Post

Neil Cicierega
@neilcic.com

recently discovered you can alter the default EGA palette color values in DOSBox-Staging... playing with some gamer sacrilege here

45 reposts435 likes

HDT
@hdt.bsky.social

Finally!! Lucasfilm Games is re-releasing The Secret of Monkey Island in DOSBox Staging and they're fixing the annoying red tint mistakenly left on Cobb's face in previous versions.

Eambot
@eambot.bsky.social

Thats a super interesting find but yeah those skin tones are burned into my memory so seeing them changed to what is more reasonable is so strange. Muting the underground red I think makes it not worth it. Trained to love the garish colours.

Sik
@sikthehedgehog.bsky.social

I still don't understand why IBM locked custom palettes in EGA behind hi-res modes (as opposed to using the CGA/EGA switch and telling developers to account for this when making a new palette). There's A LOT of games that could have looked much better if they had done that.

"Shadow Hog" is already a spooky name
@shadowhog.bsky.social

It was because IBM expected many people would use EGA cards on their old CGA monitors, but those expected Ground on one of the pins the new colors used, and could be damaged. They didn't support the 350px mode, though, so the new colors could be assumed safe on any monitors that did.

Sik
@sikthehedgehog.bsky.social

Yeah but they had to set a switch selecting CGA or EGA monitor *anyway* because otherwise the EGA BIOS can't tell whether text mode should be lo-res or hi-res, and to prevent intensity from being applied to all three pins. My question was why not use that instead of tying it to the video mode.

donut
@donutgayass.bsky.social

it makes me very hapoy to see your name is still trapezoid on old accounts (even if you probably just can't change your name on those platforms lol)