CGA 16 Color Graphics Part 2 - Magiduck
0In Part 1 I demonstrated two pieces of software that showed full 16 color usage on an IBM CGA card using something that appeared to be more than just ordinary text modes. Here in Part 2 I am showing a homebrew game from 2015 called Magiduck. This game uses 40-column graphics as a basis instead of 80-columns. This gives something close to a blocky 80x100 resolution for those pixels using a character which takes up one side of a text cell, giving two colored pixel for every text cell. However, there are instances of other text characters being used, so those graphics will appear in more detail. 40-column modes are faster than 80-column modes and do not suffer from CGA snow.
I set the RGB2HDMI to an 800x480 resolution to capture the full borders if any. Then I displayed the image with the VCS program, a third party viewer program for the Datapath E1 and E1s. I used OBS to capture the video and audio, but these CGA captures I had OBS capture the VCS window rather than capture the video directly with OBS. This ensured a perfectly sharp, lossless capture without "extra color".
The video captures were rather large given I was using OBS to capture the video losslessly. I loaded the video into VirtualDub2 64-bit and resized the image first to 800x240 and then to 3200x2160, both times making sure I was using nearest neighbor resizing. Then I used the 64-bit ZMBV Codec to compress the files. The result were file sizes drastically smaller than the recorded files, even upscaled.
The system used for these captures is an IBM PC/XT Model 5160 sporting a 4.77MHz 8088 and 640KiB of RAM. Audio was captured using a pair of alligator clips, one clip connected to the speaker signal input terminal and the other to an area of the metal chassis for ground.