Help improving the VIC20 palette in vice!

[ral-clan]

How did you get the really authentic, semi-smeared look to the screenshots above. It looks like they were actually on a real TV. Normally, the display in VICE is super sharp....not like on a real VIC-20 on a TV.

I've noticed that I can get something similar in VICE if I toggle on the PAL EMULTION setting. I'm not even sure what this setting does. Since I mostly use VICE in NTSC mode, there doesn't seem to be a similar NTSC EMULATION in VICE.

[tlr]

How did you get the really authentic, semi-smeared look to the screenshots above. It looks like they were actually on a real TV. Normally, the display in VICE is super sharp....not like on a real VIC-20 on a TV.

This is indeed the PAL emulation in vice. I used the (new) PAL emulation in vice 2.0.
It emulates certain aspects of how a TV/composite monitor works to provide accurate color transition artifacts and inter-line colors.

It will give the exact same effect on NTSC, which is not 100% accurate, but far better than no PAL emulation.

[ral-clan]

How did you get the really authentic, semi-smeared look to the screenshots above. It looks like they were actually on a real TV. Normally, the display in VICE is super sharp....not like on a real VIC-20 on a TV.

This is indeed the PAL emulation in vice. I used the (new) PAL emulation in vice 2.0.
It emulates certain aspects of how a TV/composite monitor works to provide accurate color transition artifacts and inter-line colors.

It will give the exact same effect on NTSC, which is not 100% accurate, but far better than no PAL emulation.

I really think this is a beautiful touch to emulation. The lack of scanlines and TV blur really detracted from a truely authentic experience. The care taken to add these features is appreciate. I hope in future there is a TV emulation mode that is written from the ground up for NTSC TV emulation (but I realise most of the VICE authors are probably in Europe).

[Kweepa]

It's odd that they go to this extreme, but don't fix the pixel aspect ratio.

[PaulQ]

It appears to be something that was inherited from the Commodore 64 emulation.

[tlr]

So can anybody at least confirm the gray scales visually?

[drvanthorp]

Somewhere I once saw a web site from a guy that had done oscilescope testing to produce a more accurate C-64 pallette. Same method should be aplicable to any composite-output machine.

[eslapion]

Somewhere I once saw a web site from a guy that had done oscilescope testing to produce a more accurate C-64 pallette. Same method should be aplicable to any composite-output machine.

This method can be done with any scope that has a video based trigger system.

Most digital oscilloscopes made during the last 5-10 years have that capability.

[Mike]

Taking a totally arbitrary combination of tokra's VIC-20 (PAL 6561-101, with S-Video mod), a 1084 monitor (at 'usable' settings of brightness, contrast, and saturation), my Fuji S5800 - and the beholder's own display hardware on the PC used to view this post, I photographed all 16 colours put on screen by 'Colour Test' (download).

Averaging the RGB values of the snippets resulted in the mushy image to the left, and then I calibrated against 'black' and 'white', maximising contrast and saturation (some colours, notably blue and purple slightly went over 255 in the blue component, and thus were clipped), resulting in the image to the right:



And here's 'mike.vpl' for download.

Greetings,

Michael

[Mayhem]

Tried loading it in Vice 2.3, didn't recognise it as a palette file. Odd... if I edit the vice.ini file, then it boots up.

[Mike]

VICE 2.3 doesn't even accept its own 'default.vpl' ...huh?

[Mayhem]

Yeah, I discovered that too during my experiments to get the palette file altered. Something very peculiar...