If I am now wrong Falcon AT is practically the same game as Falcon 1. But I don't want to ignore the first game and I was wondering if the cga mode in Falcon 1 can be cofigured properly to change the pallette to a more civilized color mode.

At launch the game offeres you to choose one of the two cga modes available in the past but even editing machine=cga in the dosbox config the selection does not work and it always shows the graphics in the ugly default cga mode. I must understand that because the game launches with the option to select the pallette mode it should work and something is not right with the configuration itself. Or maybe I am doing something wrong.

Any idea? I remember that in games like wizardry 1 I selected cga mode as machine and the graphics were shown in the alternative palette (red white etc...). But with Falcon it does not work as intended.

greetings

The selection works no problem for me without changing anything in the config file. The game offers a choice between cyan, magenta, white and cyan, red, white. I can see the colors change when playing the game according to the option.

I can see on mobygames that the DOS version also supports Tandy and Hercules, which should look better. Have you tried them instead? I think the CGA palette is set by the game so you have to stick to the options that the develops made available unless you "hack" the CGA adapter by substituting the colors somehow. I don't know whether this is actually feasible (I am no 1980ies hardware expert) but unless you find a program from that age that does that, you'll probably have to program it yourself in asm. (The other possibility is to modify the game executable itself and change the color codes, but this will require quite a bit of expertise with programming for DOS).

I would actually consider asking this question on VOGONS forums, since they have plenty of people who know a lot about dosbox internals.

If you want some "real" CGA experience, I suggest trying Ultima II/III which even support the composite mode (although look better without it). Ultima III is probably better, because Ultima II has a lot of mindless grinding. Silent Service might also look good in the CGA mode (although it also supports low-res EGA).

Thanks for the response. But I solved it keeping things as default :)

Apparently the first thing I did when the game was installed was changing the machine to cga, even before running the game once, having in mind erroneously the peculiar cga mode.
And apparently in this game if the machine is set to cga the palette switching does not work as intended.

So keeping the machine=svga_s3 and the colors are selectable.

Thanks again and greetings

Yeah, dosbox configuration can sometimes produce unexpected results :)

Greetings