[Coco] Will the *real* artifact colors please stand up?

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/5/04 2:11:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time, rtaylor at bayou.com 
writes:

> I always thought of the random red/blue artifact issue as a bug in the CoCo 
>  1/2 video.  I'm not sure if the CoCo 3 has the same problem. If it does, 
>  then the GIME is probably emulating this by using a random generator.

ISTR that the Coco3 has a more thorough power-on reset in its GIME, hence 
will always come up the same color.  No random number generator, but some games 
were written so that if you held the ESC key while switching on, the opposite 
clock phase would be re-initialized in the GIME to reverse the colors.

Maybe that ESC trick was coded into the Super-Extended BASIC ROM, so that it 
would work on old Coco 1/2 games?  Been a long while.  --Mike K.