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Artifacting - isn't it weird?


dmlloyd

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Hmmm, that's a good solder point to know about IMHO. I'll file this away in my

drawer of developer theory. ;-) I already liked the 'LUM' project (anyone else?) and

your thought means the other side is available for 'special video input' too.

There are curious possibilities here...<devious laff...>

 

&falcon

 

An interesting hardware note: the CADJ input can be driven at color clock frequencies, giving you independent control of a pixel's color. Just lift the pin and supply a voltagr level.

 

Bob

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For what it's worth, I seem to get different colors than jacobus on my 130XE. I base this on how the image looks through my PC's video capture card. I don't change the hue, but I do play with the contrast and saturation a bit, trying to match what I see when the 130XE is connected to its own monitor.

 

In fact, I seem to get different colors in different games, though there may be other factors at work. Two games I know that use this trick are David's Midnight Magic for the pinball table, and Flight Simulator II for the cockpit instruments. I get greens and purples in both games, but not quite the same shades of each. I wonder if David's Midnight Magic using a not-quite-black background has something to do with that.

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Playing around in Altirra and I noticed that standard artifactig in NTSC allows you to change the phase / colours but when you put it in high artifacting it completely changes the colours.

 

Seems odd to me?

 

But then again I'm not a TV engineer or have tech knowledge like Phaeron does :)

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FujiSkunk, you can change the color qualities of artifacting by choosing a different color value for the background, which will effectively mix the effect of luma artifacting with the normal color output of the GTIA. For my test I chose black and white to provide the sharpest contrast possible, which will allow a better identification of the relative phase shift of the luma output.

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FujiSkunk, you can change the color qualities of artifacting by choosing a different color value for the background, which will effectively mix the effect of luma artifacting with the normal color output of the GTIA. For my test I chose black and white to provide the sharpest contrast possible, which will allow a better identification of the relative phase shift of the luma output.

 

That would explain the differences in David's Midnight Magic then. Any idea why I see different colors for the cockpit instruments of Flight Simulator II on my 130XE? As far as I can tell it's just black and white there. Okay, never mind; it turns out Flight Simulator II uses a very dark grey for its background. Interesting how a slight change in the "mixing" color dramatically affects the final product.

Edited by FujiSkunk
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I'm not exactly a super tech guy, but the story I heard back in the day was that artifacting stems from the fact that the NTSC standard was never intended to include color. It was literally added after the fact, taking advantage of gap between the video and audio carriers, two additional signals were tacked onto the back end, using phase differences to determine the exact hue. This tends to smear the signal, and white areas will have a bluish tint on the left side and reddish on the right. Fine patterns of black and white (like herringbone jackets) could create some eye popping results, so people would turn the color down when watching shows that hadn't made the leap to color.

On a computer the tint of an artifacted color would depend on how it combined the chroma and luma - even a slight variation up or down the carrier would move chroma enough to change the tint, I would think.

'Course my knowledge of this stuff is pretty thin, I'm sure I'm over simplifying a complex bit of engineering.

 

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I'm not exactly a super tech guy, but the story I heard back in the day was that artifacting stems from the fact that the NTSC standard was never intended to include color.

All color television was a hack of the existing B&W standards, and was designed to be backwards compatible. It sounds a little like you're confusing the color encoding methodology with the way a color signal is mixed into the picture. The color information is in-band in the B&W picture but is at a high enough frequency that it doesn't affect the picture on B&W TV's much. It's funny that saturated color information is often quite visible on NTSC color TV's as "dot-crawl."

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Okay here's another version which displays color bars for comparison.

Just a thought-- If the color bars are for comparison with the artifacted colors, then it might be good to rearrange things as follows:

 

Even bit positions:

<line of artifacted color (even bits)>

<line of color bars>

<line of artifacted color (odd bits)>

Odd bit positions:

 

That way the color bars can be easily compared to both lines of artifacted colors.

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All color television was a hack of the existing B&W standards, and was designed to be backwards compatible. It sounds a little like you're confusing the color encoding methodology with the way a color signal is mixed into the picture. The color information is in-band in the B&W picture but is at a high enough frequency that it doesn't affect the picture on B&W TV's much. It's funny that saturated color information is often quite visible on NTSC color TV's as "dot-crawl."

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Oops, sorry about that. Haven't gotten the hang of the quote thing.

