Colors is a somewhat useless little program which loads and displays SHR
pictures, replacing the colors 1-4 with a scrolling rainbow of 64 colors.
When the program is run, a standard dialog box will allow the user to select
the graphic to be displayed.It must be in $c0 ( non-compressed ) form. The
file will then be loaded and displayed until the mouse button is pressed, at
which point the dialog box will re-appear. You may then select another file,
or click on the cancel button to quit.

When creating graphics for use with this program, one should follow these
guidelines:

    Picture must use 320 mode only 640 mode will result in weird effects.

    A single palette should be used for the entire picture. The program
    assigns the palettes to lines according to it's own requirements,
    which are most probably different than your own.

    Colors 1 through 4 should all be set to the same color, different
    from any of the other colors. This will make it easy for you to
    distinguish what parts of the picture will be replaced.

    All of the remaining 12 colors are available for your use, but
    color 0 should be the darkest, and color 15 should be the lightest
    of these. This is not a requirement, but it makes the dialog box
    easier to read.

There is a sample graphic included with the program to give you an idea
of how it should be done, as well as send a message to our Amiga freinds.

As I said before, this program is mostly useless, but it does show off some
of the GS's abilities. It will probably show up in another form in future work.

For the curious:

This program cycles the first four colors of each palette (16 palettes times
4 colors = 64 colors). My original intent was to create a rainbow of 256 colors
by using all 16 colors of each palette, but the 12 bit color of the GS limits
the number of 'nice' colors available. For example, in shading from green to
blue, there are only 32 colors. ( $0F0 $0F1 ... $0FF $0EF ... $00F ) This
means only 32 x 4 -3 = 125 colors in the entire rainbow. ( red to green, green
to blue, blue to red)  Unfortunately, colors $8F0 through $0F8 all appear
alike ( green ) on the screen. This resulted in a rainbow with wide bands of
red, green, and blue, and smaller bands of the transistion colors yellow,
aqua, and violet. I was forced to ramove some of the 'excess' colors to improve
the appearance, finally arriving at 64 colors. While this was somewhat
disappointing, it did open up the other 12 colors for use as background. If I
see any interest in this, I am quite sure I could rewrite it to allow use of
all but one of the colors in the picture. The remaining color would be the
key color and could be specified by the user.

If you have any comments, questions,or suggestions, please drop a line.

America Online : Lafsalot
Snail mail :  Jack Simon
              3219 Mt Zion Rd
              Upperco, Md 21155
                      
