Multicolour mode on VIC v C64 and 264-series

[Victragic]

A quick question -

is multi-colour text mode on a VICII/TED essentially the same as the 'normal' (I guess only) colour mode on a VICI?

The only differences I can see are that

1) instead of utilizing the border as one of the colours, a seperate register exists for one of the extra two colours?

2) If you used extended colour mode you could have each character's background colour set independently, but only be able to display 64 chars..

I saw an article in Wikipedia about the VIC-II and how three of the four colours could be unique for each character position, with only the background colour shared, but it didn't seem right to me.. I thought at least two of the colours would be common to the entire screen based on the above two assumptions.

-Glen

[Mike]

ad 1) correct

ad 2) you can't activate both extended colour and multi-colour mode at once, TED and VIC-II will give you an entire black screen.

The article in Wiki (3 of 4 colours unique to each char position) applies to the multicolour hires mode (as opposed to multicolour text mode) of the VIC-II. With TED that again reduces to 2 of 4 colours (colour 0 and 3 apply to the whole screen, only 1 and 2 can be chosen for each char).

But ... you can run the CPU in lock-step with the video chip (even on the VIC-20), to alter background/border and aux. colour every raster. On the C64 and 264 series you can even force a DMA to re-load the colour-sources each line. These are the FLI modes. Finally, on the C64 you can overlay sprites. To see what possible you might take a look at the demos 'Digital Magic'/Crest, and 'Tsunami'/Booze Design.

Greetings,

Michael