New Model Development Updates

[MbeeTech]

Hey Ewan, have you ever thought of introducing YCbCr color thereby increasing color count to 64 or more?

My thinking is that color ram can hold CbCr bits (4bits), while PCG ram can hold the Y bit for each pixel. A Separate PCG bank could hold another set of Y bits and the two banks alternate quickly so you perceive 2 Y bits per pixel thereby visually creating 64 possible colors. Hell, fill yet another bank with Y bits and get 128 colors (too much?).

Now you have HDMI out, you'd have to convert this 4:1:1 scheme to something a tv will accept OR create and external analog vga output board for the bee. Just something i thought might be doable at 10 and 20 Mhz that would make users happy.

There'd have to be code for it of course.

Thoughts?

Hey Matty.

In fact the new models can have up to 256 colours on the screen.  Normal 16 colors per pixel ( 4 bit planes ) , but then also you can choose out of 16 separate palettes of 16 colours each per character cell.
Each palette entry is 12 bits - so 4096 hues available to choose your colours from.

Video output is HDMI only, and its is scaled to 640 x 480 @ 75hz.

Here's a sample :  I updated the demo software's pictures just before Christmas for the retro meetup at Spingers Leisure centre.

                   

All of these photos are 4 bit colour with an optimised palette in windows BMP format.