80-column colors revisited -- two questions for 128 owners

[nikoniko]

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with Risen from Oblivion, pretty much the only serious piece of demo-coding ever done for the 128's 80-column chip. Well, I've been poking around in WinVICE's VDC code to see if I can improve emulation a bit, and since Risen is so demanding it's a great tool for studying the accuracy of emulation. Or at least it would be if I had a real 128 to compare and contrast the two with.

The next best thing is a 26MB AVI someone shared with me. The file has okay resolution, though being compressed it does introduce some artifacting. It's not completely terrible, though, and there's enough detail to be somewhat useful for study.

Which brings me to my two questions:

The first: When you set the background color in 80-column text mode mode, does the background color extend all the way to the edge of the monitor? In WinVICE, it does not, there's a black border around the normal display area, but in an informational screen at the beginning of Risen the color blue extends to the edge. It's possible the programmer specially set it to do so, or it's possible that background color changes always extend to the screen edge. In either case, I'd like to investigate why this behavior isn't present in WinVICE, so if I can know what the usual behavior is that would help me to know what to look for. If someone will go to 80-column mode, do a COLOR 6,7 command, and let me know what happens, I'd appreciate it.

The second: What color is color 10? If you type COLOR 5,10, do you get dark yellow text? That's what WinVICE shows, and that's what the Programmer's Reference Guide says it should be, but in the video I have it actually shows that color as a shade of red. That's the only color in the video which looks unusual to me, and I'm curious whether it's something weird about the recording, a side effect of the compression, some clever trick by the demo coder or what. Or... is the color which Commodore claims is dark yellow not really dark yellow?

Here's a screen capture of the difference:



Thanks!

[Guest]

COLOR 6,7 changes the entire screen to blue with cyan letters on my 128-DCR.

[Guest]

I think the bigger problem to fix is that the "dark yellow" needs to actually be brown in Vice.

[istvan]

If you'll excuse the poor photography, here's what the colors look like on my flat 128.  Background color extends to the edge of the screen, color 10 is orange-ish.

[nikoniko]

Thanks to both of you for your help!

Goodness. So VICE has been displaying dark yellow instead of brown all this time and no one ever fixed it? I guess they were going by Commodore's guide. By the way, is the VDC brown the same brown as color 10 of the VIC palette?

Istvan, do you feel like taking a photo of the 40 column colors as well? Also, may I ask how pure is the color white on a real machine? The photo leans toward a slight bluish tint to everything, but is there a little bit of blue (or any other discernable tint) when you look at the palette in person? I know the VICE colors have never felt right to me, but without a basis for comparison I haven't bothered to tweak them. Both the VIC and the VDC palettes ought to be adjusted.  I'll have to do some tweaking of the palette and submit it to the VICE team. I'll also dig into the code a bit and see if I can fix the screen border behavior.

[Guest]

On my Magnavox Professional 80-col monitor the white is very white, no discernable tint to it that I can tell.  Digital cameras have a tendancy to apply a color to large white fields.  If you do an auto-color-correction on the photo with Picasa you'll find it will probably clean up quite a bit.

[nikoniko]

Thanks for clearing that up. I'll balance the color in Photoshop then, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't taking away something I shouldn't.

[istvan]

Yeah, sorry.  Cheap camera, and I was in a rush and didn't take the time to fiddle with the color adjustment.  Plus, I just remembered that I'd turned the brightness way down on that monitor.  I'll try again.

[nikoniko]

Haven't looked into the border issue yet, but here's my initial try at palette adjustment.

EDIT: Just discovered that my monitor profile was totally whack when I worked on this, so a few things were off in my palette posted here, most seriously what should have been white turned out to be grey. So while I fix that, I've taken the old files offline.