[Coco] More colors on CoCo 1?

[John Kowalski]

>But I would really like to see a text/graphic adventure that uses a high
>color display.  That would be very cool.
>...use compression to keep file size and I/O time down, and limit
>the size of the high-color images to a portion of the screen.  You could
>also speculatively pre-load next and previous screens, or limit the
>high-color screens to special situations in the game, such as when a
>particular objective has been achieved, using low color images during
>the rest of play.

A good compression scheme might be to assume that data will be "16 color"
most of the time - and in that case both screen buffers get loaded with the
same data, but also allow "extended color data" which will occasionally load
portions of the 2nd buffer with data that differs from the 1st.

Even "hicolor" data is often the same between both pages (especially so if
you count an alternating dither pattern between the two pages as "the same"
- the phase difference could be software recreated/reintroduced after
decompression), so it should require considerably less than twice the
storage space of 16 color data.

                                         John Kowalski (Sock Master)
                                         http://www.axess.com/twilight/sock/