[hyperman1]

Part of it was the video mode. EGA 640x350x16 had 16 simultanous colors, from a palette of 64 possibilities. And non square pixels as a bonus.

They might have made better choices from the palette, but the limitations were severe.

If you really want to stab your eyes out, CGA had a mode with white, bright pink, light blue and black. I remember playing Keen on it. I've never seen that mode used for anything nice.

[hagbard_c]

The CGA colour palette was horrid on RGB monitors but on Composite it could look quite good for its time. Not Amiga-level good but good enough. Of course composite monitors were not really a thing in the IBM PC world so it was to little avail. Here's an example of a screen in the mentioned horrible hot-pink palette:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

...and here's the same screen viewed on a composite monitor:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

These images come from this page:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/cga-composite-graphic...

If this isn't enough it seems to be possible to coax ~1000 colours out of these cards as well:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...

[hyperman1]

Thanks. I learned something. Also the fact that it only worked on NTSC, so people from the EU like me simply never saw the nicer variant

[xattt]

> bright pink, light blue

This is magenta/cyan mode is essentially the proto-cyberpunk aesthetic.