The APAC System, or Any Point, Any Color was a software-driven display mode capable of displaying an image using all 256 of the Atari's possible colors. By taking 80×192 mode lines that displayed 16 hues, and those that displayed 16 shades, and either interlacing rows of them, quickly alternating between rows of them, or both, a screen displaying 80×96 or 80×192 pixels in 256 colors could be perceived.
APAC was created in early 1987 and later introduced in the magazine A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing, Issue #60, May 1988 in an article by Tom Tanida. The source code was written in 6502 assembly language.
APAC used a Display List Interrupt, or DLI, after each line of the screen was drawn to alternate between GTIA Graphics Mode 11 (15 hues) and 9 (15 shades of grey) of the GTIA chip. The hues and luminances would blend together on the screen (usually a television) to create the effect of a palette of 256 visible colors, with the artifact of a thinner, horizontal blank line in between each visible line.
APAC used a very basic API consisting of four functions:
- Init, used to place the computer into the APAC mode
- Exit, used to exit the APAC mode
- Plot, used to place a point of a specified color on the screen
- Draw, used to draw a line between the last plotted point to the given point
A second article for an "APAC-II" mode was hinted at in the original article. This mode would have alternated the GTIA 9 and 11 modes during a vertical blank interrupt, or VBI. The article was neither completed nor published.
Read more about this topic: Software-driven Graphics Modes For The Atari 8-bit Computers
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