On 6/24/2020 11:09 AM, John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic wrote:

Hey folks,

I've always felt that the mid-90s when games were still fairly low resolution (320x200, 320x240, sometimes 640x400) but started having access to 16-bit and 24-bit color palettes, the graphics tended to look very bad/blurry. This contrasts with a few years earlier where you had the same resolution but less colors so it was easier to 'see' what was going on in a game.

For me there was a ratio -- at 1024x768 - 65,536 colors is fine, but 320x200 -- anything more than like 256 colors or so becomes too much and makes things hard to distinguish. The 'too many colors at low resolution' kinda turned me off gaming for a little while in the mid-1990s.

Does anyone have similar thoughts/experiences?

Hi I don't have a strong opinion here and not much of a video game connoisseur, but it has been evident to me that there are charms in how the artists worked with the various levels of video sophistication available to them at each juncture. So there may be examples within that low res/high color that are in fact, very noteworthy. Hopefully, if this is case, someone can chime in and give you a few to look at. You very well may be right, though, and there may not have been any good use of the colors until the resolution went up a notch to full VGA 640x480... This is the point where I started paying attention to a few of the popular games back then.