What's the console or computer with graphics you find more difficult to look at?

[cwpab]

I will explain what I mean.

With some retro systems, such as the Amstrad CPC (of course!) or, let's say, the Neo Geo, we have some "visual familiarity" with the graphics because they have "lots" of  colors (for its time!) and we've played them many times. And even with mysterious new systems, like the Atari 800, we can look at screenshots and still "feel good" with the combination of colors, resolution, sprite handling...

But with other systems, usually the ones we haven't played that much or with the strangest color palettes, it can sometimes be hard to even look at the game screenshots, and this is something many experience when discovering Atari 2600 or ZX Spectrum for the first time.

However, I was pretty used to Spectrum graphics back in the day, as well as the CPC most blocky games, and even had some share of CGA, so for me the Atari 2600 never felt too... uncomfortable. Yes, pixes are huge, and yes, you don't know what's going on, but it's all so colorful and "stylish". It's like an alien planet.

But somehing unexpected happens to me ever since in the late 90s, I discovered a very famous and successful machine via emulation. A platform with fast scrolling and major, influencial titles. A system I should have been playing since then, but I didn't... because simply looking at the graphics made me feel bad.

I'm talking about the NES, my friends. No, it's not an anti-Nintendo thing. I had a Game Boy in 1997, and I was expecing to find some of that. I also played SNES a few times at some friend houses and it was pretty cool. I kind of like the 2D era of Nintendo (I believe they started to become annoying with Mario 64, even if I love the Nintendo 64 graphics, multiplayer approach and controler/console shapes).

No, what I feel when I look at NES screenshots is something different. It's not logical, I don't even have time to process whether the console is from Nintendo or Sega. I think it's a combination of super bland colors and limited sprite size. I mean, the C64 has pretty emo colors with lots of purples of browns, but it still has its charm and development flexibility. But this? I instantly feel bad by looking at the unnaturally tiny, brown main sprite over some ugly red and green backrdounds, albeit all scrolling fantastically well.

So that's my story. There's something about NES graphics that puts me off, and maybe it shouldn't. But maybe some of you have the same feeling with the C64, the Atari 2600 or the ZX Spectrum. What platform does this to you the most?

[Mark_wllms]

Certainly the CGA colour palette is quite hard to take. I do agree with you about the NES and I also find the washed out look of some C64 games very dull. I'd much rather have my Amstrad monitor.

[Anthony Flack]

Even at the time I found a lot of NES games looked a bit drab and flickery. But I've since discovered it can also look very good. 

[ZorrO]

In my opinion, the platform on which most titles are so ugly that it's a shame to look at is Atari VCS/2600. Everything in it is so angular that it makes your eyes bleed. And to think that 30 million of them were sold, that's more than all computers and other Atari consoles combined.

The second platform from which your eyes turn away in disgust is PC CGA with that hideous palette of White+Cyan+Purple. Something awful. Every game presented in such a palette looks hideous. Fortunately, all you have to do is disconnect blue cable to change these colors to much easier to bear Yellow+Green+Red.

The next machine is Apple II, a similar palette to CGA, with Orange+Blue added, but it didn't improve much, and on top of that those hideous-looking letters in color mode, different looks in every second columns.
The same palette as CGA has one of popular graphic modes in TRS/Tandy CoCo, and its clone Dragon, only in wider pixels, something awful. Even ugliest Spectrum ports to Amstrad are beautiful compared to something like this.

Let's add Nintendo Virtual Boy. If you don't know it, you have nothing to regret.

As a bonus, I will add two platforms that repel me because of the sounds they generate. You can easily look away from the image, but you can't turn ears away from sound so easily. And when I hear them, I want to murder with any tool that machine which generate them.
And these are Atari XL/XE and its Pokey, whose farting gives me creeps, and I have goosebumps as if in reaction to an attack. The same is with the 5200 console.

Another machine whose sounds I can't stand because of commonly overused high tones is NES and its clones. These images have often made me as Amstradian jealous, but I usually want to turn volume down to zero. I don't know why in Japanese games, even on better 8/16bit platforms, I also often hear such an excess of high-pitched squeaky tones that makes me want to cover my ears.
Fortunately, in the 32bit era, Japanese games have gone into a completely different climate of music.

I also can't stand looking at text on a white background, just like Spectrum and all Windows have by default, fortunately on ZX you just have to press Invers and your eyes immediately feel relief, on Windows you have to spend few minutes tuning options, but you can also set a black background in text editor and default colors in browser. I simply have hypersensitive eyes to light and a white background bothers me.

