Hi!

I just read a review on Nemesis 2 at "Passion MSX" and it says "We are supposed to have 16 colors displayed simultaneously, but when looking at this more closely, programming tricks allowed to exceed this simple number. " AFAIK There is no such tricks in Nemesis 2 or any other game on the msx1 and if there is I would realy like to know what technique they are using. I am familiar with lots of techniques to get more colours, but thats when coding demos on the atari st. can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks

/Tobias

There are 16 colors on MSX1, and that's it. 15 in fact, as 0 and 1 are both black. The only things you can do to get the impression of new colors is using rasters (which limits your image a lot of course) and quickly alternating, as shown in MSX Unleashed.

There's another trick: on standard TV sets, alternating lines of different colors could lead to new colors. Of course, it's only an optical effect, not all colors blend fine and it only works using RF or composite video; using RGB, this effect disappears.
You can see this technique used in games like Beepertron or Magical Stones.

So, no, sadly there's indeed no way to obtain more real colors...

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There's another trick: on standard TV sets, alternating horizontal lines of different colors could lead to new colors.

Note that that specific trick only applies to PAL TV sets.

*edit* I don't think Nemesis 2 does any weird tricks to simulate more colours.

That's what I thought.. The "quickly alternating" trick leaves you with a bit of flickering and Nemesis2 has none of that. Nor does it use Rasters, and that wouldn't expand the colors since the whole pallette is only 16 colors, rasters are usefull when you have like 512 colors pallette but can only use 16 at a time. Using that trick you can even mix resolutions on the same screen as some text based adventures did on the ST

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So, no, sadly there's indeed no way to obtain more real colors...

My Toshiba HX-10 gave LOTS of NEW colours with simple VDP command! But I guess this was the feature not seen in other MSXs? (or was there something like that with SVI-738?) There were still 16 colours, but there were at least brown, black, and many shades of grey.

And my dying Hit Bit gave even more colours, without doing anything, result was amiga like! there was some sort of bad malfunction in it´s chips... maybe someone should start to experimenting with malfunctions!

I have never heard of a Toshiba HX-10 with more than 16 (15) colors, weird

The SVI 738 - Xpress had AFAIK 256 colors and had the V9938 Video chip. It was almost an MSX2

Ah, here it is,
"We are supposed to have 16 colors displayed simultaneously, but when looking at this more closely, programming tricks allowed to exceed this simple number." <-- I'm sorry Mars2000, but that's bollocks. Beautiful graphics aplenty (especially stage 6!), though all with the same old 15 colours.

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alternating horizontal lines of different colors

Oh, yes, horizontal lines of course...

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Note that that specific trick only applies to PAL TV sets.

Why?, they don't blend under NTSC?. I can't remember how this pattern looks on PAL and NTSC machines...; but it's true, what about NTSC/PAL?. The NTSC artifacts appears in a horizontal fashion; so it's a quick way to get more colors from the TMS9928A. It's the same trick used in the CoCo machines or even the TI 99/4A (TMS9918A). Related to the last one, take a look at the game Parsec and their "extra" colors, you can even see those artifacts emulated using the TI emulator pointed out in the same page

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And my dying Hit Bit gave even more colours, without doing anything, result was amiga like!

Hey, that rings a bell!. IIRC my HB-75 also did something weird when VDPing something in register 0 or 1, I don't remember at all, I just keep the impression of seeing strange color shadows (but not solid ones) on screen and indeed a lot of grey.

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Why?, they don't blend under NTSC?

I'm not an expert on the subject, but I do know that NTSC only shows horizontal artifacts, and PAL suffers from vertical artifacts too.
meisei supports NTSC simulation btw, and some games use/abuse it, 2 examples on the bottom of this page: http://home.kpn.nl/koele844/meisei_archive/

Yes but again these extra colors are there due to the way the video is encoded, and not visble on a "perfect" video signal. As also stated in the Parsec info..

of course both pal and ntsc suffers from the horisontal artefacts, the artefacts has to do with "video bleeding" and it is mostly horisontal because of the direction of the electron beam that draws the image.

As for your HB-75, jltursan, I assume that had a Toshiba VDP model (a not 100% accurate clone of the TMS one).

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meisei supports NTSC simulation btw, and some games use/abuse it

Cool!, those filters are great emulating the artifacts! :-).

My Sony, indeed, it must built the infamous T6950

About the Nemesis review, maybe Mars2000 is referring to how fine the colors are arranged that even they managed to fool the eyes showing more shades, again "video bleeding" of course...