mainly because we have 32 bit colour and accelerated graphics drivers today. You can't palette cycle 32 bit colours because there's no palette to cycle. An 8

mainly because we have 32 bit colour and accelerated graphics drivers today. You can't palette cycle 32 bit colours because there's no palette to cycle. An 8 bit display meant that you basically had a lookup table of size 256, and each entry mapped to an 18 bit colour (6 bits each for R, G & B IIRC). These days it's kinda normal for a bit geek to have numbers like 1024, 1048576, 16777216 and 4294967296 permanently burned into your brain. Back then we also had 262144 burned in -- the number of colours we had access to. The best part about palette cycling was that you didn't have to wait for the VBLANK to make your changes. For most frame changes, you'd have to wait until the cathode ray hit the bottom of the monitor and was slowly making its way back up to the top to scan through again. You had to make all writes to video memory at this time to avoid screen fuzz, ie, half a screen with the old frame and half with the new frame. Palette cycling could happen at pretty much any time, so you'd just hook it up to the timer interrupt and let it go.