One Further Rainbow
Nov. 2nd, 2023 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerNext to the original TRS-80 Micro Computer System with its black and white monitor (converted from surplus RCA TVs, as the folklore has it), the Radio Shack Color Computer’s name was justified. Next to just about any other color-capable small computer from the early 1980s I’m aware of (save those that also used its Motorola MC6847 VDG chip for graphics), the “CoCo” can seem kind of pallid. Maybe that sense strengthened as later programs for it concentrated on its highest-resolution mode with its “artifact red” and “artifact blue” (regardless of certain further tricks pulled off with them).
As with other color-capable computers of the time resolution could be traded off for more colours, and there were two genuine four-colour sets I associate with earlier and simpler games. Both of them were still limited when trying to represent the wider world, though, the “white, orange, magenta, and cyan” set perhaps more so than “red, yellow, green, and blue.” Maybe the artifact colours at least give a certain sense of “two-strip Technicolor,” although that tried to make do with reds and greens.
So far as trying to get an actual rainbow on a Color Computer screen went, its simplest graphics mode, accessible even on its earliest models with a less elaborate BASIC, could put all eight of the hues I’ve just mentioned together with black. This amounted to replacing the upper-case characters of its “sixteen lines of thirty-two characters each” text screen with coloured blocks, and a block could be divided into four parts so long as only one colour plus black was used in it. Even that resulted in a lower resolution than the original TRS-80’s.
There were further elaborations on that “semigraphics” mode, though. I might have become really aware of that through knowing that, unsupported by BASIC and little-used by machine-language programmers, they weren’t available among the much more elaborate graphics of the Color Computer 3. Years after learning that I did happen on a new “CoCo 1 and 2 only” game using one of those nine-colour modes and introduced with the comment this was something for people who couldn’t find or afford the final model in the “retrocomputing” market nowadays. Although I only have that final model ready to hand myself, I was able to try the game in emulation.
For quite a while I was content with that, and then all of a sudden I found myself curious enough about the subject again to try a web search about Color Computer semigraphics. With that, I happened on a description of the furthest elaboration on that mode, “semigraphics-24.” It had the same horizontal restrictions as the simplest and best-known mode, but could change from scan line to scan line to offer as much vertical resolution as the Color Computer’s highest-resolution mode. The description mentioned a program that could create and edit those displays one super-elongated “picture element” at a time and save them. More than that, though, I’d also happened on a message board post from someone who’d worked up a Windows program that could boil pre-scaled bitmap images down into a display file for that Color Computer program.
Even if it meant using Wine again to run the converter program, I was ready to try it out. The person who’d created the converter had mentioned wanting to put Homer Simpson on screen. I resorted to an anime image on the top level of my “Pictures” folder, which I saved quite a few years ago and have tried boiling down into other antique formats (including, not that long ago, Color Computer artifact colours), with a familiar “why not?” feeling. Still, I did find myself wondering a little again if this way of avoiding having to be an actual “pixel artist” isn’t that far from the minimal speedy gratification of churning out junky illustrations with a text-to-image generator. Later on I did try and boil down an early promotional image of the Color Computer itself.
I had the file, anyway, and I was able to display it in emulation. A semigraphics-24 image is much more a matter of “squint and you’ll get it” than Color Computer high resolution, and yet it does offer the semblance of shades you just don’t get with artifact colours. There’s even something to them having black borders rather than the white border of the high-resolution mode. All in all, despite the way I started off this post in the years before the Color Computer 3 showed up I wasn’t quite aware other companies even made different computers, and had no opportunity there for potential dissatisfaction. There might be a trace of melancholy at the thought “there might not be another revelation like this about this old computer for me,” and yet there’s also a feeling of “hypothetical reassurance.”
As with other color-capable computers of the time resolution could be traded off for more colours, and there were two genuine four-colour sets I associate with earlier and simpler games. Both of them were still limited when trying to represent the wider world, though, the “white, orange, magenta, and cyan” set perhaps more so than “red, yellow, green, and blue.” Maybe the artifact colours at least give a certain sense of “two-strip Technicolor,” although that tried to make do with reds and greens.
So far as trying to get an actual rainbow on a Color Computer screen went, its simplest graphics mode, accessible even on its earliest models with a less elaborate BASIC, could put all eight of the hues I’ve just mentioned together with black. This amounted to replacing the upper-case characters of its “sixteen lines of thirty-two characters each” text screen with coloured blocks, and a block could be divided into four parts so long as only one colour plus black was used in it. Even that resulted in a lower resolution than the original TRS-80’s.
There were further elaborations on that “semigraphics” mode, though. I might have become really aware of that through knowing that, unsupported by BASIC and little-used by machine-language programmers, they weren’t available among the much more elaborate graphics of the Color Computer 3. Years after learning that I did happen on a new “CoCo 1 and 2 only” game using one of those nine-colour modes and introduced with the comment this was something for people who couldn’t find or afford the final model in the “retrocomputing” market nowadays. Although I only have that final model ready to hand myself, I was able to try the game in emulation.
For quite a while I was content with that, and then all of a sudden I found myself curious enough about the subject again to try a web search about Color Computer semigraphics. With that, I happened on a description of the furthest elaboration on that mode, “semigraphics-24.” It had the same horizontal restrictions as the simplest and best-known mode, but could change from scan line to scan line to offer as much vertical resolution as the Color Computer’s highest-resolution mode. The description mentioned a program that could create and edit those displays one super-elongated “picture element” at a time and save them. More than that, though, I’d also happened on a message board post from someone who’d worked up a Windows program that could boil pre-scaled bitmap images down into a display file for that Color Computer program.
Even if it meant using Wine again to run the converter program, I was ready to try it out. The person who’d created the converter had mentioned wanting to put Homer Simpson on screen. I resorted to an anime image on the top level of my “Pictures” folder, which I saved quite a few years ago and have tried boiling down into other antique formats (including, not that long ago, Color Computer artifact colours), with a familiar “why not?” feeling. Still, I did find myself wondering a little again if this way of avoiding having to be an actual “pixel artist” isn’t that far from the minimal speedy gratification of churning out junky illustrations with a text-to-image generator. Later on I did try and boil down an early promotional image of the Color Computer itself.
I had the file, anyway, and I was able to display it in emulation. A semigraphics-24 image is much more a matter of “squint and you’ll get it” than Color Computer high resolution, and yet it does offer the semblance of shades you just don’t get with artifact colours. There’s even something to them having black borders rather than the white border of the high-resolution mode. All in all, despite the way I started off this post in the years before the Color Computer 3 showed up I wasn’t quite aware other companies even made different computers, and had no opportunity there for potential dissatisfaction. There might be a trace of melancholy at the thought “there might not be another revelation like this about this old computer for me,” and yet there’s also a feeling of “hypothetical reassurance.”