[Coco] colors

[Wayne Campbell]

Thanks, Bill. Unfortunately, I have already been doing this (in a slightly
different way) with a routine I wrote named colortest. I am learning much.
For example, you say the first eight are all background, but I know that
they are not. Register 2 is window foreground. I've changed it enough times
to know. Register 3 is window background. Changing register 11 does not
change the background of the window. Changing register 10 does not affect
the foreground color either. In fact, the only 2 registers I can count on
100% of the time to be the correct foreground and background registers are
2 and 3. The cursor also uses one of the back 8, but I can't recall ATM
what that register number is. I can say it changes only the cursor color.
Trying to use it as a window color does not work. It doesn't seem to matter
what color I specify, I do not get the foreground or background color I
want. The one thing your routine does do that mine doesn't is identify the
color number of the default 8 colors. Other than black and white, I was not
sure of any color. Thanks to you I now have the correct values of the
default colors. This will help me much as I work to find the darker
versions of those colors. Once found, then it will be a matter of figuring
out how to make my program use them all.

I found an article in the January, 1987 issue of the Rainbow named Color
Chart for the CoCo 3. It contained images of both the composite and RGB
sets of the 64 colors. It also contained the source code for the program
they wrote that displays all 64 colors at once. It's written in SECB, and
includes a assembly source listing for the routine that does the work,
named CYCLE. I had to wrestle a copy from the article, as the OCR was not
very accurate, but I got it all typed in and saved.

Being a Basic09 guy, I went to the Basic09 Tour Guide to see if there was
an alternative, and there was. I typed in the code and watched as VCC not
only displayed the colors, but as the Log window recorded hitting something
multiple times. I guess VCC got overworked? It worked tho.

I don't have edtasm to compile the assembly code with, and trying to load
the BASIC source (named COLOR3.BAS) results in an error. I am not very
familiar with SECB, or COLOR BASIC at all really. I jumped right into OS-9,
and never learned CB, ECB or SECB. The Complete Guide to OS-9 Level II
contains listings for Bars and Palette procedures to display the colors in
Basic09. Not the same as the one from the article, but gives me code for
setting palette registers in Basic09. Still no help on how to setup and use
a 16-color text palette that contains 8 dark colors and 8 light colors that
can be used interchangeably as foreground and background colors. Setting
the palette registers is the easy part. Getting the system to know that I
want this register here and that register there, and be able to use all 16
of them that way, is proving to be impossible. This may still not make
sense, but it's difficult to make sense when you don't know what you need
to know to ask an informed question.

At any rate, I am still working at it. I hope I can solve this problem
soon. Worrying about screen colors was not part of what unpack was supposed
to do. But I can't give up on it. This needs to be answered, and I need to
understand how to properly use the palette. So, I continue searching.

Wayne

-- 
The Structure of I-Code
http://www.cocopedia.com/wiki/index.php/The_Structure_of_I-Code

decode
http://cococoding.com/wayne/