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Originally Posted by chb
That's possible, but I rather think the quoted "7 bitplanes" or sometimes even "128 colors" are a misunderstanding that stems from the fact that ECS has 7 bitplane pointer registers - six for the normal display and one UHRES pointer. Having a single bitplane overlay wouldn't have added that much IMHO to justify the effort. But who knows.
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since you could treat it as a totally independent playfield it would be nice even with just two colors ... if your second (vram) output is attached to a CLUT it could give you a much more colourful "plane"...
Switching to the background if foreground (Denise) is all black, is a dead simple circuit in TTL...
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BTW, I think it's interesting that while the UHRES/VRAM functionality was clearly there partially - it's mentioned in the ECS & AGA documentation, the AAA docs mention that it got removed from AAA because it was never really used - but I have never seen any details how it was meant to be implemented. Really just 1 bitplane b/w? Or some external color DAC/RAMDAC? Seeing all the fuzz and myths about Ranger, the lone fact that ECS had some VRAM support should trigger some curiosity. But seemingly almost no one talks about that. Anyway, just a footnote in computer history.
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we discussed some of it already in the UHRES thread ... and there seems to be no way to really control a more sophisticated CLUT ... except for using some "magic patterns".
So b/w or a fixed color CLUT seems more likely.
Well - we probably will never know.