A related, interesting rabbit hole I wandered through the other day (prompted by a thread on Mastodon), was that the early Sierra games included stronger art than the systems they were developed for supported. The thread started by wondering if there were smart ways to upscale some of the games because Sierra often used a lot of vector art, though the conclusion there is the vector/raster mix is too brittle in most of their games, because it is almost always a pixel-specific mix in the end result.
That lead to the interesting bit that SCI0 games from Sierra in the EGA era had artwork drawn at higher color palettes than EGA supported at the time (or more specifically, the artwork individually follows EGA restrictions of 16 color palettes, but a larger mix of different colors palettes for different artwork mixed in the same scenes/games than EGA can quickly cycle through and than other EGA games would have done in the same time frame), and included that detail in the games with the SCI0 engine dithering the results at runtime, rather than standardizing palettes at dev time. Sierra at the time was quite proud of their dithering tech because it gave the artists greater freedom and looked good enough at the time. Arguably, too they knew the technology would get less restrictive eventually and they could support that when that happened, though that was before the era of easy game patches so who knows if they ever thought to act on that for "easy" VGA upgrades.
The interesting part of that to me is that ScummVM reimplemented the dithering, then eventually turned it off by default. If you play a SCI0 game in ScummVM today you get the wider color mix of the original artwork. You can turn the dithering back on if you wish, but the artwork really does look better with modern color support rather than emulated dithering.
> The thread started by wondering if there were smart ways to upscale some of the games because Sierra often used a lot of vector art, though the conclusion there is the vector/raster mix is too brittle in most of their games, because it is almost always a pixel-specific mix in the end result.
IIRC "Out of this World" (aka "Another World") was relatively pure wrt vector art. This is probably why it was straightforward to port to a modern re-release. I don't know that they targeted a higher resolution, though.
That lead to the interesting bit that SCI0 games from Sierra in the EGA era had artwork drawn at higher color palettes than EGA supported at the time (or more specifically, the artwork individually follows EGA restrictions of 16 color palettes, but a larger mix of different colors palettes for different artwork mixed in the same scenes/games than EGA can quickly cycle through and than other EGA games would have done in the same time frame), and included that detail in the games with the SCI0 engine dithering the results at runtime, rather than standardizing palettes at dev time. Sierra at the time was quite proud of their dithering tech because it gave the artists greater freedom and looked good enough at the time. Arguably, too they knew the technology would get less restrictive eventually and they could support that when that happened, though that was before the era of easy game patches so who knows if they ever thought to act on that for "easy" VGA upgrades.
The interesting part of that to me is that ScummVM reimplemented the dithering, then eventually turned it off by default. If you play a SCI0 game in ScummVM today you get the wider color mix of the original artwork. You can turn the dithering back on if you wish, but the artwork really does look better with modern color support rather than emulated dithering.