How many colors on screen?

[MN12BIRD]

I've been wondering how many colors the 2600 could display on screen. For such an old system there are a few games that have surprised me with many variants of colors. Example in Pole Position you get 3 cars on screen at a time all different colors and it seems like each car has 6 or so colors on them! Really looks nice. Most games seem so limited to only a few so its curios. Surley programming and CPU power come into play but if someone wanted to cram all the colors on screen at once for a demo or whatever it could look nice!

[LS_Dracon]

Atari 2600 had 128 color pallete, in NTSC system (104 in PAL).

You can freely use all 128 colors in an object (sprite, background, playfield) but change color information by line, not by pixel.

Pretty well for 70's console.

Edited September 16, 2008 by LS_Dracon

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Attached a simple demo displaying all colors at once.

colors.bin

[SeaGtGruff]

Attached a simple demo displaying all colors at once.

You can also get extra colors by flickering between any two of the 128 colors (or if you're using the Chronocolor method, between any three of the 128 colors). This has its limitations of course. Anyway, here's a demo that shows 240 colors-- 15 shades of the 16 hues. I also have one I can post later tonight that (if I remember correctly) shows 480 colors at once-- 15 shades of 32 hues.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...t&p=1357638

 

Michael

Edited September 15, 2008 by SeaGtGruff

[MN12BIRD]

Wow thanks guys. Now for the harder question... what game actually uses the most colors on screen?

[Omegamatrix]

Wow thanks guys. Now for the harder question... what game actually uses the most colors on screen?

Gotta be one of the ones with scrolling colors like maybe Turmoil or California games. I'm talking the title/intermission screens heres.

[Nukey Shay]

True that...gradients and color cycling isn't a very advanced technique (just load/store the frame counter or line counter and there you go). Perhaps the question is regarding the most screen colors that do not cycle?

[SeaGtGruff]

Okay, here is my "480 colors at once" demo. I think this must be my second version of it. My original version alternated the colors from line to line-- i.e., as if the even lines were "frame 0" and the odd lines were from "frame 1," and then vice versa on the next frame (interlaced flickering). But when I viewed it on my HD LCD TV, the scan lines looked too fat. So I rewrote it to flicker the two frames without interlacing their lines together, and the lines looked thinner, resulting in a better blending of the colors.

 

Anyway, I admit that flickering between colors to get additional colors has its limitations, and this display is really little more than a pretty trick without much practical use, but I wanted to see what the "in-between" hues look like! It's written with inline assembly, even though it's a batari Basic program.

 

Michael

 

+ =

480_Colors.bas

480_Colors.bas.bin