[F3nd0]

> (2 bits per color? how is that possible)

Assuming high colour depth, yes, but wouldn’t it have been specified as part of the question that ‘this was for four-color CGA mode’? I think 2 bits per colour for 4 colours total seem pretty sensible even in 2026. :-)

[Sharlin]

Their point, I believe, is that someone (just about any younger person in 2026) who has never seen indexed color modes, or colors taking less than one byte per pixel to encode, could reasonably be confused by the notion of "two bits per pixel".

[lstodd]

2bpp is indexed obviously, question in 1994 would be is it bitplane or packed

[HarHarVeryFunny]

CGA was very limited, and didn't even support full per-color indexing - instead you got to choose one of two palettes (i.e. one of two different sets of 4 predetermined colors).

CGA was followed by EGA which supported 16 individually indexed colors (with a palette of 64 colors). With dithering you could display "faded polaroid" quality photos.

[bananaboy]

CGA is even more nuanced than just two palettes. You can choose from three palettes, and each can be set to low intensity or high intensity, so you can effectively choose from six. On top of that, the background colour for each palette (colour 0 which defaults to black) can be set to any colour from the full CGA 16 colour palette! I wrote a sample program for a friend recently to demonstrate this https://github.com/samizzo/cgasample