Questions tagged [color-display]
For questions specifically regarding video displays in colour.
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Were VGA palette's HSV math properties used in practice?
In "Why were those colors chosen to be the default palette for 256-color VGA?", we've established that 216 of its colors represent a 24x3x3 truncated HSV color space.
This results in an ...
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Why weren't CGA colors selectable from palette?
Most memorable graphics mode in games for CGA was 320x200 which supported 4 colors. (I know there was 16 color composite mode trick, but let's ignore that.)
Those 4 colors could be selected from ...
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Why didn't early color TV sets accept RGB input?
Early PCs generated RF signal, and later Composite video or S-video, to use a TV set as monitor. Why didn't color TVs of those days expose a analog RGB interface for direct connection from VCR/PC or ...
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How does the Apple IIgs color compare to the Apple Macintosh color?
There has been an interesting discussion of how to convert Classic Macintosh Color to sRGB, which begs a second question. How does color on the IIgs compare to that of Classic Macintosh? I'm asking ...
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What is the most accurate way to map 6-bit VGA palette to 8-bit?
AFAIK VGA mode 13h palette has only 64 possible colors (6-bit) per channel.
One obvious way to map those 64 colors to 256 colors is to multiply them by 4 (since 4 * 64 = 256):
8_bit = 6_bit * 4;
This ...
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Turning off the color burst
On early color computers, it was possible to add a feature by which you could turn off the color burst output, restricting the display to black and white but making it significantly sharper and ...
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Why was the VIC-II restricted to a hard-coded palette?
The MOS VIC in the VIC-20 and the MOS VIC-II in the C64 were capable of outputting 16 colours drawn from a hard-coded palette.
It's clear that the palette size was fixed at 16 colours as a memory-...
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What were the Apple II artifact colors?
A simplified version of the question in the title is "is lo-res color #1 red, or is it purple?" because that's the color that shows the most obvious variation. Color #1 was usually called &...
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Why did old IBM-PC-compatible computers only have 16 colors available?
In the MS-DOS Editor, the only choices for colors were a collection of 16 colors:
That's 16 colors:
Black
Blue
Green
Cyan
Red
Magenta
Brown
White
Gray
Bright Blue
Bright Green
Bright Cyan
Bright Red
...
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Why not SCART for early color monitors
By the early eighties, it was starting to be considered desirable for computers to have color monitors. Home computers often made do with a TV set and accepted the consequent low resolution, but ...
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How was it back then in 1984, when the Apple II had color, and the new Macintosh didn't?
I imagine it being a huge downgrade for some, not to have color on the Macintosh. Macintosh games were black and white in the beginning, while Apple II had color.
I'm especially interested in ...
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How does the GameBoy Colors' display work in color?
I know the GameBoy originally worked in a 2bpp display functionality, with 4 shades of grey, but how does the GameBoy Color tiles work with colors? No website seems to have a obvious and ...
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Was it ever possible to access the full EGA color space in 200-line modes?
It's long been an established fact that the EGA only had four memory planes, which limited the number of colors on the screen to (24) 16. The best compatible monitors at the time had six TTL color ...
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Why did CGA RGBI output leave DAC to the monitor?
CGA on the original IBM PC produced sixteen colors, one bit each for red, green, blue and overall intensity modifier.
The preferred output device was the later-arriving 5153 color monitor, which ...
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What causes that "organic fade to black" effect in classic video games?
This happens a lot on older consoles than this, but for this specific example, I'm picking what I spotted today: Harvest Moon for PlayStation.
Here is a screenshot of the player just about to exit an ...
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Why we YIQ is composite signal where RGB three different signal? [closed]
As we know that RGB monitors requires separates signals for red, green, and blue components of the image but television monitors uses single composite signals. For this composite signal use YIQ color ...
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Usage of Windows default 20-color palette
Currently I'm digging in the history of computer graphics and found the Windows default 20-color palette. It's based on the Windows and IBM OS/2 default 16-color palette but has the four additional ...
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Atari ST colour rendering
In the late 80's, I had an interesting incident with an Atari ST that I've never really understood.
I was using some graphics software that I recall was very similar to the way Microsoft's Paint still ...
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Ideal resolution for color computer on PAL/SECAM
Suppose you were, in the early eighties, designing a color computer to run on an PAL TV with a free hand to choose the specifications within the limits of the technology of the time. What would be the ...
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Why BGR color order
Blue Green Red (BGR) byte ordering exists in a few image processing libraries "for historical reasons", mostly because it seems to have been a Microsoft standard.
