Wizball "loader"

[MacDeath]

A lot of C64 games relied too heavily on those grays and often looked quite bland and drab in comparison.

They quite had no choice.

1/6 of C64 actual palette consist of greys...

B&W + 3 greys... 5 on 16...

Also add like 4 "brownish shades"...


   

[TMR]

Also add like 4 "brownish shades"...

Four...? i mean, i know the reds aren't pure red but calling them "brownish" is pushing it quite a bit. =-)

[TotO]

Four...? i mean, i know the reds aren't pure red but calling them "brownish" is pushing it quite a bit. =-)

The problems is that C64 use 16 colours YPbPr palette and most C64 users don't see the good colours using composite video.

Here what "everyone see"...


And Here what few USA NTSC TV with good quality YPbPr decoder can see...


Wahoo, colours !!!

Emulators use the wrong first palette... (No red here)

[ivarf]

 

And Here what few USA NTSC TV with good quality YPbPr decoder can see...


Wahoo, colours !!!

WOW!!! The C64 has nice a nice palette of  saturated  COLOURS. Maybe the C64 gfx doesn't look so bad after all. But I hope they can enjoy the garish look of their palette 

 

well, in all honesty, even "back in the day" we used  Atari ST's and Neochrome for doing Amstrad game graphics

I wonder what they used for Sorcery which was released at the end of 1984 or early 1985. Probably that Amsoft artprogram...

Even the EGA dos PC ("IBM compatible" at the time) was too often cruelly badly ported graphically.


recently on a french forum, I put some stuff to show this.
there i posted a few pictures of night hunter (french game)...

you can see the Atari ST version, "original"... not bad, perhaps too much greys for nothing, not enough contrast IMO but was a great game.

The original "EGA" (320x200x16... but limited to CGA palette)... WTF ? only one grey ? and blues everywhere ?

And a remastered version (by me) also using the CGA palette (in EGA so the whole 16 colours available) from the Atari ST picture (mock up then, ut I tried to do it the most accurate I could)

The result is quite different and some stuff are even better looking (the score zone with red spilled on...)
just a matter of opinion of course.

But to be honest, EGA was also plagued because it had to also look good in CGA... was perhaps too costly to put two properly done set of graphic datas...

but quite strange anyway, it reminded me the way some graphics were ported to CPC : limited palette compaired to C64 concerning Greys and browns (only one grey on CPC, only greys and browns on C64...) or Atari ST (more fine pixels and more palette to choose from...

while CPC often had to cheat to "emulate greys and browns" and wasn't helped because of the low resolution, the EGA PC had 2 greys and a "proper" resolution...
but still they used (badly) only one grey (bad palette swap IMO) and tried to replace it by blues and cyan, the way it was done on rick dangerous on CPC.
WTF ?

I had a look at the original PC EGA, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC versions on youtube. Interestingly the mode 1 CPC version looks in my opinion better than the PC EGA version. A bit surprising

[Bryce]

I converted my old C64 to NTSC and had it connected to an NTSC TV for years, I'd forgotten how brown the colours really are until I got a newer C64 and didn't convert it. Maybe it's time to convert again

Bryce.

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

It's a shame that the CPC Plus don't add those modes with its today "4096 colours" useless palette.
- 640x200 4 colours
- 320x200 16 colours
- 160x200 256 colours

To be honest this would have required 32KB of screen RAM, and to update the larger screen we would have needed a faster CPU, and to keep that CPU and the video going we would have needed faster RAM... all within the constraints of actually cost-reducing the hardware. Might as well have asked for the sprite implementation to have its own larger dedicated memory bus to its own section of sprite RAM (or cartridge ROM) to get past the major issue with CPC sprites - animating them. But it was cheaper to integrate 4 kilo-nybbles of memory/registers. On top of all that you would have had to ensure backward compatibility was still good (probably via a software switch from compatibility mode to plus-mode including clock changes).

I liked the Plus machines, but they were two years late for what they were. Amstrad should have just canned the lot and created a next generation cheap home computer based around a different architecture.

Can't change history though...

[TotO]

2 years late? 5 years late!
It's more a CRTC than a CPU limitation. They can manage that with the ASIC w/o problem.

[arnoldemu]

2 years late? 5 years late!
It's more a CRTC than a CPU limitation. They can manage that with the ASIC w/o problem.

yes it was too late, they could have made this update much more quickly.