Special Effects On Composite Color Monitors
Using the NTSC TV-out instead of an RGBI monitor not only made for less attractive colors, as described above, but as is common with NTSC composite video, the separation between luminance and chrominance is far from perfect, yielding cross-color artifacts, or color "smearing". This is especially a problem with 80-column text:
It is for this reason that each of the text and graphics modes described above exists twice: once as the normal "color" version and once as a "monochrome" version; the "monochrome" version of each mode would turn off the NTSC color decoding in the viewing monitor completely, resulting in a black-and-white picture, but also no color bleeding, hence, a sharper picture. On RGBI monitors, the two versions of each mode are identical, with the exception of the 320×200 graphics mode, where the "monochrome" version produces the third palette, as described above.
However, programmers soon found out that this flaw could be turned into an asset, as distinct patterns of high-resolution dots would "smear" into consistent areas of solid colors, thus allowing the display of completely new colors. Since these new colors are the result of cross-color artifacting, they are often called "artifact colors". Both the standard 320×200 four-color and the 640×200 color-on-black graphics modes could be used with this technique.
Read more about this topic: Color Graphics Adapter
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