Old games that allow palette changing/general color stuff

[starscream]

Back in the early days of the game industry, color choices were of course much more limited than today. Think about the CGA standard for instance.
What I'm looking for and showing here are games which allow the player to change the color palette - basically the entire or most of the screen should be changeable. So, no sports games where you can edit just the look of the athletes or such.
Text adventures with pictures where it's possible to change background and text color are relevant, as are construction kits.

Platform-wise, I'll draw the line at 16bit consoles and standard VGA PCs(256 colors), so the limit is about what's was available up to the early 90s I guess. Playstation 1 games are of course also "old",
but this isn't what I'm looking for here. Neither is it standard hardware related stuff, like the Super Game Boy, GBC palettes for monochrome games, RGB-Composite switches, and similar things.
Well, this was apparently futile, let's talk generally about colors then.


You'll understand when you see the examples. I couldn't actually remember any console game.


I mentioned CGA earlier. If you have some experience with early DOS stuff, you may have seen
some games offer an alternative palette, like this


That's La Espada Sagrada, a Spanish game.

Some games offer much more extensive choices, e.g. the original King's Bounty:









Roadwar 2000 by SSI:




Same applies to Roadwar Europa, and some SSI American Civil War games from around the same time. They also only support CGA, there'no EGA support.

Non-SSI games where I've seen more than one alt palette are Matterhorn Screamer and some Arcade conversions by Banana Development (Operation Wolf, Ajax etc),


So far, these were all games where color options are only available in the PC versions to my knowledge. Here are a few titles on non PC platforms:

Night Mission Pinball
The PC releases offer one alt CGA palette, but in the Atari and C64 versions you can tweak the colors more. This was also mentioned in the advertising.
C64 example, default, then edited




Boulder Construction Kit
Shown here is the Spectrum version. I would expect at least some color editing possibilities on all other platforms.


Soko-ban CoCo

The CoCo 1/2 and Dragon computers were severly limited in their color abilities, but many games (too numerous that I would want to list them here at least) allow palette switching between "Buff Mode", "Green Mode" and "Black & White Mode", the latter is a mode that can display color on NTSC displays with artifacting.
The CoCo 3 expanded the color capabilities substantively. Games that were coded for the improved hardware would then normally not let you change the palette (similarly like PC EGA and onwards).
The Soko-Ban port for the CoCo family allows you to switch so you can choose from the CoCo 3's 64 color palette though:








In order -
Artifacting Mode 1
Artifacting Mode 2
Green Mode
Buff Mode
CoCo 3 default
CoCo 3 - edited example

Chess games
This is probably the genre where you can find the most examples, again, too numerous. Here's just one, Chess Player 2150 aka The Chess Simulator
on the Atari ST




I couldn't find a similar option in the PC version, the interface appears quite different.

Text Adventures - Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls

Nowadays with interpreters for modern systems or certain emulator features this isn't really an issue I guess, but back then, changing e.g. the background color was really a feature dependent on version/platform for these. For Infocom, you can have custom colors at least on the Amiga (derived from Workbench), Atari ST (changeable via keys), CPC (derived from CP/M). For PC/DOS versions this was originally not a feature. Later versions have a color switch (/C commandline parameter). On the C64 this is paradoxially reversed: the early releases derive their screen from the basic (normally the two shades of blue).
So if you know the basic command to change colors, you can easily have a custom screen.
Later releases defaulted to grey/black backgrounds with white text, haven't seen any comparable options for switching.

For Magnetic Scrolls, I'm not sure yet how many games on which platforms let you switch text and background, so far, I believe this is possible in The Pawn and Guild of Thieves on CPC (function keys) and Atari ST (commands Foreground/Background with number). Haven't seen this on other refcards.




That's it for now!

[magic89]

In The Peace Keepers / Rushing Beat Shura its possible change color charachers clothes as review here says.

[dsparil]

The Super Game Boy adaptor allows for customizable palettes.

[ommadawnyawn2]

Not what you're looking for but might be interesting anyway: Back then some devs used composite mode and dithering to achieve new shades in CGA. 8-bit guy has a video about that.

[backgroundnoise]

The only other example I can think of would be the DOS versions of games using the Freescape engine (Total Eclipse, Castle Master,...), which would change the color palette from room to room (CGA only).

Would Maniac Mansion count, since you can change the display setting in-game on the fly without the need for an external setup file?

[dsparil]

There's also this very old command line utility(forum thread about it) for changing EGA and CGA color palettes. The time stamp on the files is 4/12/88 and the source code is included which is neat.

[starscream]

quoting myself:

You'll understand when you see the examples

Worst prediction ever

Not a single reply so far is consistent with my examples. I give in and updated the subject and post, so let's talk generally a bit about color .

Aug 4, 2017 11:51:10 GMT -5 ommadawnyawn2 said:

Not what you're looking for but might be interesting anyway: Back then some devs used composite mode and dithering to achieve new shades in CGA. 8-bit guy has a video about that.

Yes, this was ruled out with the RGB-Composite switches part....credit for actually reading and understanding the post though

I was pondering to make a thread first about more about general color stuff relevant for emulation which would also cover stuff like this...but then I figured that most of it would either be too specific or I assumed it's commonly known.

Composite support for CGA for example has been long a feature of Dosbox, but it was limited so the composite mode for certain games wouldn't be accessible.  I believe that's still the case with the standard (0.74) version and not one of the newer builds, Daum etc. With newer builds, you can just turn composite mode on and off, and then games will display without the detection issues.

EGA/VGA is also not completely backwards compatible with CGA RGB, which is why when emulating for e.g. taking screenshots, one should always use a genuine CGA setting for accuracy. Although in reality, some cards may have been compatible enough, there were also EGA cards that could use the full 64 colors in 200-line modes etc.

[zerker]

Well, aside from Doom mods (go search for EGA Doom for some fun), the closest thing that comes to mind is games that support multiple graphics modes, which each, of course, have their own colour palettes. E.g. Eye of the Beholder and Prince of Persia both support CGA, EGA AND VGA modes.

Sim City supports just about all of them.

For a modern example of the exact topic, N++ has a whole bunch of colour schemes, and periodically unlocks more as you play.

[Woody Alien]

Downwell is another modern example of game that unlocks more new palettes the more you play. Some are pleasing, others like the Virtual Boy one are downright eye-searing (but it's a joke... I hope).