Why the poor color selection?

[notwhoyouthink]

Would it have killed TI to have included a brown in the color pallet?

I would gladly swap one of the green shades for a real brown.

Trees with yellow/red trunks just look... awkward.

Edited December 31, 2017 by notwhoyouthink

[matthew180]

The colors in the 9918A seem to have been chosen for shading. The red, green, and blue all have multiple shades that can be used with good effect (check out Konami games on the MSX1). But yes, it would have been nice to have a brown and/or orange color.

[+OLD CS1]

Back in the good ol' TV days we could use some color blending to make missing colors. I used a red/yellow mix using a character defined with alternating 55AA to roughly produce orange on the TV, and it looked fairly good on a composite CRT monitor. This came about from when I was writing my conversion of Block Battle when I accidentally produced purple on the TV by mixing red and blue. Never tried for a brown.

[sometimes99er]

Why the poor color selection?

 

I asked Karl Guttag about the palette and he replied (snip, more below): It was driven by trying to implement the NTSC type signal. As I remember it, the Home Computer group picked the colors and I remember the colors being adjusted at least once after the first silicon to adjust a few of the colors.

 

Don't know if this resembles the so-called NTSC type signal. For fun I did a TV test signal cartridge in Standard Graphic Mode (GM1). A nice MSX version was done using Bitmap Graphic Mode (GM2).

 

 

http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/vdp-99xx/email4.html

http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/vdp-99xx/

 

Edited December 31, 2017 by sometimes99er