Can someone explain this to me?

[Plastik]

Okay so I was using the great sprite editor Magellan and it has the typical 16 colors that the Ti is said to do. But as I was flipping through my copy of Micro Pendium I came across this.

A group of guys from a Ti group in ohio came up with this color demonstration program.

100 REM COLOR BONANZA BY ED YORK
110 REM CIN-DAY USER GROUP
120 REM TI BASIC
130 CALL CLEAR
140 FOR A=40 TO 136 STEP 8
150 CALL CHAR(A,"55AA55AA55AA55AA")
160 NEXT A
170 FOR B=2 TO 14
180 CALL COLOR(B,1,1)
190 CALL VCHAR(1,2*B,24+8*B,22)
200 CALL VCHAR(1,2*B+1,24+8*B,22)
210 NEXT B
220 FOR C=2 TO 14
230 CALL SCREEN(INT(16*RND)+1)
240 FOR D=2 TO 14
250 CALL COLOR(D,D,C)
260 NEXT D
270 CALL KEY(O,E,F)
280 IF F<1 THEN 270
290 NEXT C
300 GOTO 220

Now this is displaying many different shades of colors using the arrow keys, far more than 16. So my question is would it be possible to get Magellan to use these different shades on sprites?

Another question I had is, is there a way to use monochrome in sprite making? Meaning different shades of gray between white and black.

 

[+Lee Stewart]

Those shades are not pure colors of the TI color palette. They are effected by “mixing” foreground, background and transparency (screen color) colors by alternating the colors of adjacent dots in the characters defined. You could probably do a similar thing with gray, black and white for monochrome.

 

...lee

[Plastik]

Ah! got it! So basically its changing the opacity of the foreground to mix with the background to create a new color.

[artrag]

It is dithering.

Some colors blend better than others thanks to the filtering in the analog part of the video circuits.

[Opry99er]

Mmm... Dithering....

[Gary from OPA]

On a stock TI99 with CRT TV it works out.

 

Try it on Classic99 or a TI99 upgraded with F18A on high-res LCD screen, and you will notice that it does not work out very well.

 

That is why there some that are producing special boxes that take the pure-VGA-digital signal, and put back the old look of being on retro CRT tube with raster scan lines, etc. as some game programmers make usage of the fact our old CRT's were a little 'fuzzy' around the edges, to give their game more depth and feeling, but it the effect is now lost on our upgraded retro tech.

[Plastik]

On a stock TI99 with CRT TV it works out.

 

Try it on Classic99 or a TI99 upgraded with F18A on high-res LCD screen, and you will notice that it does not work out very well.

 

That is why there some that are producing special boxes that take the pure-VGA-digital signal, and put back the old look of being on retro CRT tube with raster scan lines, etc. as some game programmers make usage of the fact our old CRT's were a little 'fuzzy' around the edges, to give their game more depth and feeling, but it the effect is now lost on our upgraded retro tech.

 

Good to know, yeah I know people love scanline generators and I too like the look keeps things looking crisp.