This is really interesting, as I ever wondered what exactly is it. (Whatever
is it, they never tell you what really is it when they try to sell...)
Thank you for this nice description.
/---
Aley
in your last email you said the Kaleidoscope was a bodge - is
this coz there was no software for it? Does the Kaleidoscope
realy give the Sam 32,768 true colours? I'm interested in
what it is and what it does - (you never seem to hear anything
about it...)
It was a complete bodge.
What the kaleidoscope did was pull down the RGB video signals generated by
the Sam as normal (by darkening the output by varying amounts of red,
green,
blue - set with an OUT command to the kaleidoscope port) so it technically
produced 256 tinted shades of the original colours - in total 32768
shades,
but could they be used in a proper fashion - nope!
So whatever value of shading the kaleidoscope was set to would affect all
the colours on screen. There was no real way to use it all, could you have
individually shaded pixels - nope again!
At most, you could write code to tint horizontal groups of 16 pixels at a
time... but for all 192 scanlines you would be using all the CPU time and
even effectively tinting 16 pixel blocks that wouldn't really let you
achieve any decent graphical effects, plus 62% of all the CPU time is
being
used.
In all, a waste of time, it couldnt be utilised in any useable way at all,
therefore no software attempted to used it.
Colin
=====
Quazar : Hardware, Software, Spares and Repairs for the Sam Coupe
April 1995-2005 - Celebrating 10 Years of developing for the Sam Coupe
Website: http://www.samcoupe.com/
