🚀 go-pugleaf

cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne) writes:
>The idea of having 16 million colours (24 bits worth), that are simply
>"chosen" rather than using a palette sounds neat, in SOME ways, but is
>it ultimately ALL that great?
>
>1) It means that if some of those colours never get used, whether in a
>particular application, or possibly EVER (who'd want THAT putrid shade
>of green?), then that part of the implied palette is wasted.  It might
>be a better use of resources to have a smaller palette that contains
>the colours that are actually USED.

But who decides what's a "good" color?  I'm particularly fond of THAT
putrid shade of green...

>2) I have often seen palette switching used to do animation/"editing"
>of pictures.  You change colour #1 from White to Black, which seems to
>be a pretty useful thing.  "True Color" seems to throw this sort of
>feature away.

The trouble with palette mapping on displays with huge amounts of
color is that it eats tons of memory.  Say you have a page of graphics
with 16 million "colors," each actually a logical color number,
essentially a key into a hash table of "real colors."  A 1 in the
display memory means go to the first entry in the hash table, pull out
the value there and use that on the monitor.  Between the video memory
and the hash table, you've just doubled the amount of memory the
picture takes up -- a not-insignificant amount with 24-bit color.
(Tangentially, you've also slowed things down a little...)  On the
8-bit Ataris this didn't cost anything -- four logical colors map to
four real colors.  Not a big deal.  On the Falcon (or whatever) it
is (or will be.)

>                          (We're ALL Americans, whether we live in
>Canada, Mexico, or the United States.  Of course, the "Americans" that
>live in Canada get better service from Atari, but that's another
>issue!)

Yeah, but you can also be called Canadians, and people from Mexico
can be called Mexicans.  Aside from "Americans" our next choice is
United Statesians, and that that just sounds really, really weenie.
-- 
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 Greg "Maddog" Knauss                      My boss doesn't know I'm doing this,
 greg@{duke|godzilla}.quotron.com                so I doubt he'd agree with me.
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