Crazy Monitor idea for old Home Computers

Eric Smith wrote: Jim wrote: You make it sound like there's some "magic" to artifacts, and that the computer "tricks" the monitor. That's not how it works. The reason people call color encoding on the Apple "artifacting" is because it was cleverly designed to take advantage of digital signals at the color burst frequency. That doesn't make the resulting waveform have any less "colorness" to it; the monitor is correctly interpreting it per the NTSC spec. For instance, people talk about how when you put a green pixel next to a purple pixel in an HGR mode, you get white as an "artifact". But that's because the NTSC signal that you get out for that pixel pair is essentially DC, so there is no color component. Naturally the monitor must interpret this as white. It's not the monitor being fooled, it's the naive programmer. The main part of the NTSC spec that the Apple II doens't meet is the relationship of color carrier timing to horizontal timing, which is supposed to be exactly 227.5:1, but on the Apple II was deliberately made 228:1 instead, so that the color carrier phase is the same on each line rather than alternating phase by 180 degress. The Apple has some other minor timing deviations, and the main oscillator usually isn't adjusted accurately to meet all the other specs (e.g., FCC spec on color carrier of +/- 10 Hz, wich is better than 3 PPM). But no other consumer gear normally meets that spec either. Anyhow, the color encoding on the Apple II works fine. That's not the problem. They looked exactly like they would on a normal Apple II. They just had correct timing. It rendered it as NTSC-compliant output. Eric