Does anyone know the historical ...
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Why aren't each pixel's bits stored sequentially on the SNES?
When storing graphics in a non-sequential/planar format (like the SNES does), converting to an 8-bit value representation requires first accessing multiple bytes (amount depending on bits-per-pixel), ...
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Ideal resolution for color computer on NTSC
Suppose you were, in the early eighties, designing a color computer to run on an NTSC TV with a free hand to choose the specifications within the limits of the technology of the time. What would be ...
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Converting from 15 kHz RGB to VGA for an 80's Atari Centipede arcade machine?
I have been hunting around to find a replacement flat panel monitor to replace the honking CRT in a 1980's Atari centipede machine. The existing monitor supports 15 kHz RGB which is not really ...
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Mid-1980s 808x computer with 24-bit graphics
I remember seeing a computer with 24-bit graphics at a computer store in the mid-1980s. It was not a normal PC with a high-end graphics board installed; the graphics came standard, possibly with ...
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What kind of 256 color palette did the Enterprise 64/128 have?
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 ...
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Why not one pixel per color clock?
Early home computers and game consoles output video to TV sets. The NTSC color clock frequency is 3.58 MHz. This informed the design of some video systems:
http://pineight.com/mw/index.php?title=...
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Can the BBC be programmed to a half-size mode 1 screen mode with 16 colours instead of 4?
Screen Mode 2 on the BBC micro is 160 x 256 with "16"* colours. This uses up 20Kb of memory. Horizontal-rectangular pixels ( 2 x squares each). 4 bits per pixel (0-15 values for 16 colours)
Screen ...
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What's the difference between an IBM 5153 (CGA) CRT picture tube and a color TV picture tube?
The IBM 5153 Personal Computer Color Display was a monitor designed to accompany the original IBM PC (albeit released a couple of years later) and provide a color display at sharp enough resolution ...
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Why does 8 bit truecolor use only 2 bits for blue?
From Wikipedia:
The other form is where the 8 bits directly describe red, green, and blue values, typically with three bits for red, three bits for green and two bits for blue. This second form is ...
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Why did the Apple III not support the color red?
I was playing around with an emulated Apple /// and while looking at the color demo I noticed that unlike the Apple ][, the /// did not implement red as one of its supported colors.
Ignoring strange ...
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First Commodore 80-column monitor
While the Amiga could be used with a TV in a pinch, it was primarily intended for use with an RGBA monitor; memory says, and Google seems to confirm, that was the 1084.
Commodore made color monitors ...
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How does Apple ][gs hardware dithering work?
I haven't been able to find an easily comprehensible description of the super hi-res, dithered 16-color, 640x200 mode of the Apple ][gs.
I can tell from the references I did locate, this is a ...
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Limiting factor on early color palettes
Early color computers typically had a limit of X colors used simultaneously from a palette of Y, a classic example being the Commodore 64 which could do 320x200 monochrome or 160x200 four colors, ...
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Nintendo 64 Color Depth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_technical_specifications says that the N64 calculated with 24-bit color, but output 21-bit.
However, https://retrocdn.net/images/7/70/...
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With a 15 kHz video signal (240p or 480i), does VGA have any real-world advantage over S-Video?
It's difficult to find a modern LCD monitor that can display a 15 kHz signal through VGA, so I'm wondering if S-Video is just as good when displaying 240p and 480i? I've looked at screenshot and video ...
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Why does the C64 have the following palette?
The Commodore 64 has the following fixed palette of 16 colours:
(Your palette may vary due to tuning of screen, etc.)
What was the reason for this selection of colours? Are these colours ...
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Square pixels and TV output
Another question about color computers in the days of CRT televisions!
There is a consensus that pixels should be square, and so they typically are on purpose-designed monitors. However, looking at a ...
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Can artifact color mode create 262,144 colors on Amiga OCS?
This is as a follow-up to my previous question on artifact colors and the excellent answers provided there.
The images below show a simple example of artifact colors generated using a single bit-...
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Actual resolution of composite video monitors
Many early computers used TV sets as monitors. With an NTSC TV set, you could really only count on about 200 scan lines of vertical resolution, and for horizontal resolution, maybe 192 color clocks at ...
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My Compaq Presario CDS 633 outputs color in Windows 3.1 but not in DOS. How can I get color in DOS?
My Compaq Presario CDS 633 outputs color in Windows 3.1, but not in DOS.
How can I get color in DOS?
I have tried the MODE setting, but it did not change anything. ANSI.SYS also has a LOADHIGH line ...
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