Duke Nukem 2 and Fire & Ice are two 16-color DOS games that I can think of off the top of my head... I think they were 16-color VGA though, not EGA. (And Duke Nukem 2 is a textbook example of how to make a 16-color palette that's almost as useless as EGA )
(IIRC, Fire & Ice used 32 colors, as it was an Amiga port)
The sad thing about DN2 was that VGA actually doesn't have a 320x200x16 mode (only the EGA compatibility does), so basically, they totally ignored the added potential of 256 colors.
EGA isn't as bad as that, though. Remember that at that point, the idea of games on PCs was still not taken very seriously, so realism in games really wasn't even worth considering. The ultra-saturated palette of EGA actually lends itself quite well to comic/cartoon-style art, and you can see a lot of that kind of art in the best games of the time. Amstrad CPC mode 0 games, with the somewhat larger 16-of-27 color palette, can demonstrate the effectiveness of this kind of palette.
Can anybody point me in the direction of some EGA games which use a custom 16 colour palette rather than the standard EGA palette?
The only game I can ever recall seeing with one is the first Warlords game, and even then I'm not certain that it isn't just a 16 colour VGA palette.
Is that game high resolution (640x350, 640x400)? Custom EGA palette for 320x200x16 == not supported in hardware at all. 640x350 == high res EGA, 16 colors from a 64-color (4*4*4) colorcube. 640x400 == high res VGA.
I think that 16-of-64 colors was only available on EGA cards with 256k memory, which were a minority. (ditto for 640x350).
However, Wikipedia contradicts me on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_AdapterIt's possible it was only a limitation of QBasic that prevented me from customizing the palette in 320x200 mode,
anyway I've never seen anything that customized the palette in 320x200 mode.
Also any ideas why custom EGA palettes are so rare? Not well supported in hardware? Harder to code for? Fewer available features? Or is it just that VGA came along before anyone learned to fully exploit EGA?
640x350 is harder to code for. Most highres EGA games are not action games, cause of the lack of special tricks we can do to get better scrolling/faster screen updates.
With standard 320x200x16, similar tricks to VGA ModeX were available for smooth scrolling, fast blitting, etc.
If I can summon up sufficient motivation I want to try exploring the quality difference a custom EGA palette can provide over standard, so any examples you can point me toward could come in useful.
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=3225.msg40939#msg40939is really the only EGA64 resource I know of. We have no EGA64 pics posted here, nor any in PixelJoint, AFAIK, and Google doesn't help much.
I did find out something interesting though -- PGC/PGA adaptors were Amiga-like, in that they allowed 256 onscreen colors from a 4096-color master palette. Kind of like a mix of OCS and AGA.
http://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/pgc.html