Ooh the colors!?! (Weirdly different colors between systems)

[leech]

So of course after having completed the SuperVideo 2.1 mod for the 1200XL, I decided to run it through it's paces and check some of my favorite games.  I'd ran into this weird issue with two different sets of Ultima IV ATRs that I have, where one seemed to have the correct colors, but the other did not.  I initially thought it was a PAL/NTSC issue, but it doesn't even seem to be consistent between Atari models!

 

For fun, I also took a look at Ultima III, and it seems to have the same issue (though apparently I only took a picture of the 130XE which looked almost correct, the trees are red, but the water is blue at least.)  It's not even consistent between the XEGS and 130XE (it's annoying that the XEGS requires you to pull off the entire shield to get to the POT for the color...)

 

Anyone else with a plethora of Ataris ever seen anything like this?  At least some of them look right

 

Ultima IV - Britannia.ATR Ultima IV - Program.ATR Ultima IV - Towne.ATR Ultima IV - Underworld.ATR ULTIMA IV - QUEST OF THE AVATAR (1985)(ORIGIN)(DISK 1 OF 4).ATR ULTIMA IV - QUEST OF THE AVATAR (1985)(ORIGIN)(DISK 2 OF 4).ATR ULTIMA IV - QUEST OF THE AVATAR (1985)(ORIGIN)(DISK 3 OF 4).ATR ULTIMA IV - QUEST OF THE AVATAR (1985)(ORIGIN)(DISK 4 OF 4).ATR

[Caterpiggle]

Wow , that is the most annoying ever ! Yes, you are right in those weirdo colours ! I better check out on my 8 bits computers and match your correct colors ! Which one is the correct colors on lakes ? Suppose to be bright blue , right ?

 

That is weird ! I tried to test on Altirra emulator and it show ONLY B/W screen ??? What going on ??

Edited April 5, 2020 by Caterpiggle

[_The Doctor__]

I have covered this in the past,

1) you need to calibrate all of your Atari fleet     and then... what to do and or explainations

2) there is a capacitor you can change to adjust this a little bit, I no longer remember what the caps number is and what not, but I did cover this using Jingle disk as the example

3) A fresh copy of the game will test the tv/monitor/computer on some titles and ask what you see and adjust the colors, it will then save it to disk and will show that color scheme forever after, making more than one computer look wrong because it save the color scheme which is wrong for that particular machine. SO try a brand new copy from a never before used disk image and it will ask if you see this color or that and only use that disk thereafter with the computer you chose the color setting on.

4) I had a NEC monitor and a Goldstar television using the same computer gave my starship as orange on one and not on the other... the TV artifact was opposite due to the decode and or tube pattern... this left me to use a fresh copy and set the color or flip a switch I had in the computer to swap the caps...  an 800XL messes up Jingle disk colors, where as on an XE they look fine.... I swapped my XL's cap for whatever was in the XE... I like my trees to look bluish green or green thank you very much

Edited April 5, 2020 by _The Doctor__

[leech]

25 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

I have covered this in the past,

1) you need to calibrate all of your Atari fleet     and then... what to do and or explainations

2) there is a capacitor you can change to adjust this a little bit, I no longer remember what the caps number is and what not, but I did cover this using Jingle disk as the example

3) A fresh copy of the game will test the tv/monitor/computer on some titles and ask what you see and adjust the colors, it will then save it to disk and will show that color scheme forever after, making more than one computer look wrong because it save the color scheme which is wrong for that particular machine. SO try a brand new copy from a never before used disk image and it will ask if you see this color or that and only use that disk thereafter with the computer you chose the color setting on.

4) I had a NEC monitor and a Goldstar television using the same computer gave my starship as orange on one and not on the other... the TV artifact was opposite due to the decode and or tube pattern... this left me to use a fresh copy and set the color or flip a switch I had in the computer to swap the caps...  an 800XL messes up Jingle disk colors, where as on an XE they look fine.... I swapped my XL's cap for whatever was in the XE... I like my trees to look bluish green or green thank you very much

Ah, but what is the explanation that the different versions of Ultima IV have different colors on the same system?  Yet some are fine on others?  As far as I have seen, Ultima IV doesn't ask or have any sort of color calibration.  Ha, seemed it was a shot in the dark which of the two versions I tried would look even remotely right, with Exodus only looking almost right on the 130XE. 

 

29 minutes ago, Caterpiggle said:

Wow , that is the most annoying ever ! Yes, you are right in those weirdo colours ! I better check out on my 8 bits computers and match your correct colors ! Which one is the correct colors on lakes ? Suppose to be bright blue , right ?

 

That is weird ! I tried to test on Altirra emulator and it show ONLY B/W screen ??? What going on ??

You need to enable artifacting for the Ultima games to look correct on Altirra.  Lode Runner (one of the versions I have at least!) also is one that requires artifacting.  I am intending on making a list.

[leech]

One funny note, that picture of the 800xl very much looked more purple than the camera showed.  For sure the phone camera on the Note 10+ does not seem to like artifacting colors that much.  It tends to make them a bit more faded than they are on screen.  It was really noticeable when I made a video of the intro of Alternate Reality.  It didn't pick up the shades of brown in the middle of the city very well....

