anyone know something about this CoCo poke?

[+hloberg]

200 POKE &H0167,&H39:'COLOR ORANGE
210 POKE &HFF22,&H78

 

the above poke changes the background to light orange on dark. personally, I find it a lot easier on the eyes (at least in emulation) then the default green.

 

200 POKE &H0167,&H39:'DARK GREEN
210 POKE &HFF22,&H70

turns the screen light green on dark. also easier on the eyes. the nice thing about the poke it's permanent till a hard reset. 

 

the source I got it from alludes to the poke being able to do other things but messing around with it I haven't done anything else useful.  and unfortunately I lost where I got the poke from. anyone else seen this poke and what, maybe more it can do and where the heck I got it from? 

[John_L]

This is an standard feature built into the VDG chip.  It's an alternate color set.  The original VDG supported Green background with (dark green) letters, or the inverse, dark green background with green letters.  Basic supports switching this mode with the SCREEN command.  SCREEN 0,0 is Green/Black SCREEN 0,1 is Orange/Black.  Your poke allows for the inverse to be enabled and makes it permanent until reset as you stated.  This is nice if you have a coco 1/2, if you have a coco 3, you have palette control.  For example, if you have a coco 3, you can use PALETTE 12,63:PALETTE 13,0 to get black background with white characters, which is extremely nice.  You also have 40 and 80 column modes that can change to any foreground or background color out of the 64 colors.  For CoCo 1/2, you also have the option of CoCoVGA (CoCoVGA.com) for much improved graphics, a 64 column mode, and 16 color VGA mode (128x96), palette control and 512 color set total.

 

However, as far as color sets go, the stock coco can do the greeen/black or orange/black, or their inverses, and that's it.

 

[+hloberg]

thanks for the info. not sure what the guy was alluding to in the article about it doing more, maybe the 3? by the way, I played with a VGA tripped out CoCo2 last week. very cool. on my 'to get' list. 

[MrDave]

The first poke &h0167,&h30 stops the video chip from resetting everytime a character is displayed and the &hff22, sets the video mode for lowercase, invert text , background color and graphics mode. So from low to high dont poke bits 0,1,2. They have nothing to do with video. Bit 3 is green (0) or orange (1) if your coco can do it.. so poke &hff22,08 will get you orange if available.  The next bit is true lowercase on. Ie poke &hff22,18  lowercase and orange.. the next bit is inverse color. The next bit if background  color. So &hff22,30 gets you green background , inverse text, and lowercase.. if your coco supports it.