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Video cards supported swapping palettes out in real time. http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5 http://www
by roywiggins 11y ago
Video cards supported swapping palettes out in real time.
http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_School_Color_Cycling_with_HTML5 http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article.psp.html/joe/Old_S...
> Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory. Thus began the era of color cycling.
- kd5bjo 11y agoThe technique is even older than that -- most graphics modes on the 8-bit Ataris only supported a 4-color palette. To get more colors on the screen, you had to take an interrupt partway through the frame to swap out some of the colors and then put them back during the vertical blank to be ready for the next frame.