CGA

CGA means Color Graphics Adapter. It was hot stuff back when the XT was a computer you might have. It supported 4 colors with multiple possible pallets.
It was superceded by EGA.

The only graphic technology which often makes you wish the user had just gone with textmode instead. Obsolete, to the extreme. 4 colors on the screen, out of a possilbe set of 6. 320 by 200. Also supported B&W, 640 by 200.

An interlaced display type capable of some ugly, ugly color combinations. Designers had to choose between a palette of either:

• Cyan
• Magenta
• White

or

• Red
• Green
• Yellow

Of course, Black could be used in either palette, as it is merely an absence of color.

With some hacking of the video registers, it was possible to combine the palettes, using Red, Cyan, White and Black. However, this type of hacking was also subject to destroy the monitor -- sending random bytes to the video registers had a way of doing that.

The two pallettes in CGA are known colloquially as Rastafarian and Liquorice Allsorts, obviously. CGA was better in some respects to EGA : although you had less colours, the clashing was less nauseating, and nobody was tempted to try creating skin tones. Centipede, 3-DEMON, Pengo, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Shogun, and Leaderboard were all fine examples of CGA gaming at its best. They looked close to the arcade and 8-bit micro originals. CGA was taken to the extreme in Alley Cat. Begat EGA, XGA, MCGA and indirectly, VGA and SVGA.