[Coco] 64 column "low res" text sceen on coco3

[Nick Marentes]

 >William,
 >This is very cool! Fantastic work! This will enable a lot of the old 
games
 >to be updated for the Coco 3 and new ones created. I can hardly wait 
to see
 >what everyone comes up with using this new knowledge.

This has been discussed before. The GIME *can* do "Semigraphics mode" or 
at least a rendition of it. I turn it on in the loader to my game 
Neutroid 2 to make it run on a CoCo3. This game was developed originally 
for the old VDG system and requires this poke to activate the 
Semigraphics mode for the CoCo3.

But where it differs to the CoCo1/2 VDG is how it handles text. Text is 
pretty much non-existant unless you use interrupts to change the number 
of lines midfield to allow the text lines to display fully.

I guess this mode was not popular because it suffers from the same 
problem that it did in the CoCo 1/2. You cannot have 2 different colors 
within a byte and they are relatively low res.

It was a good mode on the CoCo 1/2 because it allows all 8 colors on 
screen for both foreground and background. It was low resolution but at 
least it got away from the "Green Box" syndrome as I call it where most 
games that used Pmode3 always where wrapped with a green (or white) 
border around the screen.

The CoCo3 negates the effectiveness of this mode which is why is has 
remained relatively silent. There are proper modes on the CoCo3 that 
provide better resolution and 16 colors.

Of course they take up more RAM but there are also several extra 
undocumented modes on the CoCo3 which utilize a lower resolution but 
keep the 16 colors such as the mode I used for my Gate Crasher game. 
This used a 128x96 resolution in 16 colors.