Just wanted to say that I'm not confused so much as uninformed. Also I wasn't very clear. What I think I read about artifacting was that because adding color was done as a hack, it means that color is "appended" on the tail end of the luma signal. This causes a tiny time delay between the display of luma and chroma. Because the electron gun is still moving, luma and chroma are slightly out of sync, causing the color to bleed slightly into the next pulse. Ordinarily this isn't noticeable, but shows up strongly in tight patterns of white and black. At least that was my impression.

What I wonder is - Do the differences in artifacted colors between different G/CTIA chips come from differences in timing between the luminance and color signals, causing either more or less shift?

Or am I completely out to lunch?

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I've got a few things to talk about with artifacting, being an artist, I used to use artifacting for color in high-res on my 8-bit. But first, I want to point out that I have two 1200XLs and both of them output the green and purple scheme like the 65XE in the pictures above, not the blue and orange as shown for the 1200XL above. The 130XE I used to have ouput the blue/orange scheme. If I turn the tint way to one side or the other, I can get my 1200XLs to display the blue/orange that I prefer (in Ultima games for instance). One of my 1200XL's has the PAL Antic, the other is stock. The monitor I use is a Commodore 1084S. I used to use a TV or Commodore 17XX series monitor for a while with the 130XE when i owned it..

 

Another thing I feel needs mentioning, is that it's possible to get more than just the blue/orange or green/purple colors from artifacting, there is a high-res art program for the 8-bits, I forget the name now, which had a variety of patterns to choose from, that with the positioning of pixels and artifacting, one was able to have about colors total, IIRC. I think I remember an option to change pixel offset when drawing that allowed to mix artifacting too, creating multiple colors. I remember besides the usual blue/orange that I could get a yellow, a light green, a purple and orange/red shades, all slightly different from the green/purple and orange/blue artifact colors. Lines drawn when doing this would be thicker/thinner depending on the color you wanted to acheive. I will have to find this program to share here.

 

The last thing is that I always thought that not only the computer's circuitry, but also the tv/monitor had to do with causes of artifacting. I heard once that the artifact colors observed had to do with the dot density and pitch of the electron gun to the screen as to the color of artifacts seen too on many tv/monitors.

Edited by Gunstar
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The last thing is that I always thought that not only the computer's circuitry, but also the tv/monitor had to do with causes of artifacting. I heard once that the artifact colors observed had to do with the dot density and pitch of the electron gun to the screen as to the color of artifacts seen too on many tv/monitors.

 

That's a misconception based on the idea that the colors come from positioning the high-rez pixels over specific phosphors. While it's true that lower resolution tubes can have trouble showing the color in small details distinctly, the artifact colors are actually being decoded in the circuitry and sent to the RGB guns and are not dependent on any precise gun alignment within the tube.

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Oops, sorry about that. Haven't gotten the hang of the quote thing.

Just wanted to say that I'm not confused so much as uninformed. Also I wasn't very clear. What I think I read about artifacting was that because adding color was done as a hack, it means that color is "appended" on the tail end of the luma signal.

The color signal is mixed with the luma signal in real time. It's literally like mixing a constant 5KHz tone with your favorite song, then playing it back through a 5KHz notch filter so you can hear the song without the tone, or recover the tone without the song. Can you perfectly extract the 5KHz signal? Not really, there will be some cross contamination but it'll be good enough. That's how color is added to video. It's not appended, it's in there all the time.

This causes a tiny time delay between the display of luma and chroma. Because the electron gun is still moving, luma and chroma are slightly out of sync, causing the color to bleed slightly into the next pulse. Ordinarily this isn't noticeable, but shows up strongly in tight patterns of white and black. At least that was my impression.

What I wonder is - Do the differences in artifacted colors between different G/CTIA chips come from differences in timing between the luminance and color signals, causing either more or less shift?

Or am I completely out to lunch?

When patterns of white and black cause the luma signal to oscillate at certain frequencies (or harmonics thereof), the TV is likely to think it has found a color signal. In the previous example of a song and a 5KHz tone, you're going to have the hardest time separating them when the song contains frequencies near 5KHz already. Likewise, when the luma patterns approach 3.58MHz, the TV will start displaying color patterns even though none were intended. This is artifacting.

