More colours in existing games?
I have been trying to follow the various threads about the new ULA and more colours. I don't understand quiet a lot of it as back in the day all I did was play Speccy games!
So I have a few questions:
1) Im I right in saying that you would eventually be able to buy this new ULA at some point and pop it in a Speccy?
2) How is that going overall?
3) In emulators like Spin there is an option for 'Enhanced ULA'. Does that make existing Speccy games have more colours? I remember some emulators have an overlay to add 256 colours to games but that was hard work.
4) How is this different?
Thanks all!
Sy.
So I have a few questions:
1) Im I right in saying that you would eventually be able to buy this new ULA at some point and pop it in a Speccy?
2) How is that going overall?
3) In emulators like Spin there is an option for 'Enhanced ULA'. Does that make existing Speccy games have more colours? I remember some emulators have an overlay to add 256 colours to games but that was hard work.
4) How is this different?
Thanks all!
Sy.
Post edited by HonoredShadow on
Comments
There's an FAQ on the ULAplus site.
Yes.
The original ULA has been replicated with 100% accuracy in a CPLD. The extensions have been verified as doable in hardware. The actual hardware design isn't started yet. CSmith has his isometric game and a book about the ULA to finish first.
No. It turns on support for ULAplus. Games don't get extra colours by magic. You have to load a palette first. Palettes are available from the above site.
Edit: The main difference is: A total of around 21 titles are supported by Spec256. A total of around 20,000 titles are supported by ULAplus.
Spec256 used a virtual 64-bit Z80 and replaced sprite data on the fly. It was horribly complex to use and impossible to realize in real hardware. ULAplus does not require any modification to existing games to get up to 32 colours on screen. You just create a palette file, load it in, then load the game as normal. There's a standalone palette editor that will run on any machine with ULAplus support and also a built-in palette editor in Spin.
I have enabled 64 colour. The game was Solomans key.
No.
Load the palette .tap file, then use the file menu to insert the game tape. Make sure you hold down shift when you click Okay in the file requester to prevent tape autoloading. Then LOAD "" and start the tape.
You might find that the border colours while loading are a bit strange.
D.
Newsbreak: I've started putting together a design for the palette handling implementation. It will use off-chip memory, and the real trick will be to fetch each colour as required from the palette memory on demand without affecting the normal ULA timing. Thankfully memory is fast these days, so you can fetch in "the blink of an eye", but that means running the new ULA at much faster than 14Mhz.
It's a lot of fun!
And yes, I'm ploughing on with the book at the moment. That's fun too. Currently documenting the CPU contention, which is proving tricky to get down on paper.
Cheers