued using the “stock default pallet” with a ton of harsh dithering .

Do a color count and 30-50 colors on screen was usually doing pretty well

The Jill of the Jungle 256 color is an aesthetic and very nostalgic but a few minutes spent on each level tweaking the color palette would have smoothed things out.
.

This reminds me that someone was able to coax a plain CGA 16 color screen to display 88 colors using flicker. (Can’t find that thread now)

I sort of wonder why stock EGA functionality didn’t do this automatically in low res. Using frames/fields to flicker monochrome screens for an extra grayscale was known back in the 70’d

Cool topic and nice screenshots!

256 colours 640x480 (and speech) was all i needed in the 90s, being an avid adventure game fan.

Art style is much more important than technology. This is true still today.

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-11-20, 17:09:

It always surprised me how many 256 color vga games into the mid 90’s continued using the “stock default pallet” with a ton of harsh dithering .

Do a color count and 30-50 colors on screen was usually doing pretty well

This may have something to do with the fact that many VGA games actually originated on non-PC platforms - mostly Amiga.

Amiga - since the very beginning - offered 32 or 64 colors, good enough for pixel art, even if it required a bit of dithering somewhere.
Intricate dithering patterns can look so good, that there was no need to redraw them when porting to the 256-color VGA.

The PC has never been the primary plaform for pixel art.
From what I recall, in the early 90s, an average PC went very quickly from 1-bpp Hercules to 24-bpp SVGA.
The former wasn't interesting for artists and gamers at all, the latter easily allowed for ray-tracing and 3D games.

In effect, on the PC, the time slot for pixel art was very narrow.

See eg. the picture by Lazur that I posted in my previous post - it's 640 x 256 pixels, definitely not a PC standard!

This one - like right out of a Fairy Tale Book...