On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, Glenn Saunders wrote:
> At 01:53 PM 9/16/2001 -0400, you wrote:
> >But, why would colored table cells be better than a JPG image with all the
> >colors? With the table cells, you're trusting the browser's color pallette.
>
> GIF would be better than JPEG. JPEG is really for photographs.
>
> As far as using a single tall image, it would be harder to line it up in a
> table with text next to it that way.
>
I wasn't thinking of lining up text with it... I was thinking of just having
hex digits across the top, and down the left hand side...
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f
0 X Y Z ...etc.
2
4
6
8
a
c
e
X, Y, Z would be colors 00, 10, 20 respectively. The hex digits would just be
part of the gif itself.
> >I've heard that different browsers do not necessarily display the same hex
> >triplet the same way.
>
> Haven't heard that.
>
> There was once the issue of "web safe colors" and the windows
> palette. That was really only an issue back in the days of 8-bit graphics
> cards. It's totally irrelevant today.
>
That may be what I was thinking of, then. If it's a non-issue, I won't worry
about it.
> >Of course, with a jpeg, you're trusting the color & tint knobs on the user's
> >monitor... same with a TV picture though.
>
> With only 128 colors, there is enough "spread" between the hues that you
> get a pretty decent guess at the color even given the variations on monitor
> settings, if you use the palettes that the emulators have evolved into
> using. Like if you want to pick a blue, there is only, I think, one set of
> blues in the 2600 so unless your tint is wildly out of whack (which tends
> not to be the case with VGA monitors unless they are really old) you'll
> find the right color settings. I find swatches more useful than the
> word-descriptions of colors in the stella guide.
>
> RGB vs. NTSC does result in differences in the look, most notably in the
> contrast or gamma, but we're talking about reasonable approximations here.
>
Hmm. So if we did go with a single gif, it could be made of stitched-together
sections of emulator screenshots? I was halfway thinking of taking pictures of
a TV with a digital camera (never tried it, no idea if it works). That would
be a pain, though, and take a lot of time... and I don't know if the results
would be much more accurate than using an emulator. A 5% gain in accuracy for
a 90% increase in the amount of work isn't a tradeoff I want to make.
Hmm again. Who needs even the screenshots? IIRC, at least one of the emulators
comes with a palette file (maybe in photoshop format?), so it should be
possible to just fill chunks of the image with colors from that.
And, if we use colored table cells instead of a single gif, we could still use
that palette file. The Gimp (image editor I use) has an eyedropper tool that
gives you the hex triplet value of any pixel you click on...
...I just now finished converting the address tables into real HTML tables,
go have a look and let me know what you think.
Brian
---
If a trainstation is the place where trains stop, what is a workstation?
-
Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
