To: Immortal Nephi
On Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:31:09 -0700, Immortal Nephi wrote:
Well. I did remember reading King's Quest IV article on the website.
It stated many customers were very disappointed to see that King's
Quest IV is written in Perl to use 16 colors on SHR. Sierra company
explained they were unable to overcome Apple IIgs' SHR limitation to
use 256 colors.
Think why? Why were 16 colors duplicated in each palette? King's
Quest IV is capable to display 16 color palette each horizontal line
so the picture would look 3,200 colors.
If they had used multiple palettes, they would have had to do other
restrictions like keeping four to eight palette entries the same in all
palettes so that their "sprites" could be moved anywhere on the screen
without the colours that they are made up of changing. This would only
leave eight to twelve colours that could be changed on each line so you
would end up with something like 8 * 16 + 8 = 136 to 12 * 16 + 4 = 196
colours per screen and would be restricted to "sprites" that could only
be made up of eight or four static colours respectively.
As to some of the other replies in this thread about Apple deciding to
limit the number of colours, it comes down to what the VGC that they
chose to use was capable of. The only feature that the VGC has that
they didn't implement on the motherboard (but did on the Video Overlay
Card) is the interlaced mode where you could get 320 x 400 or 640 x 400
resolution but the flicker I've seen when using these modes on the VOC
made them pretty much unusable.