Can you provide the names of some of those qbasic games?

I several years ago I was really poking around with EGA trying to get access to the palette in low res modes.

nikiniki wrote:

Joey_sw wrote:

for 350 lines mode, was EGA support between-scanline palette changes like color-0 changes in mode-4 CGA ?

No. You use PALETTE to specify a new colour. 16 colours are displayed at the same time of 64 colours. It's better than using the same tricks on CGA.

That may be true if you're talking about qbasic's built-in support. But I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to change the hi-res palette between scanlines using precise low-level timing tricks, just like CGA.

In either case I highly doubt that any palette change can be made in low-res, qbasic or otherwise (unless it's an "extended" EGA board or really just VGA). In 320x200 EGA mode, the default 16 colors are "cloned" 4 times into the 64 color palette: if you try to select color #33 for example, you'll get CGA/EGA color #1 (blue). That's what DOSBox does, and this conforms to real IBM EGA behavior.

EDIT: Interestingly, the PCE/ibmpc emulator doesn't replicate EGA behavior accurately, so games can indeed select extended colors in low-res mode - this can be used to run some games intended for "extended" EGA such as Rambo III.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Can you provide the names of some of those qbasic games?

I several years ago I was really poking around with EGA trying to get access to the palette in low res modes.

Mini RPG 2
http://www.petesqbsite.com/reviews/rpgs/minirpg2.html

Mini RPG 3
http://www.petesqbsite.com/reviews/rpgs/minirpg3.html

Play those games with VGA and EGA mode. You'll see the difference.

....that's just standard VGA behavior at work - tons of games used to do the same thing in 16 color mode for VGA but not for EGA (Rastan, Metal Mutant, Supaplex, and so on).

Maybe there's a simpler way to put it...

• Standard EGA cannot change the palette in screen 7 (320x200x16). DOSBox emulates this correctly.
• Some "extended EGA" boards can change the palette in screen 7 using the EGA color space (16 out of 64 colors). This is not supported in DOSBox.
• Standard VGA can change the palette in screen 7 using the VGA color space (16 out of 262,144 colors). DOSBox emulates this correctly.

These two different methods of low-res palette change are unrelated, not compatible with each other, and not available on standard EGA.

Joey_sw wrote:

for 350 lines mode, was EGA support between-scanline palette changes like color-0 changes in mode-4 CGA ?

While VGA includes a Color Select register to swtich between banks of colors (4 64-color palettes or 16 16-color palettes), EGA does not have this register. So you're stuck setting all 16 colors at once, and there's usually not enough time in a horizontal retrace to do all 16 at once. So the answer to your question is no.

Rekrul wrote:

I guess I wasn't clear enough... […]
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I guess I wasn't clear enough...

I know that EGA couldn't use more than 16 colors at once. However those 16 colors could be chosen from a total palette of 64 colors.

The default 16 colors didn't include a proper flesh color, but that's what most DOS games used. For example;

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ski-or-die/screenshots
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/police-ques … gel/screenshots
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/california- … mes/screenshots

Notice how all the characters have reddish brown skin.

EGA was a standard, meaning that every EGA card should have been capable of displaying the same colors (with slight variations due to different manufacturers). Using the default 16 colors wouldn't have helped them port the game to any other system, as no other system used the EGA palette by default. So the colors would have to be remapped anyway.

So I don't understand why so many games just used the default colors, rather than choosing 16 custom colors that would better fit their game.

It might have to do with portability across platforms. Not every computer back then had the same graphical capabilities so if you wanted to write a game for PC, Amiga, Atari ST, etc, it would have been better to use a palette of colors that they all could use. As soon as you starting fiddling with non-default palettes you run into problems on those other computers that may not have the same colors available.

Ironman Offroad for MS-DOS supported the 64-color Enhanced / Extended EGA in 320x200 , but it required a monitor that could handle it.
I had one such monitor back in the day, with my 286 and Tseng ET3000 graphics card.
Here's a really good blog-post about it. And the game looks incredible btw.
https://swarmik.tumblr.com/post/179660020524/ … chable-monitors

I wonder if the ATi VGA Wonder would do a similar trick with an EGA monitor connected to the digital port.

Here's a question about something possibly related to extended EGA.
In the early 90s one of my friends had a 286-10 with EGA. I don't know what kind of EGA card he had, but it was either extended EGA or a VGA Wonder, connected to a Tatung EGA display. When he played the Legend Entertainment game "Frederick Pohl's Gateway", I remember very clearly that you could see an animation of the heechee spacecraft shooting off into space (but not the scene leaving the station). I was never able to see the spacecraft animations in any of my own EGA builds. Anyone know which special "super" or "extended" EGA mode would have made it possible to see that animation (it's normally only viewable in VGA mode)?

I often wondered why the hybrid VGA/EGA/CGA adapters didn’t just use flicker techniques so you could display a psuido “VGA” on cga/ega.

I had a CGA screen attached to such a card once and while better, it still could flake out.