At 11:51 PM 8/14/2002 -0500, you wrote:
I may also just remove the 4th color, the playfield looks substantially
better when I put the stripes on the "tiles" every other line instead of
every third. I am still hopeful about figuring some way to represent the 4
different states.
You know it is possible to change color registers at least six times in the
middle of the scanline.
http://www.atariage.com/2600/screenshots/s_ColorBarGenerator_2.png
If all you did was change the PF color and left BK black, then if you knew
you were going to alternate PF BK PF BK you could give the illusion of
double the resolution that way by changing the PF color register by loading
while PF is being drawn and storing while BK is being drawn.
An interlaced approach is what I was suggesting for a Battleship type game.
On the even lines you draw white over black. On odd lines you draw red
over black. That way you can represent unknown (black), misses (striped
white) and hits (striped red).
Another approach is to see if sprites could be used to fill in the missing
colors. You'd have 9 pixels per player/missile combo with independent
color. That would yield a pseudobitmap of 18 pixels and 4 colors per
scanline, but you'd be limited in how you place the pixels down. If all
you needed were 3 colors you could get away with this approach with full
freedom of placement.
In fact, now that I think about it, the sprite overlay approach would work
pretty well with Battleship, since that only requires 10 pixels across
assuming two boards stacked vertically (which isn't optimal considering the
dimensions of the TV, but hey).
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