 

The reason for the differences between CTIA and GTIA occur because CTIA shifts the high rez pixels over by 1. This results in the two colors being swapped.

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  • 9 months later...

It seems that different systems, and even different revisions of the same system, can produce different color artifacts in the 320x192 mode. Ultima II-IV uses the artifact colors in its overworld. Ultima I, by contrast, does not, it uses a non-artifiact color mode on the overworld. The most notable graphics affected are the water and the trees.

 

The water is obviously intended to be blue in these games, and most systems offer blue as one of the "primary" artifact colors. Ideally, the trees should be green, which is what they are in the original Apple II. But in emulators like Atari800Plus and Altirra, brown is only available with blue. It appears that the colors are only ideal on the Atari 800 for these games, as demonstrated in the screenshots above.

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One other thing I have noticed ... the colors are usually some variation of blue-brown, red-cyan, or magenta-green, but only if the PF2 register is 0. Change it to other colors and you get color blending on the artifacts. This doesn't happen with Altirra (the colors stay the same no matter what PF2 is), although it does happen with Atari800Win.

 

In interlace or flicker modes, you can use artifact belnding to make a 16 color rainbow. As an example, here's a screenshot of the color palette from my ICE IRG font editor. The screenshot was takein in Atari800Win. This is Super 0 (Graphics 0 with changes made on CHBAS, PF1, and PF2 every VBLANK), and the rainbow artifact effect is achieved by alternating blue and yellow every frame on the PF2 (background) register. This effect only works properly on a real Atari or on Atari800Win, and only with magenta-green artifacts. For other artifacts (blue-brown or red-cyan), a blending of different colors from opposite sides of the color wheel (red-cyan or green-magenta respectively) will produce this effect.

 

post-23798-0-48824000-1375423525_thumb.png

 

The effect can also be achieved on a scanline basis in Graphics 8, by alternating each scanline between the two colors (blue-yellow, red-cyan, magenta-green)

Edited by Synthpopalooza
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Yeah, most of the hi-res games on the coco2 relied on the two color mode producing four color with artifacts. Orange and Blue.

With the coco3 and an RGB monitor these games are black and white.

 

This the exact reason why the Tandy machines in the US were great but the compatible Dragon machines in PAL land looked monochrome...AKA ZX81 style shit....and it tanked like a lead submarine with the tubes flooded haha :)

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  • 7 months later...

Glad I stumbled up this topic. Could this be the reason that Microleague Baseball has the wrong colors on my 27" Toshiba?

The grass is pink, the fence is green, and the dirt is blue-ish.

 

I was thinking there might be something wrong with the game (floppy) but now I think it's a result of the interlacing used to render the graphics. It was pretty innovative for the time.

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Glad I stumbled up this topic. Could this be the reason that Microleague Baseball has the wrong colors on my 27" Toshiba?

The grass is pink, the fence is green, and the dirt is blue-ish.

 

I was thinking there might be something wrong with the game (floppy) but now I think it's a result of the interlacing used to render the graphics. It was pretty innovative for the time.

 

Here's an Antic Mode E hack for Microleague Baseball: MLB (Color Version)

 

The greens are very close in Atirra in NTSC mode, so it only looks like three colors. PAL mode looks correct in Altirra though. It also looks good in Atari800WinPLus with the XFormer palette for NTSC.

Edited by MrFish
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  • 9 years later...
On 10/23/2012 at 10:01 PM, jacobus said:

As requested, photos of all models including a CTIA 800. The 400 has a monitor output, but the 600 XL is using the RF modulator.

 

post-11281-0-64686200-1351043755_thumb.jpg 400

post-11281-0-81070100-1351043839_thumb.jpg CTIA 800

post-11281-0-23290500-1351043849_thumb.jpg GTIA 800

post-11281-0-85200100-1351043941_thumb.jpg 1200 XL

post-11281-0-64287100-1351043821_thumb.jpg 800 XL

post-11281-0-05694100-1351043762_thumb.jpg 600 XL

post-11281-0-90052000-1351043832_thumb.jpg 65 XE

post-11281-0-82486100-1351043748_thumb.jpg 130 XE

post-11281-0-39987700-1351043855_thumb.jpg XEGS

I would be interesting to line these up in rows with similar patterns.  I find it very interesting that the XE and 1200XL are so similar (just reversed), and the 800XL and XEGS are similar.  

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