[Coco] The myth of the Coco3 256 color mode :)

[Robert Gault]

John W. Linville wrote:

> I'm curious as to why you think this mode is problematic for drawing
> images?  Because the various colors don't bare an obvious mathematical
> relationship to one another?  Or some other reason?
>
> To me, the fact that each byte maps to a single pixel (i.e. NTSC color
> clock) makes the 256 color mode easier to use than modes that require
> bitwise manipulations to change individual pixels.  YMMV, of course...
>
> John
>

John,

Let's say you want to draw a vertical line and the line is not one of the "pure" 
artifact colors available. You can't display a line of single pixel width 
because you need to blend pixels to achieve the new color. The same vertical 
line using one of the directly achieved artifact colors would be thinner.
I guess you can compensate by making all vertical lines 4 pixels wide but then 
you would need to also expand lines in the horizontal direction.

Regardless of how easily the algorithms to achieve the above could be written, 
the resulting graphics will not look as good a images generated on screens where 
single pixels can achieve all possible colors.

Heck, I don't really like semigraphics-24 images even though I wrote a graphics 
editor for the mode. Here single pixels achieve all possible colors but they are 
4x1 in shape.

Robert