[Coco] More colors on CoCo 1?

[Joel Ewy]

Roger Taylor wrote:
> At 02:12 AM 1/21/2007, you wrote:
>   
>> Ok, this may be just wild speculation.  But couldn't one write a program
>> that would flip between 2 9-color SG-24 screens to make a 64x192
>> high(er)-color display on a CoCo 1 or 2?  Not that I'm seriously
>> thinking of attempting such a thing.  It would take up 12K of RAM, but
>> that in itself shouldn't be a show stopper on a 64K machine.  Resolution
>> would be quite low, and the elongated pixels would be weird.  But I
>> wonder if you could almost get a recognizable image by time-domain
>> dithering the colors.
>>
>> Another question is whether the screens would even have to be in the
>> same graphics mode.  Could one superimpose a 256x192 2-color bitmap over
>> an SG-24 colorizer?  Or two?  That would require 18K.  Why would this
>> not work?
>>     
>
> Sockmaster would be the guy to pull that off, although I think pixel 
> resolution has a lot to do with it.
>
>   
Yeah.  The line of thinking was of course influenced by looking at
Sock's CoCo 3 HiColor code.  Also by Robert Gault's web page on S-24 (
http://home.att.net/~robert.gault/Coco/History/Semi24.htm ).
> Blockier graphics will result in flicker being much more noticable 
> because you're spreading the same colors across so many dots on the screen.
>   
Some amount of flicker is a given with this kind of thing.  The point is
just to see if it could be done.  If you would superimpose a G6R with a
dithered high-res bitmap over the color screen you could break up the
4-pixel long blocks.  33%-50% of the time (depending on # of screens)
many of the big blocks of color would be broken up into high-res
pixels.  I don't know whether that would have any effect on perceived
flicker, but it would add detail.

How would PMODE 4 artifact colors blend with S-24 real colors?  Also, it
occurs to me that many of the 'mixed' colors would likely be duplicates
of each other, and possibly existing 'real' colors.  So would it be just
as effective to use one of the higher resolution 4-color modes like G6C?

JCE