New Model Development Updates

[MbeeTech]

Latest update on the Classic Plus development.

Over the last week I've been ironing out a few bugs
(hardware cursor positioning, cursor auto-repeat, videotex mod 1/2 dot clock screen mode etc)
and writing test software to prove out some of the new features.
I'm really pleased with the progress and glad to report that the new
4 bit plane graphics is working.  I've not tested all of it's capabilities as yet, but the design works
as anticipated to this point.

Here are a couple of teaser screen shots (not terribly exciting content wise, but they show the new
graphics working )






The image quality is not great as both pictures are just snaps with my phone of the output of the LCD monitor,
but you get the gist.

What the photos show is :
640 x 256 resolution
Regular font displayed in the foreground, while
the 4 bit plane graphics becomes background.
Foreground and background have different colour palettes (although for this test program
both the foreground and background palettes are programmed with the same colour sets)
The foreground has a single 16 colour palette while the background will have up to 16
sets of 16 colour palettes.  While using bit plane graphics mode, the normal 'Background'
colour (that gets written to colour ram) becomes an index to select which of the 16 background
colour palettes is in use for that character position and the value from the bit plane determines
which of the 16 colours from the selected palette get displayed for each pixel.

More pictures to come as I test the other graphics functions.