The Spectrum's spectrum
appears to be missing a few things...
specifically I'm wondering about pink and brown
my hazy attempts to mix red and white are not proving very successful
specifically I'm wondering about pink and brown
my hazy attempts to mix red and white are not proving very successful
Post edited by Wookiee on
Comments
ULAPlus?
I'm using orange and brown in The Speccies that way. That was easy. :)
My games for the Spectrum: Dingo, The Speccies, The Speccies 2, Vallation, SQIJ.
Twitter: Sokurah
Write some machine code that constantly flips the attributes between two or more options under fast interrupt control. If you select the right base colour set it should work due to human vision being rather slow and averaging out what you see, but it'll slow down other stuff. You'll also probably only be able to to do a small area of the screen.
Or, a method that won't slow anything down...
Take your TV remote control and change the colour settings until you get the colour you want. If you're lucky and if your TV is flexible enough you might be able get a setting that'll give you both colours available at the same time :)
David
what is a ULA plus? and how does it apply to BASIC UDGs?
Yes it will. A short MC routine could initialize it and then it would work fine evne from Basic.
But you would need an emulator that supports it to see it.
Here's a picture of it in use (only the orange is new here, but brown is used elsewhere).
My games for the Spectrum: Dingo, The Speccies, The Speccies 2, Vallation, SQIJ.
Twitter: Sokurah
:lol:
that one sounds more my level
dunno about brown, maybe red and black pixels?
tried that - ended up with a mini red n white chessboard....thought it might fool my eyes but sadly not
thanks man - interesting stuff there
If you sit far enough away there's some passing semblances to pink & brown in there. There's also Spectrum Colour from Sinclair User and Super Colour from Your Sinclair (although that last one uses machine code).
Because C64 production had exhausted all the brown resources already? :)
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Use the power of suggestion :p
It sort of worked sitting 5 feet away from a crappy old blurry portable TV;
It looks like a chequerboard on a high definition monitor.
So the Spectrum shouldn't've been called a Spectrum? :-o
More did you know waffle... where's ewgf got to these days?
Your eyes' response to coloured light is far more complicated than you might imagine. A TV generates R/G/B light, which is enough to fool most people's vision that they're seeing all the colours in between. Your eye senses colour in roughly those three bands, from wavelengths of around 700nm (red) down to 400nm (blue).
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~fovell/AS3/eye_cones.jpg
So pure yellow light will trigger your sense of red and green together, and you call it yellow. But you're easily fooled into seeing yellow by having red and green light arriving simultaneously.
Some birds, for example, have more acute colour vision and could tell the difference between red and green together, and a single source of pure yellow.
But as you get to the shortest wavelengths at the blue end of the spectrum, your sense of red (from the other end of the spectrum) is triggered ever so slightly, and that's what you perceive as 'violet' on the edge of a rainbow, just before it passes into UV and out of sight completely. It's an illusion. It's caused by the near-UV light having almost exactly half the wavelength of red light, causing a kind of secondary harmonic response. How far into the UV you can see (and thus the strength of this secondary sense of red) varies from person to person. Some people who've had artificial corneas implanted folllowing cataract surgery can see much further into the UV spectrum, although they run an increased risk of sun damage just as if you weren't wearing your UV-tested sunglasses.
But you can't tell that effect apart from something that's genuinely reflecting or emitting blue and red light at the same time.
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Look at where the peaks are in that diagram. There's that clear sense of blue, but the peak that's marked in red really peaks around the yellow-orange wavelength. What you have from those is blue/yellow colour vision, which is what most mammals have (e.g. dogs and bulls are only partly colourblind, not completely. A bull doesn't react to red specifically, his colour resolution isn't that acute, and anyway his brain is attuned to motion more than colour).
But at some point we've evolved a third sense of green. So now we can deduce that if something shows up brightly in our yellow-orange sense, and not much is registering on our sense of green, then the thing we're looking at is probably red. And it's this one extra sense breaking down that leads to red/green being the most common form of colourblindness - we revert back to mk.1 mammal-vision where we see everything in blues and yellows.
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nah they run 100+ colours these days, with the new gfx modes (for demos , not for games)... to a point where amiga owners think they are amiga demos ;)
http://www.studiostyle.sk/dmagic/gallery/gfxmodes.htm
are a few of em, there have been nu..err new ones since :)
Even worse, your ability to perceive colours is actually shaped by your cultural upbringing and the language you speak.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb05/hues.aspx
(Found thanks to a cracked.com article :) http://www.cracked.com/article_18823_5-insane-ways-words-can-control-your-mind.html Look at number 3)
There was a documentary a little while ago talking of that. Tribespeople that could pick out the different colour from a set of coloured blobs, where you and I probably couldn't see the difference. And the reverse test was also true for some other colours. Clearly different to me, this tribe couldn't spot the difference...
