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avatar_JohnElliott

PCW CP/M and colours

Started by JohnElliott, 20:40, 28 March 23

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JohnElliott

Although the PCW is a monochrome machine, it nevertheless internally maintains settings for foreground and background colour. That's why the ESC b and ESC c escape codes are still there and still take 6-bit colour values.

What I hadn't realised until today was that there's a little difference of opinion between the two modules in the EMS file responsible for screen handling. SCR, the low-level module responsible for actually drawing characters on the screen, has default colour settings of Border=1, Background=1, Foreground=60 -- that is, bright yellow on dark blue, like the CPC at startup.
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At a slightly higher level is TE, the Terminal Emulator, responsible for interpreting escape codes, setting the cursor position and so on. It initialises after SCR, and decides to set the colours to Background=1, Foreground=63 -- bright white on dark blue.
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So far, I haven't found anything similar in LocoScript. LocoLink 2.02 incorporates SCR but not TE, so it sticks with the yellow on blue colour scheme.

erikarn

ha that's neat! If only we had colour plane support in the PCW ASIC. :0 Or an expansion card that hijacked the video so we could implement an 80x32 text expansion with greyscale. :)


-a

RockRiver

#2
Spanish Amstradians scene tried to ask Roland Perry about ANT ,  Ant Number Two (hybrid PCW-CPC project).
Maybe there are two prototype boards...

Interesting that 64 colour PCW , compatible with CPC

Interesting too Habisoft's "ColorIn" fpga board project, that makes possible PCW with 4 colours in old software and maybe more in new programs.

PCWcolor FPGA cores exist with AY sound option : Mister ; Neptuno ; Poseidon ; Neptuno+ ... machines

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