I once tried to figure out the smallest modification to cga hardware that could be made to substantially improve the palette.
Inverting the digital red line produces some amazing options. Not least because the palettes containing red became black enabling the colour that was typically used for black to be reused as this was the only palette entry that could be set to any of the 16 colours.
You can make funny tricks when passing image as composite. Where with those you can produce other colours. And state of computers were quite limited and primitive then.
On other hand for business use, those are still acceptable, everything was text anyway.
