Everything that supported graphics looked better than CGA. Even monochrome Hercules graphics.

Although to be fair CGA wasn't intended to be used on monitors. It was intended to be used on smeary composite video sources where you could expand the palette using artifact colors. Even then the graphics were terrible, but you could at least get a green.

But by '87 EGA cards existed; it's just they never bothered to port it to EGA.

I've never heard of this game before. Looking it up, its impressive considering the capabilities of then current hardware.

Yea, I still have floppy disk and manual for mine. 256K of ram and no hard-drive required.

It definitely required you to have lost many times before you could complete it though; the galaxy was too large for you to explore fully in the time granted by the mechanics.