[Coco] CoCoFEST! 2009 256-color slideshow (now dithered!)

[Joel Ewy]

Steve Ostrom wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "John W. Linville" 
> <linville at tuxdriver.com>
> To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
> Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 4:28 PM
> Subject: [Coco] CoCoFEST! 2009 256-color slideshow (now dithered!)
>
>
>> So I learned how to dither images.  Now my 256-color slideshow looks
>> a lot better...
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm9yB3xVfbs
>>
>> Enjoy!
>>
>> John
>> -- 
>> John W. Linville Someday the world will need a hero, and you
>> linville at tuxdriver.com might be all we have.  Be ready.
>>
>> -- 
>> Coco mailing list
>> Coco at maltedmedia.com
>> http://five.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/coco
>
>
> John, when I view this on my Vista PC with broadband connection, I see 
> static pictures that last about 15 seconds each with a flashing 
> border. What am I missing?  What should I be seeing?
>

That's exactly what you should be seeing.  It's a video of a slideshow 
running on the CoCo 3 rendered in 256 artifact colors on an NTSC 
monitor.  This uses the CoCo 3's 640x200x4-color screen to produce an 
effective 160x200x(approximately)256 color display.  This doesn't work 
with an RGB monitor, and AFAIK it doesn't work in any of the emulators.  
It doesn't seem to be something that was used much back in the day, 
though there was perhaps a paint program from Sundog(?) that used it.

Recent discussions ( 
http://www.coco3.com/community/2009/12/256-composite-colors-screen-capturesphotos/?instance=tml-1&action=login 
) have sparked new interest in this display pseudo-mode, and Jason Law, 
Brian Palmer, Robert Gault, and Potatohead have worked out a fixed 
~256-color palette that approximates pretty closely what you can see on 
the CoCo's screen.  You can re-map a picture to this palette and convert 
it to a format the CoCo can display, and you get a low-resolution, 
256-color display on the CoCo 3.

I have also made a slideshow to demonstrate this:  
http://www.coco3.com/community/2010/01/256-artifact-color-slideshow-demo/
You need a 512K CoCo 3 and Drivewire to make this work, but I'm working 
on a version that can run from a 720K floppy disk.  I may also be able 
to squeeze it down so it runs from 128K, but I'm not yet certain that 
will be possible.

John has also recently posted a very cool demonstration of 128x96 
16-color 15fps motion video on a CoCo 3:  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVksKs8Y_XA

Pretty impressive stuff for an 8-bit machine.

JCE
> Thanks!
>
> -- Steve --
>
>
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>