First post, by VileR
- Rank
- l33t
I've started working on a patch, basically because this is how I remember playing games on my first XT clone.
This setup was very common around these parts anyway - RGB monitors were sort of rare back then (and I live in a PAL country, meaning we couldn't hook up CGA to our TV sets). So a lot of people had to make do with cheap monochrome TTL monitors, green or sometimes grey... amber could be seen too (and was built-in with a lot of old "luggables").
Not sure why some other nostalgic bastard hasn't done this yet, but here is what i'm coming up with so far;
- separate "cga_mono" machine declaration
- the 16 CGA colors are mapped into 16 mono shades (hard coded)
- different brightness/contrast combinations
- alt+F11 cycles between green, amber, and grey + brightness/contrast settings
- color-burst composite mode not supported by cga_mono
The hard-coded settings for shades and brightness/contrast are a toughie. I'm going by memory here, as well as a picture and a video that i managed to find (check out 2:31-2:47 in the video).
Seems that there's no corellation between the RGBi color components and the resulting monochrome shade - there's just an increasing brightness trend based on color index. Also (e.g. for green), we can't use only the green component of the RGB vga palette, since it doesn't yield a wide enough range of brightness... so these palettes are somewhat fanciful, but they do the job. I think most nostalgic bastards could agree they are passable, but of course, any comments would be welcome.
Demonstrating the different brightness/contrast settings, in green mode (using Trixter's CGA_COMP program):
And a few game shots (w/tv2x scaler):
Green -
Amber -
Grey -
Green again -