CGA Composite

CGA card with composite monitor

Overview
Games

There are 154 games documented on PixelatedArcade supporting CGA Composite for IBM PC/Compatibles.
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CGA Composite is part of the category Display Hardware Supported.

The IBM CGA card could be connected to either an RGB monitor or a composite monitor or TV. When using a composite monitor/TV, the resolution and detail were more limited however more colors were possible. As a side effect of the NTSC encoding/decoding process and the CGA card's implementation, certain dot patterns would smear together to create new, solid areas of color. This essentially limited the resolution to 160x200, however a total of 16 colors could be displayed at once in graphics mode (as opposed to the 4 colors at once that were available with an RGB monitor). While not very popular with business applications due to the poor resolution, many games took advantage of this to gain a greatly improved color palette. Both the 320x200 and 640x200 graphic modes would appear as 160x200 16 color graphics on a composite display as long as the color burst bit was enabled; with this bit disabled, graphics and text would instead be greyscale.

All games would display on a composite monitor (there was no way to limit output to one type of display nor detect the type of display being used). However, depending on the colors and/or dot patterns being used it was possible to make the game very difficult to see and read on composite displays (this was especially true for 80-column text in color). Games that included composite support sometimes included separate composite and RGB versions to maximize the abilities of each display type, while others simply made sure the color and dot patterns that were used displayed reasonably on each type of display.