[HN Gopher] The Saga of the Color Brown in the Early Years of th...
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The Saga of the Color Brown in the Early Years of the PC (2023)
Author : susam
Score : 74 points
Date : 2024-12-14 03:11 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com)
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| My favorite kind of brown is Safety Orange (#FF7900), which I
| find to be cromulent and soylent concurrently. Strange though,
| how it does change where the pixels flow.
| FredPret wrote:
| Other interesting kinds of orange (International Orange and
| friends): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_orange
| amelius wrote:
| #BA160C looks more like red to me
| wellix wrote:
| I wouldve initially also said it looks like red to me, but
| after watching the Technology Connections video , I can see
| the orangeness of it.
| Andrex wrote:
| I remember having a bitch of a time in MS Paint as a kid back
| in the day trying to find an acceptable orange, everything I
| tried came out brown.
| wellix wrote:
| What kind of orange were you going for?
| smitelli wrote:
| This effect is enshrined into the default EGA palette[1] --
| you'll notice that the bit pattern sent to the monitor is always
| either 000xxx or 111xxx except in the case of brown, which is
| 010100. In any given color, the base bits (0..2) contribute 66%
| of the RGB channel levels, and the intensity bits (3..5) provide
| the other 33%.
|
| In the case of brown, which should be an "intensity all off"
| color according to the pattern, the green-base bit (which strong
| green) is disabled and replaced with the green-intensity bit
| (which produces weaker green).
|
| Without this, the default color would be #AAAA00, which has it's
| uses I'm sure, but in the abstract is a difficult color to love.
|
| [1]: https://moddingwiki.shikadi.net/wiki/EGA_Palette
| adrian_b wrote:
| As also mentioned in the article, the root problem is that for
| all the other pairs of colors defined by IBM the hue is the
| same and only the brightness varies, while for the pair yellow
| and brown both the hue and the brightness are different and
| many early implementers have failed to take this into account.
|
| Brown is just dark orange, but what is interesting is that
| there exists no dark yellow, which is why IBM had decided to
| define the paired low intensity color for yellow as the more
| useful brown.
|
| When the brightness of yellow is reduced without changing the
| hue, at some threshold the sensation of yellow disappears and
| the color is perceived as some kind of dark olive green.
| Changing continuously only the hue at low brightness passes
| continuously between a dark yellowish green and a greenish
| brown, without any intermediate color being perceived as
| yellow.
|
| It seems that the sensation of yellow is produced by the
| approximate equality of the detected red and green components,
| but only when their intensity is high enough. This is similar
| to the sensation of white, which is quite distinct from the
| sensation of gray, even if these colors differ only in
| brightness.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Brown is just dark orange_
|
| How _dare_ you. Brown is beautiful, unique, a flare of joy!
| You shall not sully its wonder, with such tryptophan-derived
| fantasy.
| dahart wrote:
| > Brown is just dark orange
|
| Fun fact, human skin is orange - both dark and light. If you
| saturate the colors of photos of people of any race, everyone
| is orange. Some AI face detectors use this to help identify
| where people are in images.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Yeah you can do a fast approximate skin detector as just
| red minus green
| amelius wrote:
| Are you the next president?
| cheschire wrote:
| There is a relevant Technology Connections video on this.
|
| https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _a faulty brown detection circuit_
|
| This genuinely feels like a line out of a scifi novel written by
| Terry Pratchett.
| dahart wrote:
| When I was just a kid hogging all the time on my dad's PCjr, I
| wrote a BASIC program to dither all combinations of the 16
| colors, and since it was connected to the crappiest color TV we
| had in the house, it was just blurry enough (even at 320x200)
| that out came what looked to my eyes like all the colors ever
| invented - 256 beautiful separate solid colors, _almost_. Dozens
| of lovely shades of brown, and pinks and magentas and greens and
| a whole subtle palette of all the colors under the sun, at least
| that's what it felt like. Then the Amiga came out and I was soo
| jelly.
| aidos wrote:
| I pushed my Amstrad to the limits but, God, wasn't the Amiga
| _something else_?
| rep_lodsb wrote:
| The "blurriness" is due to the color resolution on NTSC being
| effectively only 160 pixels, so the colors of adjacent pixels
| blend together. Early Sierra games like King's Quest used this
| trick too :)
|
| A very informative blog post about what's possible with CGA
| colors: https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-
| mode-...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Ohhh I thought this would be about the ugly brown/beige boxes in
| the early pc era. I think this was just because IBM used that
| colour in theirs and everyone copycatted it. The same way a lot
| of peripherals were using semi-transparent fruity coloured
| plastic in the early 2000s after Apple popularised this :P
|
| Not many computer companies really had good industrial design.
| Except remarkably some business-oriented companies like SGI and
| (to a slightly lesser extent) Sun whose stuff was awesome for the
| era. Too bad it was completely unaffordable.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I thought that as well. And brown radios and televisions. In
| the past, electronics stores used to sell 'brown goods', in my
| language.
| jasperry wrote:
| They made the cases or keycaps brown to compensate for not
| having good browns on the screen :D
| cannam wrote:
| The April 1984 issue of the British magazine "What Micro?" (70p
| from all good newsagents) contained a spoof review of a
| revolutionary new PC, the "Victori XZ64/4A".
|
| A paragraph in praise of its display reads:
|
| "Now lets move on to the display - and what a display it is. No
| less than 30 colours are available from Basic: white, off-white,
| cream, dark cream, light tan, light brown, bamboo, medium tan,
| medium brown, wood brown, sepia, burnt umber, oxtail, mustard
| (both French and English), khaki, off-brown, chocolate, dark tan,
| dark brown, dark burnt umber, burnt chocolate, drinking
| chocolate, ovaltine, light black, medium black, dark black, brown
| with a hint of green, brown with a hint of red, and brown with a
| hint of reddy-green. On some televisions these colours tend to
| look a little muddy, but with a little hunting around compatible
| sets can be found. For the purpose of this review I am using a
| VictoriVision Super Compatible available at most good electrical
| shops in Taiwan."
| Lerc wrote:
| A while back I did some experiments with 4-bit digital to analog
| RGB. I wanted to find a simple arrangement of resistors that took
| for digital lines and produced Red,Green and Blue intensity
| levels to produce a palette that was more friendly.
|
| Blog entry on it here.
| http://blag.fingswotidun.com/2020/07/a-nicer-4-bit-colour-wi...
|
| More recently I had the thought of training a resister-net in
| pytorch with quantization aware training (quantizing resister
| values to a few common values) to see if I could produce a set of
| colours to minimise the average perceptual distance to the
| closest palette entry from any color.
|
| One day I'd like to make my own 74-logic game console, so this
| was one of the building blocks. It did make me think that having
| a cartridge port that as well as ROM, included Analog-in, Analog-
| out, and digital-in video lines so carts could tweak the colours.
| To use system default just connect analog-in to analog-out for
| each of R,G, and B. Cross the wires to get palette variations.
| Use the digital lines to resister-net your own (or just modulate
| the default). Or go crazy like a NES mapper.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I like the brown instead of olive drab in the EGA palette,
| though imho they could have also made one of the two magentas
| orange instead: orange is missing and how many magentas does
| one really need?
| lisper wrote:
| Brown is actually dark orange:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Following is a very convincing picture
| https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/plo9bh/t...
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(page generated 2024-12-14 23:00 UTC)