01-20-2014, 01:24 PM
SPECTRA is a SCART interface. Its extended colour scheme is worse than ULAplus in every single respect. ULAplus is available now in clones and is emulated by almost everything. The only thing remaining to sort out on the plug-in board is the audio levels for LOADing and SAVEing. Everything else works. SPECTRA will only ever work on the 48K machine and is emulated only by ZXSP. To date it has had one demo release.
To recolour existing games on ULAplus you can just set a palette. No coding required. If you hack the palette you can get 64 colours on screen at once. With SPECTRA you have to rewrite the display code.
ULAplus has a carefully chosen 256 colour palette that works well for converting 24-bit images. In 8x1 attribute mode using the HAM8x1 software you can display a static 256 colour screen with 32 colours per row and 8x1 attributes. SPECTRA is limited to a palette of 64 colours, many of which are barely distinguishable. Its hi-res attribute modes are incompatible with existing Timex software. Its maximum colour resolution still gives worse results than HAM8x1 and uses considerably more RAM.
ULAplus supports the Timex modes. Eventually the plug-in should bring these features to the 128K machines, including the ability to run SE Basic 4.01 with its 80-column hi-res screen mode.
Personally I think SPECTRA is a dead end and I wouldn't waste time developing for it.
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9zMsEL4J0Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9zMsEL4J0Y</a><!-- m -->
You can try out HAM8x1 mode for yourself in the current release of SpecEmu.
To recolour existing games on ULAplus you can just set a palette. No coding required. If you hack the palette you can get 64 colours on screen at once. With SPECTRA you have to rewrite the display code.
ULAplus has a carefully chosen 256 colour palette that works well for converting 24-bit images. In 8x1 attribute mode using the HAM8x1 software you can display a static 256 colour screen with 32 colours per row and 8x1 attributes. SPECTRA is limited to a palette of 64 colours, many of which are barely distinguishable. Its hi-res attribute modes are incompatible with existing Timex software. Its maximum colour resolution still gives worse results than HAM8x1 and uses considerably more RAM.
ULAplus supports the Timex modes. Eventually the plug-in should bring these features to the 128K machines, including the ability to run SE Basic 4.01 with its 80-column hi-res screen mode.
Personally I think SPECTRA is a dead end and I wouldn't waste time developing for it.
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9zMsEL4J0Y">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9zMsEL4J0Y</a><!-- m -->
You can try out HAM8x1 mode for yourself in the current release of SpecEmu.