bazilracoondog

"Typical Adventure Thing"

Published: September 2nd 2024, 10:17:22 pm

Also did new pixel art in-between, got a craving to make a pseudo-screen from an old graphic adventure game for DOS computers when they had these cyan-magenta CGA graphics.

The visual style is inspired by a couple of CGA DOS games about Mickey Mouse and Winnie Pooh released in 1984. I don't know if there's any other games like that and I have no idea why they have such graphics. I mean, as far as I remember, DOS computers weren't forced to use these awful double width pixels common for Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers and for some reason the only dithering it uses is two color vertical lines.




As an example, here's screenshots from Talisman and Oo-Topos, similar graphic adventure games which yet show more typical IBM DOS graphics with regular not stretched pixels and just all sorts of dithering used freely.




My only assumption is that Mickey Mouse and Winnie Pooh games were made such way that they can be ported to other computers with minimal effort needed to fit the game into other platform limitations where stretched double-width pixels and other shit had to be dealt with.

Anyway, despite this graphic style is quite horrendous, I got inspired to try imitating this caveman type of pixel art with my boys, using stretched pixels and nothing but CGA palette flat fillings and vertical line dithering. Also tried to imagine this picture in EGA graphics (CGA and EGA are Color and Enhanced Graphics Adapters just to remind you), EGA had 16 colors which could be used freely, DOS games from EGA era are much prettier, one of the best examples is famous Maniac Mansion game.


Although it lacks some nuance tones so people look sun-burnt, there's no better shades but light red for skin.
 Here's examples of the same Mickey Mouse game but ported to an EGA adapter PC and Commodore 64 respectively. This is why I decided to try coloring my own CGA pixel art too. It turned out pretty nice, with a little bit of dithering I found the way around the lack of purple color in this palette and made my characters look almost exactly the way they should originally. I wanna to experiment with EGA colors a bit more in future because I use some super ancient and limited graphics when it comes to pixel art with my characters very often and can't even depict my characters the way they should be, EGA graphics allows to be more free yet it still looks very retro and provides a good amount of challenge with its limited palette and resolution.