by drzaiusx11 3 days ago
To be fair, the way Woz did color on the ][ was pretty wild, but unfortunate they weren't able to properly copy that as well...
Screens were low enough resolution back then that you could look closely at the screen to see how he got the six hires colors.
I'm scratching my head over your statement. You can see how they generated artifact color on the back porch of the colorburst by looking at the screen? You can see the phaase of their color reference wrt the pixel clock? Please explain.
See https://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/10/apple-ii-compos... for how it really works.
I assume they meant the unintended rainbow-like color halos and vertical line artifacts plainly visible on a good crt, particularly on edges due to Woz's design where there is no direct pixel color really; rather, a "1" in a specific "phase" (odd or even column) of a pixel byte would tell the TV to output a certain color, like green or magenta. It simply walked the bits in memory as if they were chroma patterns, in rough approximation.
That said I'll read up on the linked article, I could me misremembering things.
They were able to get color working on the subsequent 1200 model. And I believe color was accessable via an expansion card, I didnt want to be staring at a tv at short distances so I was content to game in monochrome.