Thank you for the information, so such modes were only for a small number of EGA card owners. My buddy's first EGA card wasn't likely 256k as parts were quite expensive back then for a 'special' card, we did go halfsies on a Gravis Ultrasound since PC squeeker sucked.
I did come across the high res EGA stuff and it was a little spotty in usage which is most likely from a lack of card memory in most cases. I was interested since high contrast color dither looks much better at 640 than 320. This form of high res pixel art wasn't used much outside of Japan and most of the better examples were NSFW.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/timequest/screenshotshttp://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/spellcasting-101-sorcerers-get-all-the-girls/screenshotsI see also in that thread some mentioning of the Amstrad CPC which I too found similar in color palette contrast to EGA which is also like Master System pixel art as well imo.
Well smoother scrolling and faster sprite blitting do take priority in action games so I can only concur with the choice to get the fastest performance out of the hardware that most PC users had.
Yeah I thought Gods was quite impressive too, very nice 16 color work. I think it was a progression practice to support both standards until VGA took hold, I think the same thing was done in Rastan as well with a switch to a more balanced but still 16 color palette for VGA cards.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/rastan/screenshotsThanks for the compliment, I think I'm getting better but I still struggle with shading depth. I'll see what I can do about a full mockup but best not to hold your breath since this EGA experimenting was mostly an offshoot of a larger research into first person perspective games during the 8-bit to 16-bit era which was mostly 2D in setup.
