[Coco] More colors on CoCo 1?

[Joel Ewy]

Roger Taylor wrote:
> As for the topic of displaying more colors on a CoCo, here's my take.
>
> This is better for graphics display programs, such as Projector-3, 
> and Sock's HiColor BMP viewer.
>
> If you try color mixing tricks with games, you're losing CPU time to 
> the video routines that the game code needs more.  So what you will 
> be faced with is trying to squeeze CPU cycles out of your game code 
> to make up for the loss.  It's already hard enough to write a CoCo 
> game with fast animation without using video tricks, so expect a challenge....
>   
I don't think it makes sense to try color mixing techniques for most
action games, unless you just want to prove you can.  In action games,
it's about the action.  Color is secondary.  But it would make sense for
adventure games, certain simulation games, and maybe strategy games.  I
guess one type of action game that would really benefit from > 16 colors
would be first person shooters, but those are already challenging enough
to program on the CoCo. 

But I would really like to see a text/graphic adventure that uses a high
color display.  That would be very cool.  And most of the time the
program will be waiting for user input with that type of game.  The
biggest challenge there would be fitting all those pictures on media
likely to be found on the CoCo, and loading them in a timely manner. 
You could have user-configurable config files to map out on which floppy
disk/drive/virtual disk image/hard drive partition the pictures are
stored, 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.

This is one of the things I would like to try using Sockmaster's HiColor
code.

JCE