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The Enterprise 64 or 128 Home Computer apparently had a palette of 256 colors.

However, that is pretty unusual and doesn't fit evenly into the typical 3 channels for RGB. Wikipedia doesn't provide any additional information.

So, were the available bits per channel unevenly assigned and thus not equally represented in the machine's color space?

Or was there an additional intensity channel (RGBI)?

Or did that computer use an entirely different color model than RGB?

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The "Technical Descriptions" link for the Nick Chip on this Enterprise 64/128 Technical Information page is a .pdf file. Page 13 of this file seems to say that the 256-color palette uses 3 bits for red, 3 for green, and 2 for blue.

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  • 5
    This BTW aligns pretty well with human colour receiption - which has a bias on green, red, then blue. The interesting thing with the Enterprise's screen is that it can switch resolutions per scanline (without involving the CPU), so there's actually not one mode for the screen, but rather one per scanline.
    – tofro
    Oct 6 '20 at 9:57
  • @tofro Isn't that pretty normal, except that it normally involves the CPU?
    – user253751
    Oct 6 '20 at 12:58
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    @Tommy Well, there actually are modes in the Enterprise: The static homogenuous modes you choose with the BASIC MODE command, this is more a software thing - But as you say, you can program Nick to use a different video mode and setting on any scanline (the standard display driver won't support that fully, but rather only split screens, but the hardware does).
    – tofro
    Oct 6 '20 at 18:50
  • 2
    @tofro So Nick is a bit like Amiga's copper. That could be used to make some interesting demos.
    – snips-n-snails
    Oct 6 '20 at 19:32
  • 1
    @snips-n-snails Yes, and it had been used. There's in fact some stunning demos on YouTube for this fascinating computer.: youtube.com/watch?v=xMW4QCaEQJg
    – tofro
    Oct 6 '20 at 19:47

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