potatohead's Blog

Nice! I didn't know the CoCo 3 was capable of such awesome graphics! Glad I just got one, can't wait to play around with it!

Awwww, that Sonic picture is solely responsible for me now hunting high and low for a Coco3

Mmmmmm, 6809 + Byte per pixel sprites!! Yummy

None Sonic and King's quest 5 are available on Coco 3. Did you use a paint program on Coco 3?

None Sonic and King's quest 5 are available on Coco 3. Did you use a paint program on Coco 3?

 

No these 2 games are not on the coco 3 at the moment. But if a talented programmer decided to port them over he could use this 256 artifact feature. I would guess Kings Quest 5 would be the easier off the 2 to port over. I'm hoping MajorG from the coco community decides to try and port it over.

 

PotatoHead. Jason and I are going to try and use the scrolling reg to see if it will work and not screw up the colors. I can't see why it won't work. 1st we will try the normal scrolling settings. If that fails try increasing the pixel increments. I reckon 4 pixel movement should work.

Nice! I didn't know the CoCo 3 was capable of such awesome graphics! Glad I just got one, can't wait to play around with it!

 

No one really knows what the coco 3 can do. It's been the last 2-3 years that people have been seeing it do stuff it was never meant to do.

Only need look at Donkey Kong by Sock Master. Or too hear music and sounds being done by CPU only with scrolling etc only need to look at Gold Runner 2000 by Chet Simpson. These showcase the awesome power off the 6809 chip and Gime chip. But now we have this 160x192x256 color artifact mode it should really show the world what the coco 3 could be made to do.

 

Happy to hear another retrogamer has brought a coco 3. Drop into www.coco3.com anytime and leave posts. If you need answers to questions this is the place to get them. Btw mate. Have fun playing around with it.

 

laters

 

Briza

None Sonic and King's quest 5 are available on Coco 3. Did you use a paint program on Coco 3?

 

No these 2 games are not on the coco 3 at the moment. But if a talented programmer decided to port them over he could use this 256 artifact feature. I would guess Kings Quest 5 would be the easier off the 2 to port over. I'm hoping MajorG from the coco community decides to try and port it over.

 

PotatoHead. Jason and I are going to try and use the scrolling reg to see if it will work and not screw up the colors. I can't see why it won't work. 1st we will try the normal scrolling settings. If that fails try increasing the pixel increments. I reckon 4 pixel movement should work.

 

Forgot to mention that the pics were from a Pc. loaded into Photoshop pro. reduced to fit the resolution of the coco 3 640x192x4 mode. then the colors were matched as close as possible to the Composite colors from the RGB palette. Then you load it up on the coco 3 and it will do the rest.

Serguei,

 

It's a bitmap picture converted to one of the Color Computer 3 NTSC artifact palettes to show capability.

 

Andym: Yeah, you know it! I've been thinking through some sprite draw routines already. The 6809 is such a great 8 bit CPU.

 

If you have to have one, go seek out Cloud 9. They are still in the CoCo business, and have the gear you want. Funny, I used to see the things all the time, then nothing. Thrifty scene here has dried almost completely up!

Serguei,It's a bitmap picture converted to one of the Color Computer 3 NTSC artifact palettes to show capability.Andym: Yeah, you know it! I've been thinking through some sprite draw routines already. The 6809 is such a great 8 bit CPU. If you have to have one, go seek out Cloud 9. They are still in the CoCo business, and have the gear you want. Funny, I used to see the things all the time, then nothing. Thrifty scene here has dried almost completely up!

I don't have a Coco 3. I wonder if I can get the same result using an emulator.

This is not yet supported through emulation. The only artifacting supported is the basic red / blue artifacting the CoCo 2 and 1 were capable of.

 

I've edited my previous blog entry to show the best overall artifact palette, you could use as a color chart.

 

Best case work flow on emulation is to use the 320 Pixel mode for development. That one will display as pairs of pixels, each being one of 16 colors. That's enough to see that the screen graphics make sense.

 

Once it's done, then edit the program to the 640 Pixel mode, and set Palette entries to 0, 16,32, 48 and build a disk or cassette image.

 

Somebody with a real CoCo could then display the product of it for you.

 

Some discussion has occured regarding emulation support. Frankly, I think the palette I have displayed here is the best overall one for emulation. It has a great color set.

 

Truth is, tons of possible palettes are possible and emulating those would be a PITA. Probably a real machine only kind of thing.

 

Right now, there is also some discussion as to the best palette to use for an emulation target. Some viewing of the combinations in both the 640 and 320 pixel mode need to be done before a 256 color emulation support is considered. That process is going on right now.

 

I'm actually going to generate a lot of them, do some captures and send them off to others, who are going to toy with them, encoding pictures and such to sort out what might make sense to go into the emulator.

 

Nobody has approached the author of the CoCo 3 emulator, and MESS could be updated by anyone with the skill. Neither project has been initiated just yet.

 

Users are just now getting aware of the high-color capability this machine has, and that's mostly the product of my efforts recently to get it out there and published, after having sat on it since the very early 90's.

 

I had to get rid of my CoCo 3 back then and didn't circle around back to this until this year.

 

Better late than never, I guess.

 

If you want to run a .cas image, I'm happy to do a screen capture for you anytime. I won't have disk capability for a while yet, and will be using emulation myself, in the way I posted here, to write some early code, then view on a real CoCo 3, once it's up and running.

Yeah. Id like to see 256 colours screenshot from coco 3 and another one with monitor to see the difference. Of better, film it and post it on Youtube to see coco 3 in action.

http://www.coco3.com/community/2009/12/256-composite-colors-screen-capturesphotos/comment-page-1/#comment-57822

 

On that thread, we've got 256 color captures and I did a live TV photo of a CoCo 3, connected to a SONY television. It's taken with a high-detail digital camera, giving that close up look. Damn nice actually. The captures don't do it justice, IMHO.

 

If you connect a CoCo 3 to a monitor, these colors don't appear. They require NTSC composite display.

 

On a monitor, the machine is 64 color, with 16 per scanline, if CPU tricks are used. 16 per screen otherwise.

 

So far, we've only got the static picture bitmaps. Moving object demos are in progress.

 

A quick look at Remz sprite / scrolling demo shows what the monitor colors look like.

 

http://www.coco3.com/community/2009/11/sprite-and-scrolling-coco-3-demo/

 

That one is done in 320 pixel mode, with the stock 64 colors available without the artifacting technique shown here.

 

This technique is 160 pixel resolution, BTW.

Thanks for sharing those pictures. They're awesome. IBM also use this technique to displqy 160x200 colour with CGA using a composite monitor. Early DOS games you can choose either composite mode or RGB mode.

 

It's too bad that Radio Shack didn't use the composite mode to display 160x192 in 256 colour on Coco 3. Peharps 16 colours was fine in 80s.

 

I hope somebody could release a 256 color programs on Coco 3. Id like to run them.