Vectrex games in color (part 2)

Hi again folks!

In the last post (part 1), i left off with "How to (err...do) i colorize the vectors ?"

Well first, i have to tell that i am using the good old DVE emulator (DOS Vectrex Emulator), well 2 versions exactly (version 1.4 and 2.0) and some games & demos doesn't display correctly in DVE 1.4 (like Tsunami & Vix). But i wasn't the first to colorize Vectrex games as Walt Garey (told you i was going to talk about him in the last post) was the first one.

Walt made especially two overlays that colorize Spike Hoppin' and Star Trek:

But these two overlay will colorize a specific color to a specific intensity, and because of these two overlays, i tried to do one myself but discovered that it was simple to add colors. So after choosing a specific color palette, i have chosen the MS-DOS color palette:

But i could have chosen the Amiga color palette:

Which is almost identical to the MS-DOS color palette (only brown is dark yellow on MS-DOS) and since the DVE is working in DOS so i settled for the MS-DOS color palette.

I have "hinted" in the first Vectrex video (Dark Tower in color) how i colorize the intensity, if you check the "Test rev.4" part, you would have seen this (not the same image):

So here you have it, by implying a specific color palette, each intensity programmed in a game (or demo) will show a specific color, say as an example: Spike is intensity 2, he will be Green and if he was in intensity 5, he will be in Magenta.

But you can choose which color will be shown in which intensity as i did for certain games like in this video (third Vectrex video):

In the video i have made 4 different color palettes, which are:

* Game & Watch style: Here i used the game Paratroopers and grey for intensity 0 (background)
and black for intensity 1 to 15.

* Game Boy style: i used the game Star Hawk with the color light spinach as intensity 0 (background) and black for intensity 1 to 15.


* MSX style: Used the game Y.A.S.I. with blue background (intensity 0) and the rest of the MS-DOS color palette for intensity 1 to 15.

* Virtual Boy style: Again im using Y.A.S.I. but with black as background (intensity 0) and red for intensity 1 to 15.

So you can choose any of the millions of colors but only 16 maximum at a time.

Now did i have modded or hacked the DVE for putting colors ? NOPE! Not even 1 byte! Same as all the demos and games in ROM format, i left them as they are. The only thing i have changed was the BIOS to display "color arcade!" instead of "entertaining new ideas".

So how do i colorize the games ?!?! That....i'm letting you folks to figure it out until i released the files. I have kept that secret for the past 15 years and the only person who has a copy of these files (way back in 2009) was Daniel Bienvenu (yep...the guru programmer of Colecovision). I say "was" because now Daniel is now "Amy" (Hi Amy!).

So in the meanwhile, i'm waiting to see if any of you can figure out how to colorize the games. Graham Toal of the vector forums has an interesting idea how to colorize but his using "VecX - SDL" and a file called "colorize.diff". But i'm using DVE and NO extra files...

Ok said enough. So until next, take care folks!

--- Sly DC ---