I hate in A500 startup image. The white background hurts my eyes. The rainbow logo on newer versions looks much better. But...
The last thing I can't stand is the default gray background on Amiga with kickstart 2.0 or higher. And all those heavily promoted gray icons and 8-color palette for MUI. If you had an A1200 with HDD, you can guess what I'm talking about. And you had to figure out what palette to set so that ubiquitous icons (they were on every Amiga CD) and background images in this palette would look legible, but also so that they wouldn't depress me with their drabness. I'll never understand what made someone choose the saddest set of icons possible on a machine with such a rich palette.

If I find some motivation, I'll paste here sample images of what I'm talking about.

[Prodatron]

Technically, CGA and Spectrum have the same color palette (bits 3-0 are used as IRGB in CGA and IGRB in Spectrum), with CGA managing to have one more gray ("light black") and convert the dark yellow on the monitor side into something which they call "brown".
So if you don't like CGA, you can't like Spectrum as well  

[ZorrO]

@Prodatron - No. You mean 16 CGA colors possible at a resolution like MODE 0. And I meant most commonly used in CGA games - 4 color mode at a resolution like MODE 1, with fixed colors black+white+cyan+violet. You certainly know what I mean. Type "cga games" into Google and you will immediately find such screenshots.

And I also remembered two computers with very poor graphics, ZX81 and Vic20. I know they are pioneers and a different price range than 8bit with 64K RAM, but it doesn't change my feelings that I don't want to look at such poor graphics.

[Egg Master]

I have problem with the visual of most MSX, C64 and ZX games.
Probably the limitation about the sprites bitdepth or color clash.

[eto]

My personal most hated display is CGA when used with the cyan/magenta palette. 

I don't understand why that was always chosen over the second palette, which imho is less of an offense for the eye. 

Second is not a specific display per se but more a general aspect: colour clash and low res monochrome display. That's why I don't like many speccy games (and their ports), although there are quite a few games which look pretty decent. 

Third is again an aspect not a display as such: small game areas. One of the reasons I dislike so many Amstrad games is that not only was the resolution already set to 256x192, they also surrounded the actual game area by large static content to make the actual game area a fraction of the screen. 

[cwpab]

ZorrO's contributions have been fun, but I do wonder if perhaps with him, it would be easier to ask: "What are the selected 2-3 systems whose graphics don't make you puke?". 

I checked the Atari 5200 audio and... yes. It's too high-pitched and "attacks" your ears!

I stlil wonder how can I feel more comfortable looking at this:



Than looking at this, though:



I dunno... With the games on the 1st image, my brain tells me that they are not overcharged, that I can "control" them, and that developers were actually doing magic to do those games.

With the ones on the 2nd image, I feel like something is off about the sprite size, like they were kind of "abusing" one or two graphical features from the system, such as the relatively high-res with scrolling, repetitive backgrounds rolling... And yes, I find the colors a problem, which is not something I find on the 1st image somehow because I seem to instintctively classify it as "basic / simple / children's toy" stuff and kind of relaxing.

Perhaps there's also a factor of having bought the Game Boy and played it as my only machine in the house I lived in regularly for almost a year... just before the emulation era came and I discovered the NES. Maybe my brain was telling me: "This games need to be more elegant by being black and white instead of ugly brown and ugly green, and also need to have more apparently flexible sprites like the ones in 6 Golden Coins".

[Anthony Flack]

I love the look of the 2600. 128 colours all the way back in the 1970s, and every game runs at 50/60hz (because it has to). As primitive as the hardware is, I couldn't believe how good it managed to look on games like Keystone Kapers. The Atari machines always had such lovely colour. Terrible sound though, it's true. 

I also really like a lot of the monochrome sprite work you see on the ZX Spectrum. A cool enough style that even some modern games use it. And I am a little in awe of how versatile the C64's 16 colour palette is. Not quite as great as the PICO-8, but close.


That CGA 4 colour palette was pretty difficult to make look attractive in any way. 

[Egg Master]

@Anthony Flack I never really understood how we went from systems with hundreds of colors and sometimes multiple action buttons in the 70s, to systems where you can count them on your fingers, sometimes close to monochrome, with a single shot in the 80s.

[robcfg]

While I recognize that the palette of the MC6847 chipset (Dragon, Tandy CoCo, MC10/Alice...) is dreadful to begin with, that makes me want to see if I can do anything beautiful with it and it turns out, you can! You just need some patience and love.

You can see what I mean here: https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/index.php?msg=108985

Also, on PAL machines you can take advantage of the PAL colour blending and show up to 24 colours. 

On NTSC machines you can also play with colour artifacting and get 4 less ugly colours.

[Prodatron]

@Anthony Flack I never really understood how we went from systems with hundreds of colors and sometimes multiple action buttons in the 70s, to systems where you can count them on your fingers, sometimes close to monochrome, with a single shot in the 80s.

