First post, by VileR
- Rank
- l33t
Something fun that I came across, maybe this will be interesting to some (I remember there was some talk about hacking different palettes for CGA games)
I've found this public domain utility here:
http://cd.textfiles.com/microhaus/mhblackbox2 … EN/CHGCOLOR.ZIP (documentation and source included)
This is an EGA palette changer that lets you remap each of the 16 onscreen colors to a value from the full 6-bit EGA palette.
But in contrast to other similar programs, your tweaks survive through mode changes, and they appear to affect 4-color CGA modes as well.
This works in DOSBox 0.74 with machine type ega and "up". I don't know if it really works that way on a real EGA card - perhaps someone would be interested in testing it... maybe this behavior is just an artifact of emulation. But anyway it works, and you get to play around with those ugly old palettes!
Easy to use, check the doc/source. You just remap colors 0-3 for CGA modes, and 0-15 for EGA. (Note that the target color values are EGA palette values, not CGA, so for example bright red is 60, not 12)
Downsides:
1. In low-res modes, you're stuck with the basic 16-color CGA palette (this is standard EGA behavior). If you remap to a color outside this palette, it seemes to get mapped to something "close enough"
2. For CGA modes - all other palette changes will be ignored, your custom palette will be the only one you'll get
3. For EGA modes - changing color 15 (high-intensity white) doesn't seem to work, at least in DOSBox
Sample DOSBox screenshots:
ALLEY CAT - LEFT: original CGA palette; RIGHT: almost as ugly, but with 4 brand new colors
LODE RUNNER - LEFT: original CGA palette; RIGHT: grey, red, bright green, bright blue
MONUMENTS OF MARS - LEFT: original CGA palette; RIGHT: "inverted greyscale" palette
SPACE COMMANDERS - LEFT: original CGA palette; RIGHT: looking swanky in custom colors
CRYSTAL CAVES - LEFT: original EGA palette; RIGHT: with some (not very) clever 16-color tweaking
DUKE NUKEM - LEFT: original EGA palette; RIGHT: ...now in ugly CGA colors!