[Coco] 256 color mode

[Joel Ewy]

Allen Huffman wrote:
> Thanks, Joel. So if this is what GrafExpress did (NTSC only), how did no one else ever pick up on it? Seems great for games though not for the serious coco owners who would have has rgb monitors.
>
>   

Several reasons I can think of that it might not have been picked up 
more generally back in the day:
1.  A paint program that can in theory do roughly 256 colors is one 
thing, digital photos are something else entirely.  It may be that 
nobody ever produced much with it that really lived up to its potential, 
so that others could really see what it was capable of and get excited 
about it.
2.  GrafExpress may not have been marketed as aggressively as other 
programs.  I recall being only vaguely aware of its existence at the 
time, and being a little skeptical of how good the graphics were.  I 
don't recall reading any reviews in Rainbow, seeing any pictures, or 
reading a technical description of what it was doing.  I don't remember 
seeing published descriptions of any file format on Delphi, or anything 
like that.  Maybe the publishers were trying to keep the details a 
secret.  If so, that worked against them.
3.  I'm not sure of the exact timing, but wasn't it around the time that 
the first "4096-color" flicker displays were being used with pictures 
digitized on the Rascan and DS-69?  That's what I remember playing with 
back in the day.  4096 colors are better than 256 colors, and this amp 
goes to 11!
4.  As you suggest, the RGB monitors were definitely sold as the 
superior choice for graphics, though it's easy to hook up a spare TV 
along with the RGB monitor.  I've got an old TV sitting right on top of 
my CM-8 at this moment.  Those Amiga and Magnavox monitors that take RGB 
and composite video would be ideal for this.
5.  The hayday of the CoCo was waning.  The sentiment among many was 
that if you want good graphics, you should get an Amiga, a PC with VGA, 
or an MM/1. 
6.  Probably the most important consideration is that much of what can 
pretty easily be done now was very difficult in those days.  First of 
all, nobody had digital cameras.  In those days, I was making high-color 
pictures on the CoCo using colored filters (or my friend's video color 
splitter from his Amiga) and the DS-69 in RS-DOS, combining the separate 
R, G, and B images with a homemade utility I wrote in C on OS-9 (using 
the RSDOS utility to transfer the images to a 720K floppy), putting the 
resulting 15-bit Targa file on an MS-DOS disk (using the equally slow 
and tedious PCDOS utility), taking it to a PC running DOS, and 
converting it to a GIF with a shareware program, then viewing it in VGA 
on the PC, or HAM on the Amiga 1000.  I could also use the VIEWGIF 
program in OS-9 to show it in glorious flickervision on the CoCo 3 until 
my head hurt. 

That was a lot of work, involving 3 different floppy disk formats, 3 or 
4 different programs to capture and convert the graphics, a video camera 
and a video digitizer, and two or three separate computers.  Even the 
process of reading in the .TGA file, quantizing the colors, and saving a 
.GIF was slow on the '286 that I first used for this procedure.  Modern 
PCs, digital cameras, and the Internet have made the process much, much 
easier.  Even the process of working out what palettes give good results 
is made much easier when people can collaborate over the Internet in 
near-real-time, using modern PCs and sophisticated software that simply 
wasn't around back in the day.

JCE

> Do the emulators handle this? They simulate artifact colors but probably not this?
>
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