But it's not just remote tribes. We didn't even use the word 'orange' to describe the colour until the 1500s (first known recorded use is dated 1512) though we'd been eating oranges for a good 300 years. Before then it was just seen as a variant of red; 'yellow-red' if you were being particularly picky about your art supplies.
Which is why we have bird names and nicknames such as the 'robin red-breast' and the 'red-tailed kite' when the body parts in question are clearly orange. Even whilst you're looking at them, you still feel you're conditioned to perceive them as red. Ask a kid to colour a robin and he'll colour it red, just like he'll colour a sea turtle green, when they clearly aren't. It's a common public perception that's blatantly wrong - even the 'green sea turtle' is only called that because if you catch one and butcher it you find some green fat on the inside.
Still, if you want some more colour madness, have a look at the official colour names LEGO use:
http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/Colour_Palette
They get these like all their part names by inventing the phrase in Danish (which is an apallingly uninventive language for descriptions) then translating them word-for-word into English. So you get delights such as 'Earth Green' for a shade of green darker than the usual LEGO green (because they decided that had been 'Dark Green' all along rather than just 'Green'). And 'Brick Yellow' for a sandy tan colour, but 'Sand Yellow' is then a much darker shade. Similarly in shapes, any sort of curve is described by the word for 'bow', so a 'brick with bow' could be an arch, a curved bit of roof, a rounded bumper, or anything. Sometimes two or more completely different pieces end up with the same description. I can only imagine their poetry must be worse than Vogon...
Interestingly, the idea that language influences thought, so that different language speakers think differently, is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Which is also relevant when you consider certain fictional languages, such as a particular warrior-race from Star Trek. And the first one of them to join Star Fleet was named...?
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Perhaps gender? :)
In Brazil we usually joke that women can distinguish a million colors and sometimes even have a name for each one. A woman may decide to change her hair color from RGB 224/210/35 to RGB 225/209/35 and get upset that her husband didn't notice anything different...
However men only pays attention to about a dozen colors. There's black, white, gray, red, green, dark blue, light blue (since blue is the only color with 2 variants!), yellow, pink/violet/magenta (3 different names but they are all the same color, right?), brown and orange. That's all. Turquoise? That's light blue. Cyan? That's also light blue. And so on...
Perhaps that's the reason I'm comfortable designing ZX-Spectrum graphics? :)
Hey!
What basis do you have for calling it "apallingly uninventive" (other that LEGO)? ;)
My games for the Spectrum: Dingo, The Speccies, The Speccies 2, Vallation, SQIJ.
Twitter: Sokurah
It is a pretty rigid language. It's not quite as bad as Dutch, where you can be shot for making up a word that's not in the official language dictionary, or French, where use of a foreign word is equally verboten. But it certainly doesn't absorb foreign concepts as fluidly as english.
Anyway, they didn't even invent LEGO - they got a patent on some design refinements and made a monopoly out of it. Just as James Watt didn't invent the static steam engine, nor Stevenson the locomotive.
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There's only 2 colours men pay attention to - pink and brown.
Some men prefer the pink more, some the brown. Some like both equally.
Errr ... Danish is a HIGHLY "internationalised" language. The Danes readily absorb any common international words into their language.
Thanks, I think so too. And I should - I am Danish after all. ;)
My games for the Spectrum: Dingo, The Speccies, The Speccies 2, Vallation, SQIJ.
Twitter: Sokurah
Thus these women being more picky over colours must be learned - men have the slightly better colour perception - although they are then more prone to colour-blindness.
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Anyway, I wrote 'concepts', not 'words'. Lots of languages will adopt foreign words for things like technology for example (though then they're mostly English). In some ways it's indicative of them lacking the flexibility to invent their own. German has an interesting habit of creating massively compound words whenever they come up with something new, which is one way of doing it, and French will take foreign words and use them to mean something completely different to the original intent - which is wonderfully French. But English radically changes its structure and usage from foreign influences - it's not just about the odd new word here and there.
There are some things, subtleties of thinking, that simply don't come across in foreign languages because someone cannot grasp the same idea without the words to describe it. For example, it's not uncommon in Germany to think that the English say "Die Deutsche haben keinen Humor" - the Germans have no 'humor', and they protest that they find all sorts of things funny. But that's exactly the point - the English phrase would be to say "no sense of humour" - that they don't share the same ideas as the English as to what is and isn't funny - not that they're incapable of laughing. But the subtlety is missed because the phrase does not translate, so there's misunderstanding on both sides.
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