> in your last email you said the Kaleidoscope was a bodge - is > this coz there was no software for it? Does the Kaleidoscope > realy give the Sam 32,768 true colours? I'm interested in > what it is and what it does - (you never seem to hear anything > about it...)
It was a complete bodge. What the kaleidoscope did was pull down the RGB video signals generated by the Sam as normal (by darkening the output by varying amounts of red, green, blue - set with an OUT command to the kaleidoscope port) so it technically produced 256 tinted shades of the original colours - in total 32768 shades, but could they be used in a proper fashion - nope! So whatever value of shading the kaleidoscope was set to would affect all the colours on screen. There was no real way to use it all, could you have individually shaded pixels - nope again! At most, you could write code to tint horizontal groups of 16 pixels at a time... but for all 192 scanlines you would be using all the CPU time and even effectively tinting 16 pixel blocks that wouldn't really let you achieve any decent graphical effects, plus 62% of all the CPU time is being used. In all, a waste of time, it couldnt be utilised in any useable way at all, therefore no software attempted to used it. Colin ===== Quazar : Hardware, Software, Spares and Repairs for the Sam Coupe April 1995-2005 - Celebrating 10 Years of developing for the Sam Coupe Website: http://www.samcoupe.com/