[Coco] Interbank Incident for Drivewire

[L. Curtis Boyle]

The graphics text character set they used must be treating the graphics as 256x192x2 (Donkey King draws the barrels, score etc. like this as well, which is why it doesn't look all that good on RGB using this method, either). The only way to fix that would be to redo the character set so that the characters are "bolded" (2 pixels width minimum), and aligned to show as white. That is probably too much effort.

L. Curtis Boyle
curtisboyle at sasktel.net



On Jan 3, 2013, at 3:54 PM, Robert Gault wrote:

> L. Curtis Boyle wrote:
>> It should just involve patching the game itself. If Interbank is using either display graphics commands, or normal bitmapped graphics, then a PMODE 4 style artifacting screen is identically set up to a PMODE 3 style 4 color screen. You would lose "subtle" colors (yellows,etc.), but it should work fairly well. I know I had patched Biosphere the same way many years back, and it worked fine.
>> 
>> L. Curtis Boyle
>> curtisboyle at sasktel.net
> 
> Curtis,
> 
> I just tried "messing" with Interbank using the MESS debugger. I started Coco3 emulation and started the game to reach the first graphics screen where you see a coastline scene and are asked if you have a Speech Sound Pak.
> 
> With MESS artifacting the graphic looks very good. I started the debugger and changed the value at $FF22 from $F8 to $E8 (PMODE4 to PMODE3). That produced a true color screen but of course with incorrect colors.
> Changing the palette colors as follows, the screen was almost acceptable with unfortunately almost unreadable text.
> Palette       Value
> $FFB4           0
> $FFB5           9
> $FFB6         $24
> $FFB7         $3F
> The net result was similar to the VCC composite presentation but the text was not as sharp.
> 
> I don't have any method for doing the above on a real Coco3 so either the system code or the game will need patching. I'm not sure which type of patching will be easiest. It will be interesting to see if the text is readable on a real Coco3 in "PMODE3" graphics.
> 
> Robert
> 
> 
> 
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