With Trashcan I wanted to pay homage to the tapered version (1.3) which unfortunately meant a lot of slight-angle problems to deal with (I didn't because I rushed it).
As I may have mentioned, System 7 was at the back of my mind doing some of the icons, and now it's at the front of my mind.
What kind of palette would a Mac-Amiga hybrid from around ´92 have? Chunky pixels were becoming popular, 8 bits per pixel, i.e. 256 colors. Now, the palette might be dynamic, but it's best to keep a few OS static colors around. I think early Windows did. This gives me 240 colors. I've been holding off doing a 256 color palette (again) because it's a rather difficult task. This time I started out by indexing 256 64x64px photos, then I arranged the colors into ramps manually, realized I didn't like the ramps so I made ramps from scratch instead.
The two main sets were made with the following philosophy: Instead of doing 16-length ramps I wanted to focus more on hue and saturation coverage, which meant shorter ramps (larger value steps). I know that both dark and bright colors can often be merged, so my ramp lengths are interlaced short and long. I imagine that the blocks can be rolled up hue-to-hue-end and tapered/pinched towards the black and white ends. I chose to do a gray block and a normally saturated one, and then I added the 6 full sat colors and a few strips of high sat graphical ones. I had a few indices left and know that earth tones can be a bit sensitive in platforming games (lots of brown rock/mud terrain) so I padded with poop colors which seemed to be missing. Skintone coverage seems alright. A quarter of my source images were porn *snicker* (easiest way to get human skintone coverage tbh). I've pondered freeing up some colors (Ptoing suggested some of the near blacks) to soften/lengthen the sky gradients. Skies are sort of unique in that they are not textured and very often feature long smooth gradients. Overall the palette seems to be working but I have not yet done a similarity/dupe test.
Palette target is OS environment, so it should handle photos, games, documents, etc. I think System 7 has a 256 color palette in one of the modes but I have not been able to find it. My fantasy computer will have a blitter-type-GPU with its own VRAM (contains framebuffer/textures/various lists and pointers). In 256 color chunky pixel mode pixel manipulations are a lot easier and faster for a programmer. The idea is that the GPU is able to quickly redaw Bobs (fast enough for convenient immidiate mode) whilst the CPU does other things in its own RAM. No sprites. The CPU mostly only sets up and nudges Bob lists, scanline lists, as well as loading/changing textures in VRAM occasionally via some port. While it's tempting to put VRAM in RAM for direct CPU manipulation I think it will create communication/addressing slowdowns/conflicts.
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Also a Win 3.1 quickie!