[Coco] colors

[Robert Gault]

Wayne,

Your original message used gfx2("PALETTE"...) to change palette colors but you 
wanted these to be system wide as you were opening new windows. I suspect that 
the Basic09 command is not system wide thus causing your problems.

The system wide command for OS-9 is a SetStat call $97, SS.DFPal. You would 
execute that from Basic09 with the SYSCALL command. SS.DFPal requires a path 
number (probably standard output) with regX pointing to 16 bytes of palette data.

If your problems include a dislike of the colors you are seeing, it may be 
emulator problems. MESS has very accurate color representation.

Actually, colors make much more sense in RGB mode than in composite. Shown in 
the Coco3 service manual
.  bits    B5 B4 B3 B2 B1 B0
RGB color  R1 G1 B1 R0 G0 B0

CMP color  I1 I0 P3 P2 P1 P0  I=intensity P=phase angle

Now it is intuitive that there are 4 levels of RGB combining in an expected 
fashion to generate 64 colors. It is not intuitive to predict what color you 
will get from a phase angle. You would need to be an expert on TVs to know that.

A guess might be that the colors are arraigned in a rainbow pattern around a 
circle but that is not right. At 0deg, the colors are black, dark gray, light 
gray and white as the colors are increased with the values 0, 16, 32, 48. There 
are 15 phase angles arranged around the color wheel (as expected from 2^4) with 
2=green, 7=red, 12=blue, so 120deg between each main color.

We can go over this further in private e-mail.

Robert