Mike wrote:Mike wrote:On a PAL VIC-20, these patterns don't flicker at a 30 Hz rate (as on NTSC), rather they are rock-steady. Depending on which pair of VIC-20/TV or monitor is used, the effect can reduce letters with certain colour combinations to an unreadable pulp.
eslapion wrote:That's why the colors of the Behr-Bonz menu absolutely had to be changed in 2015.
No. That was not the reason. You just couldn't make a sense of the table of colour combinations I gave you at that time.
I did receive screen shots clearly showing barely readable menus.
At the time, however, I did not investigate if this may have been caused by poorly adjusted pots.
To restate my point from then (I won't provide you with the link, as I know you wouldn't follow it anyhow): besides white and black - blue, yellow and their light variants are the two colours which don't change the phase between consecutive rasters, on PAL, and thus aren't prone to produce the cross-hatch patterns I was talking about.
You
know wrong. I am a meticulous person and when people invest the energy and time to explain, unlike other people, I respect that.
However, when you have an explanation to a problem or a solution to a technical issue, you seem very narrow minded and will systematically reject all other possibilities. IMHO, this is not a very scientific approach.
I repeat: these six colours - white, black, light yellow, light blue, yellow and blue -, in principle can be used in any combination. You'd obviously not use those combinations with too low a contrast. White on light blue might have been on the edge - and you changed from that to white on black for the second iteration of Behr-Bonz.
In principle, perhaps. People did report having problem reading when using white on a blue background.
IMO, white on blue would have worked quite as well, as orion70 already had pointed out in said thread. I already was employing that colour combination in the several uses of MG Browse (Bible series, quite some instruction texts included on disk images) with 40 column text, and I never heard or read any complaints the texts in those programs were somehow hard to read.
At the time (may 2015), I had lost the only PAL VIC-20 that I previously owned (I got it from you, I believe) so I had to rely on external sources of information. A few people reported problems reading white on a blue background and I see no reason to question their judgement. These people were not as technology literate as you are so they didn't provide detailed information but they were perfectly honest.
I lost my first PAL VIC-20 when my stuff was moved after I was hospitalized. I purchased another one from MCes about a year ago.
Can I suggest a possibility ? Many VIC-20s have a problematic video signal amplitude setting and when this amplitude is too low, colors don't display the same. This is true for both PAL and NTSC. I am quite sure this causes a few color combinations to become problematic.
Added edit:
The original (2008) Behr-Bonz uses a white text on light blue background menu and it's fine on NTSC but it is very difficult to read on PAL/composite systems.
Be normal.