[Coco] More colors on CoCo 1?

[L. Curtis Boyle]

On Wed, 24 Jan 2007 16:29:39 -0600, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:

> Roger Taylor wrote:
>> As for the topic of displaying more colors on a CoCo, here's my take.
>>
>> This is better for graphics display programs, such as Projector-3,
>> and Sock's HiColor BMP viewer.
>>
>> If you try color mixing tricks with games, you're losing CPU time to
>> the video routines that the game code needs more.  So what you will
>> be faced with is trying to squeeze CPU cycles out of your game code
>> to make up for the loss.  It's already hard enough to write a CoCo
>> game with fast animation without using video tricks, so expect a  
>> challenge....
>>
> I don't think it makes sense to try color mixing techniques for most
> action games, unless you just want to prove you can.  In action games,
> it's about the action.  Color is secondary.  But it would make sense for
> adventure games, certain simulation games, and maybe strategy games.  I
> guess one type of action game that would really benefit from > 16 colors
> would be first person shooters, but those are already challenging enough
> to program on the CoCo.
>
> But I would really like to see a text/graphic adventure that uses a high
> color display.  That would be very cool.  And most of the time the
> program will be waiting for user input with that type of game.  The
> biggest challenge there would be fitting all those pictures on media
> likely to be found on the CoCo, and loading them in a timely manner.
> You could have user-configurable config files to map out on which floppy
> disk/drive/virtual disk image/hard drive partition the pictures are
> stored, use compression to keep file size and I/O time down, and limit
> the size of the high-color images to a portion of the screen.  You could
> also speculatively pre-load next and previous screens, or limit the
> high-color screens to special situations in the game, such as when a
> particular objective has been achieved, using low color images during
> the rest of play.
>
> This is one of the things I would like to try using Sockmaster's HiColor
> code.
>

     If I remember correctly, the intro (animated) screen of Photon by Jeff  
Steidl uses a similiar technique to get extra colors, but I don't believe  
the actual game itself does. An adventure game or strategy game would be  
cool to see using these techniques, I agree.


-- 
L. Curtis Boyle