If you could replace a single colour on the 9918’s colour palette with any RGB value, what colour would you add, and which would you remove?

[pixelpedant]

As boring as it sounds, I think I’d be tempted to add a dark grey.  Probably at the expense of one of the greens, or reds. I feel like four greyscale shades (a la CGA) go a lot farther than three.

[+adamantyr]

Dark grey WOULD be nice, the grey on the TI is really just an off-white color.

 

What the TI needs is darker hues; the darkest color besides black is dark blue. A dark brown, indigo or deep purple would be nice to have.

 

As for a color to drop, I'd say light yellow or medium green. Neither of them is strong enough in hue to stand out against other colors of their type and luminescence.

[+FarmerPotato]

On the Geneve (back in the day), I replaced Dark Red with Brown at boot time. 

 

I'd been using it to stand in for brown anyway.

[pixelpedant]

Yeah, I feel like dark red is an okay brown, at least as far as what you can reasonably expect from a 15 visible colour palette goes. That being said, a true brown would surely be more useful than whatever shade of red, yellow or green one likes the least. 

[Opry99er]

Dump magenta, add a brown.

Edited December 10, 2019 by Opry99er

[fabrice montupet]

I would replace the dark red with a nice brown.

[Omega-TI]

1 hour ago, adamantyr said:

What the TI needs is darker hues; the darkest color besides black is dark blue. A dark brown, indigo or deep purple would be nice to have.

Rasmus wrote a program a few years back for people with F18A's called PALEA5.  It's available in cartridge BIN format as well as DSK format.  Just search for "PALEA5" in this forum and you'll find it. ? 

[+OLD CS1]

I want a second shade of transparent.

[pixelpedant]

26 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

I want a second shade of transparent.

But I feel like to keep up with the NES, which after all kind of defined game graphics in the popular imagination of the late 80s, what the TI really needs is *nine different identical blacks*.  Anything else just wouldn't be keeping up with the Joneses. 

[JB]

2 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

I want a second shade of transparent.

I think we should get rid of transparent entirely. Replace it with octarine.

[Asmusr]

I think we should remove cyan.

[+mizapf]

No more blue skies?

 

(I remember that in German, this color was called "kornblumenblau" by TI (cornflower blue). I wonder whether I ever actually saw a cornflower, at least knowingly. "Zyan" is too close to "Zyankali" = potassium cyanide.)

[Omega-TI]

About all this...

1) How would you accomplish this, it's all in hardware right?

2) What about the look and feel of legacy programs designed to use the standard color palette?

 

I imagine some extensions could be designed into the new F18A Mk2 *IF* Matt was willing, but otherwise...

[Asmusr]

1 hour ago, mizapf said:

No more blue skies?

[Omega-TI]

1 minute ago, Asmusr said:

I hardly ever see the title screen anymore, but you know, that looks BETTER!

[Tursi]

1 hour ago, --- Ω --- said:

1) How would you accomplish this, it's all in hardware right?

On the 9918A, you won't.  The analog taps for color are inside the chip.

 

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, mizapf said:

No more blue skies?

 

55 minutes ago, Asmusr said:

 

In my line of work these days, grey skies are a bad thing.

 

[pixelpedant]

52 minutes ago, Tursi said:

On the 9918A, you won't.  The analog taps for color are inside the chip.

 

Seems realistic to project a future where almost everybody who's actively and regularly using a TI99 is using an FPGA VDP, though.  I mean, if F18As had never gone out of production, that'd probably be the case today.  So it's maybe worth thinking about optional tweaks to the colour space in that context.  Especially something like an alternate colour mode which switches out dark red for brown (seems really popular), or makes dark yellow a less bilious shade.  Which shouldn't really even really "break" most existing designs if left on for legacy games.  But if the alternate palette mode isn't on by default, that's not really even a concern. 

 

That having said, I was mostly asking this as a thought experiment.  Now it's just got me thinking. 

 

 

[PeteE]

I would like to replace the transparent color 0 with a darker gray or brown.  But suppose you could inject that color as composite video into EXTVDP, and set VDP register 0 bit 7 to 1 to enable the external VDP input.  Would that get you that extra color in place of transparent?

[Tursi]

3 hours ago, pixelpedant said:

Seems realistic to project a future where almost everybody who's actively and regularly using a TI99 is using an FPGA VDP, though.  I mean, if F18As had never gone out of production, that'd probably be the case today.  So it's maybe worth thinking about optional tweaks to the colour space in that context.  Especially something like an alternate colour mode which switches out dark red for brown (seems really popular), or makes dark yellow a less bilious shade.  Which shouldn't really even really "break" most existing designs if left on for legacy games.  But if the alternate palette mode isn't on by default, that's not really even a concern. 

Matt has sold out each run of F18As, but there are still people who feel the cost is too high. Wait for it, he seems to be pretty close.

 

Nothing wrong, with that in mind, with a little BIOS tweak that lets you change the system palette.

[Tursi]

2 hours ago, PeteE said:

I would like to replace the transparent color 0 with a darker gray or brown.  But suppose you could inject that color as composite video into EXTVDP, and set VDP register 0 bit 7 to 1 to enable the external VDP input.  Would that get you that extra color in place of transparent?

Hah, that's an interesting idea. The main trick I found when I tried to use the external input was sync -- when you activate external video, the VDP also expects to receive video sync. If you provided both... that might even work.

 

[pixelpedant]

Worth noting I guess that Tim Worthington's NESRGB and 2600RGB both feature a palette switch for selecting from multiple palettes (well, as an option, but it'd be weird not to install it).  And the 2600RGB palette is reprogrammable.  So there's precedent for this kind of thing. 

[Omega-TI]

I'd like to see a "night mode" for the new F18A Mk2.  My Windows has a dark setting, my car has a dark setting and my phone even has a night setting.  Having something like this available in the TI would be so cool, not to mention easier on the eyes.  I can imagine some sort of small E/A5 program could be run that could easily toggle such a feature... if it was included.

[Airshack]

Why does the TI-99/4 have this color pallet? Why multiple shades of yellow, red, blue, green? I’ve always wanted to know. Is it really just eight colors somehow hacked into 16 via digital sorcery? Why no brown or dark grey? Why a less spectacular pallet than one witnesses playing Atari VCS games?

[+adamantyr]

The same question could be asked, I suppose, of any engineer who worked on the computers of that era. Since they had a limited number of colors possible, it's really an artistic and marketing choice over anything else.

 

Whoever picked colors on the TI clearly wanted more yellows and greens than was standard on most systems. Honestly, one yellow and two greens would have been fine. Light Yellow and Medium Green are two of the least useful shades. (Medium Red is also kind of meh.)

 

Cyan feels like it was chosen specifically as the "baseline" background color for applications. It's so significantly brighter than the other two blues that they don't blend very well.