Merlin_85 Posted April 22, 2020 Share Posted April 22, 2020 Friends, I'm confused about the Atari 2600 colors. I know that the Atari 2600 colors are colored by lines, but on some occasion I saw Homebrew games that put different colors where it couldn't be put. How do they do that? ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+splendidnut Posted April 22, 2020 Share Posted April 22, 2020 Short answer: Programming tricks. If you want a more elaborate answer than that, please provide a screenshot/example of what you're talking asking about. (be more specific) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tokumaru Posted April 22, 2020 Share Posted April 22, 2020 The system only has a handful of color slots for the objects it can draw: 1 for the background, 1 for the playfield and the ball, 1 for player 0 and missile 0 and finally 1 for player 1 and missile 1. However, these colors can be changed at any time, even in the middle of a scanline, meaning that in some cases, if the screen's design allows it, you can have more than 4 colors per scanline. In Stella you can activate the "debug colors" mode so it will render all the objects with fixed colors, allowing you to see where each of the TIA's objects are used. You can also step through the game code instruction by instruction as the image is rendered, so you can easily see when exactly the color registers are used. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+SpiceWare Posted April 22, 2020 Share Posted April 22, 2020 You can change the color registers at any time during the scanline. You can use Stella's Fixed Debug Color mode to get an idea of what's going on. To toggle it use COMMAND-PERIOD on a Mac, or ALT-PERIOD on Linux or Windows (if you're running an older versions of Stella use COMMA instead of PERIOD). An example would be Congo Bongo. In the area I drew the red box in: The brown ground, the green cliffside, and the far yellow cliffside are all drawn using the playfield, which is drawn in purple when using debug color mode. These are the colors of everything - note there are 3 PF registers, which are used twice on each scanline. Each PF register has a slightly different shade of purple. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Merlin_85 Posted April 22, 2020 Author Share Posted April 22, 2020 The world of the Atari that are curious, thanks for your response. I believed that colors were created by straight lines, that was what made me think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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