At least Jay Miner never built video hardware with less than 100 colours 

[robcfg]

Indeed! And you can use the hardware sprites to generate more colours on top of the ones in the current graphic mode

[Shaun M. Neary]

I owned a NES in 1992 for a couple of years and there were a lot of games I enjoyed on it at the time. Bad Dudes, Ninja Gaiden, SMB 3 and Batman are the first few that come to mind instantly.

But playing them again in more recent years, it does have a nasty bang of C64 washed out browns and blues of it, so I do believe it's a fair criticism in my opinion. I guess being an Amstrad guy from the get go, I was used to a lot more vibrant colours where as C64 guys would probably see the NES as a natural progression and probably find the Sega Master System way too bright.

I'm actually OK with the Atari 2600/5200/7800 palettes funnily enough. The Intellivision was far more offensive looking than any of the Atari systems in my opinion.

[robcfg]

Perhaps you should take a look at modern productions that take the machines to their true limits, like Malasombra:

[cwpab]

Yeah I much prefer how modern homebrew games look for the NES... However, I suspect these games wouldn't have been possible back in the day (correct me if I'm wrong).

About the CGA... Weren't "ugly" 4 colors games supposed to be displayed on a black and white monitor, making them much more elegant and generally a whole different thing altogether?

[andycadley]

About the CGA... Weren't "ugly" 4 colors games supposed to be displayed on a black and white monitor, making them much more elegant and generally a whole different thing altogether?

The palettes were chosen so NTSC artifacting can be used to generate a wider range of colours at the expense of lower resolution. It only works via composite on an NTSC display though, which quickly became irrelevant.

[dodogildo]

I don't think CGA gfx were ugly when used with monochrome monitor. I used to own an Amstrad PC 1512 back in the day with a BW screen and had plenty of joy playing CGA Sierra adventures.  

[cwpab]

Yeah, that's a great first-hand example from back in the day... Thanks.

It's just a piece of the puzzle of a question I would like to have an answer for: did computers playing CGA games in the 80s usually have a black and white monitor?

[eto]

I used to own an Amstrad PC 1512 back in the day with a BW screen and had plenty of joy playing CGA Sierra adventures. 

Do you mean the Hercules monochrome screen? CGA would not work well with a monochrome display as it's TTL level and could not create a greyscale image. The later PC2x86 models had a VGA greyscale monitor but the PC1512 came with either Hercules (mono) or CGA (colour) display.

Weren't "ugly" 4 colors games supposed to be displayed on a black and white monitor, making them much more elegant and generally a whole different thing altogether?

CGA was always meant to be in colour (Colour Graphics Array). As mentioned above it doesn't even support greyscales and I have never seen a greyscale monitor being used with a CGA card.

[dodogildo]

Do you mean the Hercules monochrome screen? CGA would not work well with a monochrome display as it's TTL level and could not create a greyscale image. The later PC2x86 models had a VGA greyscale monitor but the PC1512 came with either Hercules (mono) or CGA (colour) display.

Nope, our PC1512 had greyscale CGA monitor.
Here:



https://ctrl-alt-rees.com/2018-09-10-amstrad-pc1512-building-an-external-power-supply.html

[eto]

but the PC1512 came with either Hercules (mono) or CGA (colour) display.

have to check that again... seems PC1512 might have had a mono CGA screen.

[eto]

Nope, our PC1512 had greyscale CGA monitor.

indeed... I could find more details now. Amstrad added a bit of logic to make greyscales work. That might of course have been possible for other monitors too. 

After a bit more research it seems there were indeed a few monochrome CGA monitors from the early years of the CGA standard, usually supporting MDA and CGA. I couldn't find if they properly supported grayscales or were meant for the 620x200 resolution only. The Amstrad monitor was mentioned as a "special" case somewhere. 

[ZorrO]

PC1512 did not support Hercules mode. This was one of the most frequently mentioned shortcomings of this computer. It was only PC1640 that got Hercules mode and EGA support.

The 4-color mode in CGA was used mostly only in entertainment programs, and office programs used almost exclusively 2-color 80-column mode. This mode was also supported by much cheaper MDA card. CGA was not needed in offices, just like color monitors. In the first half of the 80s, if someone bought such an expensive color card, it was usually together with a color monitor, otherwise it made no sense, although it also worked on B&W. Does anyone want a diagram of how to connect C128 80-column to Composite or Luminance, so that it displays 16 shades?

To tell truth, at that time I had no contact with computers at all, but from what I have read, and also watched on The 8bit Guy channel, some CGA cards also had a Composite output, but in 80s TVs did not have such an input, so you needed a special monitor, and few people saw it with their own eyes.