Inspired by an excellent interview of Urs Koening with David Karlin, I am thinking of adding more colours to standard QLs. It seems a single pin was eliminated in the process of cost cutting before QL mass market production.
http://www.sinclairql.net/story/The_lon ... Karlin.htm
Question, is `ULA ZX8301' in fact capable of more colours so just by supplying some simple logic we could trigger 16 true colours with BRIGHT shading like on ZX?Q: Why has a non-common FLASH option been implemented and not a more desirable and usable 16 colour option (BRIGHT of the 8 base colours or real 16 colours)? Was this because of Teletext/BBS/Videotex/MicroNet/Prestel or the like had flashing characters?
DK: I hardly remember this. The ZX8301 is purely digital, so to get multiple colour levels, we would have needed an extra output which would have fed a primitive DAC. This would have needed another pin, and we didn't have one.
Cheers
Tomas