Ah yes, palette effects allow for some really impressive things. The drawback is that they use a lot of CPU, usually some kind of busy-looping, so the greatest advantage of text mode - rendering very fast with minimal CPU and I/O overhead - goes away.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 203 - ZZT is online! Nice! I loved that game when I was young. In a way it paled in comparison to more graphical games of the same day and age, but the programmability and interactivity was great. What it did really well is make the player feel like a game developer …

Thanks for the insights. according to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA-compatible_text_mode we already use an entire byte for the characters attributes, which means an "upgrade" is unlikely;theoretically now that text modes are more or less "cheated" and actually a real framebuffer is used, …

Just out of curiosity I wonder if any hardware ever existed that natively could set a text mode with more than 16 colors. In the 90's there were tons of different, incompatible SVGA cards so maybe one of the vendors would have had this crazy idea. Or some of the more high end VT terminals maybe? I'm …