Incidentally, this type of temporal dithering is how 18-bit LCDs can approximate 24-bit colour:
Secret colours of the Commodore 64
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Re: Secret colours of the Commodore 64
#22I remember writing a piece of machine language on a C-64 which flipped the color palette as fast as possible. It was so fast that all you saw was individual horizontal line segments of different colors within every individual raster line. (I.e. it was faster than the horizontal refresh rate of the CRT which is usually what, well over 10 kHz.)
Sheesh, when was that? Probably 1985.
Re: Secret colours of the Commodore 64
#23Cool article, but the Spectrum really only had 7 colours and black. And at the time I hated the Commodore 64's colour palate (and any non ZX Spectrum palate, until I saw the beautiful SAM Coupé's) so I guess it's a matter of preference.
You could use this same palette flicker on the speccy to remove the attribute clash and create new colours, I remember someone demoing a more or less pixel perfect version of Super Mario World, albeit with a black background. The spectrum was capable of all sorts of odd things that were never intended. http://tarjan.uw.hu/zx_gfx_modes_en.htm
That's very interesting. I'm always impressed at how dedicated some people are to old systems too. My Spectrums haven't been touched in 15 years and here's people making graphics cards for them still.
Re: Secret colours of the Commodore 64
#24I once toyed with Temporal dithering on VGA ModeX. While the bullet point listed resolution for standard VGA was 320x200. Hitting the hardware registers and paying the price of a rather peculiar addressing mechanism for pixels you could get a lot more(and double buffering to boot). 320x240 was the most common tweaked mode, because it gave you square pixels and page flipping. At the edge of what momitors could handle…
I'm pretty sure I've seen this used in the demo scene, but I can't name any productions after all these years. I remember Second Reality has a mode x plasma at least
Re: Secret colours of the Commodore 64
#25This is cool, but I've never understood why people like the C64 palette. It looked washed out to me.
I guess people grow to like the look of the machines they have fond memories of. (Apple II, Coco, Sinclair)
The Amiga was the first machine to really impress me with its pallete.
Re: Secret colours of the Commodore 64
#26These kinds of tricks remind me a bit of how the Apple II produced color using the timing of the NTSC signal, or how Thexder tried to produce more colors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBL2rtCdpZ0, or how the demo 8088 MPH produces more colors than the CGA composite mode was intended https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
Re: Secret colours of the Commodore 64
#27I once toyed with Temporal dithering on VGA ModeX. While the bullet point listed resolution for standard VGA was 320x200. Hitting the hardware registers and paying the price of a rather peculiar addressing mechanism for pixels you could get a lot more(and double buffering to boot). 320x240 was the most common tweaked mode, because it gave you square pixels and page flipping. At the edge of what momitors could handle…
I'm pretty sure I've seen this used in the demo scene, but I can't name any productions after all these years. I remember Second Reality has a mode x plasma at least
I recall Ambience by Tran as one of the first (and few) tasteful interlaced productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJshv8BjdoM VESA-compatible hicolor and truecolor were about to become commonplace.
Re: Secret colours of the Commodore 64
#28Near the bottom, I wonder if high-speed img flipping in js could be done by absolute-positioning the two images and toggling display:none/display:block (or flip the z-index above/below) on the upper layer on every animation frame?
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Re: Secret colours of the Commodore 64
#29Here's a great older example of this technique (and a couple others) used on the TRS-80 Color Computer 3 to show "hi-color" bitmaps on a machine with a 16 color palette:
Re: Secret colours of the Commodore 64
#30I think this type of instance maybe why the C64 has the reputation of encouraging hackers that it does. This is the perfect example to me of hacking to make something better.
I think a big part of the beauty of the C64 is that there were so many of them, and they were all more or less the same (although the hardwere went through many revisions). That meant people quickly ran up against the same boundaries, and identified amazing ways to push past them.