[jonny_eh]

The EGA version is the original version of the game, and is gorgeous. Most people don't realize that by playing the more colorful VGA version, they're experiencing an inferior redrawn remake.

More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738

[no-name-here]

Comparison: https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8

Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.

[wk_end]

Well, I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version. The rest of the game seems a bit of a wash; some of the backgrounds are a little more striking in EGA, some look much more refined in VGA. And the sprites look much better and more colourful in VGA. I don't think it suffered as much moving to 256 colours as Loom did (what that original thread was about).

And we should also remember that looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT; neither of them really looked the way that video suggests, so it might be a bit misleading.

[no-name-here]

> I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version.

I'd personally say the EGA portraits look far more uncanny, resembling early CGI, while the VGA version looks like a hand-drawn book illustration. https://youtu.be/86O3PxdLrg8?t=181 Still, opinions can differ.

> looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT

That may be true, yes.

[Tommix11]

There are great CRT-shaders these day that would remedy this.

[canpan]

Great video. I think both ega and vga look good, depending on the scene (I prefer ega backgrounds but vga close up).

The music however, floppy is best and the cd version is the worst. I played with the internal speaker myself. The cd music sounds off to me, but cannot pinpoint why exactly.

Cga seems to be 1-to-1 conversion of ega. It only looks bad because of the strong cyan and magenta. But thats a hardware limitation not an artistic choice.

[the_af]

> Cga seems to be 1-to-1 conversion of ega

I'm not sure. The dithering is obviously different, not only harsher but in different places in many scenes. Also, the splash screen doesn't have scrolling clouds in the CGA version. And there are other subtle changes.

Call me weird but there's a certain charm to the CGA version, though it's obviously the worst of them. My favorite is the EGA version.

[haspok]

This comparison is a bit misleading, as you are not watching the game full screen, but at 1/4 screen size with video compression artifacts. This helps the EGA dithering tremendously.

In reality, dithering can only help you so much, when you have gigantic pixels and 16 colors... It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.

[the_af]

Old CRTs helped blur the image. For that matter, C64 games on TV screens (which is how most people watched them, even though there existed dedicated Commodore monitors) blurred the image so much, the games barely resembled what you can see now with an emulator and a modern screen. Graphics were designed with this in mind.

> It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.

In many cases, especially in the early days, artists didn't know what to do with so many colors, and produced inferior versions. Loom is a good example. The conclusion is that it's less about hardware capabilities and more about artistry, and technical limitations often force artists to be ingenious.

[rob74]

Well yeah, the good old CRT monitors (the worse, the better in this case) also helped with the EGA dithering, while viewing the EGA graphics fullscreen on an 1080p LCD display, you'll have ~30 pixels for each original EGA pixel.

[rustyhancock]

The visuals are clearly better but honestly what worked best for me was the Floppy Audio.

Even the internal speakers actually made the intro theme great.

The CD was nicer to listen to overall but I do think the floppy audio just has something about it that I prefer.

[whywhywhywhy]

Amiga versions seem the best of all the Lucasarts adventures, music is just much richer and although Monkey Island and Loom are done in the reduced color palette so look more stylistic I think they use a few more colors or better shades of colors than the harsh looking EGA set.

[the_af]

Wow, they really messed up Loom in the EGA to VGA conversion. The EGA graphics were a work of art, very moody.

It's interesting how the VGA version manages to be way less nuanced, plus it destroys that beautiful "blue" look of the night scenes.

[Subdivide8452]

This sounds so snobby. VGA Loom was absolutely stunning. I can understand that you may appreciate EGA more, but "messed up" sounds hyperbolic imo.

[the_af]

I won't go over the details, but if you look at the website mentioned in the other thread from 2021, you'll see I'm not being hyperbolic.

EGA Loom is a work of art. VGA Loom misread the style and completely obliterated it, in its eagerness to deploy that early VGA "pillow shadow" style so typical of games of that era. (I love the term "pillow shadow", so apt now that I've learned it!).

Every nightly blue gone, light sources broken, every shadow gone, ominous deep-black tree shadows converted into gray/brownish things, etc.

To be clear, I think this is less a limitation of VGA and more a case of the conversion done lazily and/or by an inferior artist.

[the_af]

Addendum: Brian Moriarty, Loom's author, also thinks the 256 color version is inferior. See here (~46:30): https://gdcvault.com/play/1021862/Classic-Game-Postmortem

[whywhywhywhy]

It's bad, but what they did to Loom was way way worse, they obliterated the style, chiaroscuro and nuance.

[the_af]

I indeed meant Loom!

[the_af]

I must be in the minority, but I really prefer the EGA versions of many of those games. Probably nostalgia.

Even less defensible, I've come to appreciate the (awful to me at the time) CGA 4-color palette. You know, the games that were either cyan-magenta-white-black or red-yellow-green-black? I hated it at the time, but now I look back on that time with my rose-tinted (or should I say, magenta-tinted?) glasses firmly on.

I even bought the fake retroremake Eternal Castle, which is a loving homage to that era.

[rob74]

I for one prefer the Amiga version, because that's what I played back in the day. The Amiga supported 32 colors (without tricks like EHB and HAM) in 320x200/240 mode, so only twice as much as EGA, but they could be picked freely from a palette of 4096 colors, so IMHO it looked much better than the EGA version with its fixed 16 colors. But if you look at screenshots (https://scummbar.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island/versio...) it's obvious that they really put in a lot of work, with custom assets which fully used the capabilities of the various platforms. Of course, the higher the limitations, the more artistry was needed to make it look reasonably good, but I don't think that should be held against the "higher-color" versions...

[yason]

I was going to say this. I never liked the 256-color VGA game (and now comparing, it does look bland) but Amiga struck the best, IMHO, balance between good hand-crafted pixel art but with realistic enough colors to give sufficient depth and athmosphere in the scene.

[vidarh]

For a game like that, while I agree with the Amiga version looks good, frankly the Amiga port still feels like a good example of why there were lots of complaints about "lazy" ports for the Amiga that didn't take proper advantage of what it could do.

For a relatively static display like that EHB would've not been a problem, and the amount of gradual changes would've made it easy to exploit in the palette. Using the copper to modify the palette a few places would've also allowed for more, and switching to 640x200 below the graphics to make the text smoother would've been outright trivial. Even HAM might've been reasonably feasible.

[ralferoo]

Watching this, neither version seem as good as I remember the Amiga version looking, which was still dithered but looked better than the EGA version. Obviously hard to say without a direct video comparison.