[Coco] colors

[Bill Pierce]

Wayne,
I do believe what you have read is correct. The first 8 palettes are background and the last 8 are foreground. It's just confusing as to which palettes OS9 is using as the default "background" & "foreground" palettes. I still don't understand it as well as I should, but I have a program that will show you what the palettes/colors are doing. I developed this sub-routine to be called from my "Sound Chaser" & "DW4Man" programs and it actually does a little more than just colors. It also does monitor type, mouse delay & resolution, key debounce and repeat delay. Warning, playing with the mouse or key delays is "System wide" not just limited to the current window. The key delays alone can mess up your default settings if you don't understand them. You'll have to reboot to recover the defaults.
Luckily. it will run standalone on a 80 col HW text screen. It does not run properly on hi-res graphics screens.

Here's a link to the disk with "SControl. Just copy the file into your CMDS dir and type SControl on any HW 80 col screen.
Because this program is meant to be run from anohter, the initial menu will be black except the current selection. Just use the arrow keys to move to "Set Screen Colors" and hit enter.
In the color menu, use the up/down arrows to change the palette, the left/right arrows to change the color for that palette. You can then see (by changing palettes/colors) what palettes affect the OS9 HW 80 col screen.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23059963/DW4Man/SControl.dsk

Also, in mentioning Vcc, it will not show proper RGB/Composite color unless both the montype in NOS9 and the Monitor type in Vcc's "Configuration/config/Display" panel are set the same.

I hope it helps you figure it out.


Bill Pierce
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-----Original Message-----
From: Wayne Campbell <asa.rand at gmail.com>
To: CoCoList <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Tue, Apr 1, 2014 2:22 pm
Subject: [Coco] colors


I have been looking up all I can find about the CoCo3's 64 colors and the
16-color palette. I am finding some information to be incorrect, or at
least it seems to be incorrect. In addition, I find that the 64 colors as
they appear in composite mode make more sense than the colors as they
appear in RGB mode. From what I have read, it seems to me that this is more
due to the RBG side of things is not properly setting the colors. perhaps a
bit-shift would correct this? I don't know what it would take.

As far as the 16-color palette is concerned, the Rainbow Guide to OS-9 L2
says the first 8 registers are used for background and the last 8 are used
for foreground. This is not necessarily true, or VCC has a issue with the
colors (one or the other). As an example, if I set register 0 to 56 (light
gray) and register 8 to white, and I set a overlay window to use register 8
as background, I get light gray for the background color. According to the
book, I should see white as the background since I selected register 8 as
the register to use for background. Changing the register so 0 is white
(63) and 8 is light gray, the background becomes white. However, where I
have used REVON to change the characters to white fore and black back, I
get light gray for the foreground color instead of white.

Is there anyone on this list that understands the color registers enough to
help me make the colors work the way I want them to? I am just getting more
and more confused.

Wayne

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