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[Devi Ever]

Anyone know why most EGA games use a standard 16 color palette instead of a custom one?

I apologize if I am misunderstanding the tech, but were you able to choose 16 of your own colors from the 64 available?

If so, why did so many use the "standard" palette?

[valrus]

I think you tended to stick to the standard palette so as to avoid tweaking colors/resolutions for EGA and Tandy graphics separately.  The EGA period wasn't very long and it didn't have a huge install base iirc, so you would simultaneously release for CGA, EGA, Tandy, Monochrome (maybe), and VGA (soon afterward).

So I think only a few studios put effort into getting the most out of EGA's special capabilities, and it wasn't like the long, stable VGA period where you could build up long-term VGA expertise over many projects.

[Devi Ever]

I think you tended to stick to the standard palette so as to avoid tweaking colors for EGA and Tandy graphics separately.  The EGA period wasn't very long and it didn't have a huge install base iirc, so you would simultaneously release for CGA, EGA, Tandy, Monochrome (maybe), and VGA (soon afterward).

So I think only a few studios put effort into getting the most out of EGA's special capabilities, and it wasn't like the long, stable VGA period where you could build up long-term VGA expertise over many projects.

Cool!  Makes a lot of sense.  Thanks!

Was there any limitation to what 16 colors could have been chosen from the 64 palette?  Any notable game examples that used a non-default set?

[valrus]

I think you could choose any of the 64 colors, but I never really used it so I'm not speaking from experience.  (I once had a school assignment where we had to choose one of the old graphics modes and make a game for it in assembly, but after I looked into CGA and EGA, I chose VGA because it's so much simpler at the bit level.)

One restriction on EGA was that you couldn't use the non-standard palettes in the low-resolution compatibility mode that most games used.  (I just looked this up but it seems that there's some conflicting information out there, so maybe you theoretically could but there was another reason no one did.)

One of the only notable games that used a custom EGA palette was Duke Nukem II, but I think this might have technically been one of the EGA modes of VGA.  (Like one of VGA's modes was the EGA 16-color interface, but to the VGA palette instead of the EGA palette.)  id was one of those companies that got caught by the EGA/VGA transition and so had some early VGA games that still had been programmed like EGA games.

[Sik]

In the 200 lines video modes you couldn't change the palette, this restriction was intentional so EGA cards could still keep working with CGA monitors.

...I do wonder why they did that though. CGA monitors would already fail in the higher resolution modes so it's not like EGA was ever fully compatible with them for starters, and they could have just documented it as "don't change if you want it to work with CGA monitors" if somebody really cared.

[valrus]

I think it's a matter of consumer perception as much as anything.  A CGA monitor run with the wrong resolution & refresh will fail, but a CGA monitor interpreting arbitrary EGA color signals will still work, it will put out a picture that's mostly recognizable but uglier.  (Like not even absurdly wrong and surreal with orange skies and black strawberries.  The CGA monitor will just be misinterpreting the LSB of the G channel as also being the LSB of the R and B channels, which isn't psychedelically terrible, but it's definitely noticeable, like it changes a whole range of pleasant light greens to bright yellow.)

So if you can guarantee in the standard that any picture that displays at all displays with the intended colors (by only allowing a palette where the LSBs of the R, G, and B channels are always the same), you don't have to deal with magazines (and word of mouth by early adopters) showing the EGA card making weird and wrong graphics.