this video is for me, the guy who likes other people learning about practical ways to exploit the mame source code beyond playing romz (i know how to do the thing but usually just use gdb)
Not directly related to your video but it has always bothered me that the 6847 used three bits for color and the fourth bit for on/off. If instead of using that last bit as on/off they made it intensity instead, the CoCo could have had sixteen colors in alphagraphics mode instead of nine. It would have been on par with CGA, at least in terms of color. And it wouldn't have required a single extra byte of memory. Sometimes I think about getting into MAME development just so I can understand enough to make a custom 6847 that uses the on/off bit for intensity instead.
this video is for me, the guy who likes other people learning about practical ways to exploit the mame source code beyond playing romz (i know how to do the thing but usually just use gdb)
Very cool, I found my audience! 😜 Do you use raw gdb straight from the command line, or do you use one of the GUIs?
Not directly related to your video but it has always bothered me that the 6847 used three bits for color and the fourth bit for on/off. If instead of using that last bit as on/off they made it intensity instead, the CoCo could have had sixteen colors in alphagraphics mode instead of nine. It would have been on par with CGA, at least in terms of color. And it wouldn't have required a single extra byte of memory. Sometimes I think about getting into MAME development just so I can understand enough to make a custom 6847 that uses the on/off bit for intensity instead.
Oh hey, how hard can it possibly be? At least, that's what I tell myself before every time I dive into the MAME source to do something...