Atari 8-bit PAL Artifacts

Plotting the dots on the Atari 8-bit for extra colours.

Above is an article originally published in Hopme Computing Weekly (issue 50, Feb 21st 1984).

Lots of Atari 8-bit games used NTSC phosphor artifacts to gain extra colours in the 'high resolution' 2 colour mode. They did this by setting the screen to black and white then they plotted only odd or even dots to gain a couple of extra colours.

Unfortunately in the UK we us PAL and the trick resulted in horrible dull green/blue stripes. The article shows my experiments to create loads of bright neon-like colours for the PAL system.

A few years later I was browsing some of the magazines in WHSmith and I saw another article about PAL artifacts in Page6 magazine... and it mentioned me!!!

Full HCW article: hcw50.png
Full Page6 article: artifacting.pdf