[Caterpiggle]

Hello Leech,

Thank you for rely me back online.

Finally I found it and I set on NTSC , show green color on lakes. No Color on PAL , just B/W only. Is that right , green lake on XL Altirra ?

Edited April 5, 2020 by Caterpiggle

[leech]

4 minutes ago, Caterpiggle said:

Finally I found it and I set on NTSC , show green color on lakes. No Color on PAL , just B/W only. Is that right , green lake on XL Altirra ?

Now try the other version?

[_The Doctor__]

19 minutes ago, leech said:

One funny note, that picture of the 800xl very much looked more purple than the camera showed.  For sure the phone camera on the Note 10+ does not seem to like artifacting colors that much.  It tends to make them a bit more faded than they are on screen.  It was really noticeable when I made a video of the intro of Alternate Reality.  It didn't pick up the shades of brown in the middle of the city very well....

as I stated, the XL needs the cap swap... this is all due to artifact and the pattern produce by the machine and it's interpretation by the display devices, some logic some physical. As I simply don't have the recall once had, it still makes me think C53... that's the one in the XL that needs the swap... don't remember the value but it made the trees greener and the fire place more or less like it should be...

Edited April 5, 2020 by _The Doctor__

[leech]

2 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

as I stated, the XL needs the cap swap... this is all due to artifact and the pattern produce by the machine and it's interpretation by the display devices, some logic some physical.

Cool, I have a giant bag of them now   After buying a bunch of stuff for the 1200xl mod.  Kind of wonder if I should do more mods to the rest of my systems to clean up the video.  I basically just soldered up a wire for Chroma on the 800xl, but of course that doesn't help for the software that uses artifacting.  But I mean that isn't just the XL, the XEGS definitely needs some love for the color correction.

[_The Doctor__]

GTIA is about 1/2 a colour clock offset from CTIA and many people didn't take that into account for artifact when referencing old software notes and books when writing new warez either, @nobody patched some titles to correct for some PAL and possibly NTSC situations... miner2049er etc.

 

That's about all I can think up at this moment

[Sugarland]

AFAIK the A8's have always had color variations when color artifacting. Bryan has talked about this here as well. There's an NTSC color wheel or something and each generation varied from the other. It may or may not be a bad cap but this has been a long known issue and may not be a defect but manufacture variations in A8 video circuitry.

[_The Doctor__]

Power supply also affects the Atari video and all were calibrated as a matched set.

Variance in the power supply affects the Atari color circuit somewhat and is compensated for with the color potentiometer and...

The color potentiometer is used to correct for same chip to same chip differences in tolerance and output that is why you let it warm up for 15 minutes to 30 minutes and adjust it for any of the machines, the other differences were chip type ctia/gtia, and the support circuitry, some variance was due to transistors used (the mytek builds discuss some transistor discoveries) and the capacitor used in filtering what gets fed into the output circuitry.

Edited April 5, 2020 by _The Doctor__

[Caterpiggle]

3 hours ago, leech said:

Now try the other version?

400/800 B , same green lake

1200XL,Yes, same green lake. All version are the same green lake in NTSC.

 

 

 

[Mclaneinc]

2 hours ago, Caterpiggle said:

400/800 B , same green lake

1200XL,Yes, same green lake. All version are the same green lake in NTSC.

 

 

 

Weird, I've always calibrated with A.E. which is meant to be blue a red / orange according to its box......A green lake, has it got COVID19? 

 

Yeah, all a bit weird with the variations...I blame the Americans

[Wrathchild]

Did some games cater for this by confirming with the user, e.g. Dark Crystal

 

[Tempest]

35 minutes ago, Wrathchild said:

Did some games cater for this by confirming with the user, e.g. Dark Crystal

Many Tandy CoCo games did the same thing because the system didn't always have the same starting parameters (high or low color clock).  You just had to press reset until the the correct color appeared.

[+DrVenkman]

Check out this post re different Atari machines and how they artifact color differently. The name of the thread tells you all you need to know, lol.

 

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/204355-artifacting-isnt-it-weird/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-2624664

[leech]

I could have titled this 'the crap I play with while stuck at home.' 

 

The worse to calibrate was the XEGS, as it has no wlexternal hole to stick something in to adjust the pot, it also had the furthest from corrected color.  After I fixed Ultima's color as best I could, the basic screen turned red. 

 

I always forget there is a warm up.  To be sure, the only one I can really feel get warm is the 1200xl, which that giant capacitor in it gets warm.

[_The Doctor__]

adjust to basic screen and test graphic software, I no longer have XEGS... or I'd fiddle with a cap or two in there as well

[Faicuai]

5 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

Weird, I've always calibrated with A.E. which is meant to be blue a red / orange according to its box......A green lake, has it got COVID19? 

 

Yeah, all a bit weird with the variations...I blame the Americans

This is the right answer.

 

It is not the individual colorimetric differences that each machines exhibits what we need to focus on.

 

Instead, it is the PERCEPTUAL rendering what counts. Or said in a different way,  what the original AUTHOR of the title/s intended the rendering to be.

