Another one with Prince of Persia, the changes are more subtle on this one:


Original 256 VGA:

https://ibb.co/n4etmw
(Curiously, this one only uses 16 individual colors too, but selected from VGA's wider palette)


Original 16 EGA:

https://ibb.co/i3ctKG

My custom Dither Heavy EGA:

https://ibb.co/jvcFYb

Comparison gif:

https://ibb.co/cHiiKG

Yes, I'm aware of the trade-offs of my aproach. I am trading in clarity at the high-frequency scale for less garish colors on the macro level. The inevitable consequence is fuzzyness and a lot of noise. Personally, the noise bothers me less than the high-contrast colors of EGA. I find it almost difficult to keep my eyes focused at those super-saturated screens.
The reason I picked Lucas Arts and Sierra games to start with, is because those companies relied heavily on scanning their artwork once they entered the VGA era, and weren't necessarily as focused on pixel by pixel retouching as artists for Arcades and consoles of the same time period. My idea was to try and bring that sort of workflow to the EGA era and see how it would fare.
On the Monkey Island one, specifically, I was extra liberal with the fuzzyness of that one, as I thought it added a bit to the nightly and humid atmosfere of a carebean island. Later Monkey Island games also adopted this slightly more eerie and misterious aesthetic to their night-time locales. I changed the overall color of the scene too, as MI1 had the EGA version built first, and the VGA was created on top of it, retaining some of the more garish colour choices. I went for a palette more akin to that of the later games, and with a bit of an inspiration by Van Gogh, to witch I think the heavy noise is quite fitting by the way...

Here comes a third experiment, LOOM:

Original 256 VGA:

https://ibb.co/hV1w4G

Original 16 EGA:

https://ibb.co/kHSErw

My custom Dither Heavy EGA:

https://ibb.co/nxzSBw

Comparison gif:

https://ibb.co/b7JyJb

Hello guys. I'm new here. In fact, I joined just because I wanted to share this experiment I made with people on the web who might find it interesting.

My idea was to try to approximate natural colourful images with the limited color palette of the EGA spec with a HEAVY use of dithering. I understand old titles already made great use of dithering, but the limited tools of the time limited the lengths they could take the concept.
Here, I was curious if by making use of modern conveniences, like photoshop's tools to automatically dither full color images specific palettes I could reach better results than those that the game-artists from back in the day had to laboriously create by hand.
So to test that hypothesis, i took screenshots from games that had both a 16 color EGA version and a 256 VGA version, and created my custom "Heavy Dither EGA version" based on the VGA one to test if it looked any better than the original's. Here is the first result: (I've made 4 more, but I'll post them later)

King's Quest (forgot the number)

Original VGA art:

https://ibb.co/hEVOjG

Original EGA art:

https://ibb.co/iOBkyb

My Custom Dither Heavy EGA version:

https://ibb.co/cRvZrw

And a comparison of all three:

https://ibb.co/n6AOjG

I think the results are particularly good. Admittedly, they are much more noisy, but that is the obvious unavoidable result of using heavy dither. What I'm going for here is a "squint worthy" image, not cleanliness. I wonder how they would look on an actual old school EGA monitor. The CRT helps dither a lot by blurring the resulting image somewhat, but at the same time, I wonder if whatever artifacts the EGA spec introduced at sub-pixel level could break the illusion.

I admit this might not be considered "pure" pixel art. I didn't hand place each pixel one by one to generate the final result from scratch. It was an algorithm that laid the ground work for me here, but there was still plenty careful retouching and adaptation done by me here. The original 256 image was converted to EGA 16 dozes of time, with different dithering configurations and different sets of filters (color filters, blurs, sharpens, etc) pre-conversion. With those in hand, I selectively chose which created the best result for every individual area of the image. And finally, I'd hand-touch multiple pixels and lines here and there until I was fully satisfied.

thoughts?