Why was 8 bit or 16 bit so bad?

[Bubble99]

Why is the contrast so strange with 8-bit?

Why where 8-bit or 16-bit the contrast so different than today?

Say games that where 8-bit just look at the strange the contrast was.

Or this other 8-bit game

Yes even 8-bit operating systems like Common Desktop Environment(CDE)

Why was the contrast so strange with 8-bit?

 

[bunnspecial]

It's not so much the OS itself but the number of colors that can be rendered.

In the old days when 8 and 16 bit OSs were common, you were lucky to get 256 colors(8 bit color). Better graphics allowed thousands(16 bit color) and then millions of colors(24 or 32 bit).

With that said, even something like Macintosh System 6 rendered in 32 bit color(millions of colors) is fairly low contrast compared to modern OSs(and before someone says it can't be done-I have a Radius card in my Macintosh II that disagrees). I think it's a combination of both needing to look good on a monochrome display, which was a significant consideration back in the 90s, and probably an overall aesthetic preference for lower contrast, easier on the eyes color. Monochrome plays a consideration in it since different shades of gray(perhaps 50 or more of them ) are used to differentiate UI elements. I also wonder if it was a reaction to white/green/amber on black command lines and going to a "let's show you what we can do when we're not constrained by that.

To me, your screenshot of CDE, which looks a lot like the UI on the version of SGI IRIX I had on on the SGI Octane that use to sit in my office, looks great. It's easy to read and to my eyes the colors look good. I could use that all day without it tiring my eyes out.

 

[dwig]

The display on 8-bit and 16-bit systems was limited to both the amount of memory that could be allocated to the display image, thus limiting the number of colors, and by the need to deal with the limitations of CRT displays. A lot of the screen shots that I've seen of older software run in emulators on current computers seem to be flatter and off color compared to what I experienced back in the day, which I suspect is the result of a digital display rendering the color palette differently than an old analog CRT would have.

 

[joevt]

Why is the contrast so strange with 8-bit?

Why where 8-bit or 16-bit the contrast so different than today?

Say games that where 8-bit just look at the strange the contrast was.

Or this other 8-bit game

Yes even 8-bit operating systems like Common Desktop Environment(CDE)

Why was the contrast so strange with 8-bit?

I'm not sure what you mean be contrast. You see they have black and they have white. Can't get more contrast than that.
Maybe you're talking about the lack of colors or the strange choice of colors?

The Apple II was basically black and white. The colors that appear on a display connected to an Apple II are basically a side affect of the black and white pixels being drawn twice as fast (≈7 MHz) as the color burst frequency (≈3.5MHz) of NTSC monitors. The 16 color modes of the Apple II used ≈14 MHz. The four color hires mode added two colors (6 total) by delaying the dots by one half of the ≈7MHz period. The hires mode only used 7 bits per byte (the MSB was used to signal the half period delay). Each byte was retrieved at ≈1MHz (the same as the CPU clock which is based on the NTSC color burst frequency).
This was the cheapest way to do color back then - any more complexity would require additional chips that would add cost. These early computers used dynamic ram which had to be accessed periodically to refresh them. The bytes used for display were arranged such that the video drawing curcuitry is also the circuitry that does the ram refresh. This added further to the cost savings. The same RAM is used by video and for CPU so they use the same clock and access the RAM at different times in the same clock period.

The hires colors (violet, green, orange, blue) have 50% brightness compared to white. This is because the video output was basically digital. The four colors were a pattern of 1 and 0 dots - so the average intensity is 50%. There really wasn't any choice in colors (except for the Tint control on the TV).

But other systems would have more colors to choose from.

256 colors was introduced with VGA graphics on early PCs and Macintosh II computers (80286 or 68020). Those were 16/32 bit CPUs. The 256 colors could be chosen from a set of millions of colors.

The 68K Macs soon added support for 32768 colors (5bpc) and millions of colors (8bpc). Each increase in number of colors increases the size/cost of video ram and the number of bits for each pixel (so the hardware needs to get faster to deal with the same number of pixels).
For games on computers, fewer color means faster drawing times (this was before 2D acceleration).
For game consoles, the sprites are drawn by hardware but had to be kept small to fit on the rom chips and to keep the price of the hardware down.

 

[bunnspecial]

The 68K Macs soon added support for 32768 colors (5bpc) and millions of colors (8bpc). Each increase in number of colors increases the size/cost of video ram and the number of bits for each pixel (so the hardware needs to get faster to deal with the same number of pixels).

Back around 2014? maybe before a lot of the 68K stuff went nuts, someone on here offered me a pair of high end Radius NuBus cards to use in a recently acquired Quadra 700. I think I traded them something, but don't remember what, but whatever the case it wasn't a huge outlay on my part.

Those cards can do millions of colors as long as you don't push the resolution too high, but I think they were ludicriously expensive when new and I'd hate to think what one would cost today.

One is still in that Q700 and one has bounced between my II and IIci. At one point I had wanted to do 6 displays on the II because, why not(who doesn't want to see System 6 on that many screens?), and I had enough cards but somewhere or another in there I lost one of my Apple CRTs and from what I remember I never really got the NuBus video cards to play nice with VGA dongles/LCDs.

 

[Bubble99]

Maybe you're talking about the lack of colors or the strange choice of colors?

Yes no one today would use that.

It just looks so odd to look at it today to see what they pick for the software or OS.

Wow, just think if you gone to a web site or using software and it looked like above.

As no one today would have OS, software or web site look like that.

The so called 8-bit and VGA mode that had that strange look like avove.

You would think being so limited they would choose white? The black with those odd browns and yellows.

Just so of setting using those blacks with choosing those options to go with black.

 

[Nermal]

You would think being so limited they would choose white

You have to remember that colour was a bit of a novelty on PCs at the time, so developers were making use of it whether or not it looked good.

If I recall correctly, the XTree Pro file management software used yellow text on a red background! (Edit: Looks like it was actually grey on red).

 

[Pakaku]

The display on 8-bit and 16-bit systems was limited to both the amount of memory that could be allocated to the display image, thus limiting the number of colors, and by the need to deal with the limitations of CRT displays. A lot of the screen shots that I've seen of older software run in emulators on current computers seem to be flatter and off color compared to what I experienced back in the day, which I suspect is the result of a digital display rendering the color palette differently than an old analog CRT would have.

CRT monitors and TVs were blurrier, so the pixels would blend in with each other. Sometimes you had pixel artists who took advantage of the way CRT pixels could "blur" into each other, and even look like new colours, so pixel art made for a CRT back then would look much different on a sharper modern screen

There's a good example under the "preview function" section: https://vgdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/179656817318