 

As an example, and as already mentioned before, we can look at how Flight Simulator II's cockpit is rendered by your machine. If it does NOT show BLUE/ORANGE-REDDISH artifacting (which is also how it looks in real life), then you know your machine's rendering is, indeed, a deviation from the original output. Anything else is just academic poetry:

 

 

 

Also, Ultima-IV serves the same purpose (read the text, in mentions color explicitly):

 

 

 

Cheers!

 

 

[leech]

2 hours ago, Faicuai said:

This is the right answer.

 

It is not the individual colorimetric differences that each machines exhibits what we need to focus on.

 

Instead, it is the PERCEPTUAL rendering what counts. Or said in a different way,  what the original AUTHOR of the title/s intended the rendering to be.

 

As an example, and as already mentioned before, we can look at how Flight Simulator II's cockpit is rendered by your machine. If it does NOT show BLUE/ORANGE-REDDISH artifacting (which is also how it looks in real life), then you know your machine's rendering is, indeed, a deviation from the original output. Anything else is just academic poetry:

 

 

 

Also, Ultima-IV serves the same purpose (read the text, in mentions color explicitly):

 

 

 

Cheers!

 

 

In the other thread on artifacting, didn't you point out that the colors were different depending on if you had the Floppy vs Cart version of Flight Simulator II?  I should leave my XEGS on for a while and see if the warm up fixes the coloring issues. 

 

On a side note, taking apart all of the 8bits through their various generations, you really can tell that Atari started making them cheaper and cheaper.  Like the earlier models all used screws (or in the case of the 1200, little pop rivets) to hold the shielding together/to the case.  In the XE line, they're all those damnable twist tabs that hold them together, as if they could save some pennies on using screws!  Also the difference between socketed chips and soldered to the board.  Again, shaving off pennies per system.  I do kind of like the design of the XE System though, it's very reminiscent of the game consoles at the time.  I just wish they'd kept the proper monitor out instead of just having an RCA for audio / video.

[Faicuai]

1 hour ago, leech said:

In the other thread on artifacting, didn't you point out that the colors were different depending on if you had the Floppy vs Cart version of Flight Simulator II?  I should leave my XEGS on for a while and see if the warm up fixes the coloring issues. 

 

On a side note, taking apart all of the 8bits through their various generations, you really can tell that Atari started making them cheaper and cheaper.  Like the earlier models all used screws (or in the case of the 1200, little pop rivets) to hold the shielding together/to the case.  In the XE line, they're all those damnable twist tabs that hold them together, as if they could save some pennies on using screws!  Also the difference between socketed chips and soldered to the board.  Again, shaving off pennies per system.  I do kind of like the design of the XE System though, it's very reminiscent of the game consoles at the time.  I just wish they'd kept the proper monitor out instead of just having an RCA for audio / video.

As for the first, YES, the SPATIAL pattern used to render the upper-half of the artificial horizon was swapped with the one on the bottom-half of it. Either an original mistake, or a 180-degrees phase inversion during Atari's production (but NEVER green / purple or any of that kind of thing...) I DO have to mention though, that I have here a pristine 800, late-production, that not only deviates from the original artifacting-phase but, most notoriously, DOES NOT need R189 replacement (!)

 

The "el-cheapo" era began as soon as Atari was trapped between their 4-years-old design, and an emerging Commodore 64, which itself was built as cheaply and as bottom-of-the-barrel as possible (back then). That's when the 400 / 800 architecture was lost, in favor of a "cheaper" design (1200XL), and then ever cheaper on 600XL and 800XL... Then came the XE-series which, by fact, symbolizes Atari's bottom, in terms of quality. Atari got "Tramielized", just as Commodore got at some point.

 

I mention all this because I got a sales job (very young) at a techno. store, where my Dad and the owner were friends. We sold multiple brands and models, and we saw the progression , not just with Atari, but with Commodore, IBM, Amiga, Apple, HP, Epson, Olivetti, DEC, and others... Back-doors, we knew quite a bit about what was going on, in general...

Edited April 5, 2020 by Faicuai

[leech]

Ha, found another couple versions on the SIDE2 SD card, one of which is only 3 sides of a disk?  Here's a screenshot, side by side of Altirra 3.20 (through Wine) vs Atari800 v4.1.0. 

 

Trees are the correct color on Altirra, the water / frame is the correct color on Atari800.  Both should be set to the same approximate settings (600xl/800xl for Altirra, 800xl on the other, both with ntsc artifacting enabled).  Both running this 3 disk version of U4. 

 

 

ULTIMA IV (V2,S1).ATR ULTIMA IV (V2,S2).ATR ULTIMA IV (V2,S3).ATR

[BillC]

On 4/5/2020 at 9:48 AM, leech said:

To be sure, the only one I can really feel get warm is the 1200xl,

That's due to the 7805 voltage regulators being on the PCB instead of in the power supply.

[Jetboot Jack]

Surely you just jiggle the hue and tint controls until it looks right with real hardware with a crt?

 

I always did anyway, no two games required exactly the same hue and tint settings to look “correct”, if it was an 800, a 1200 or XE...

 

sTeVE