Omnimaga
Calculator Community => Other Calculators => Topic started by: quasi_Phthalo on July 21, 2010, 10:29:25 am
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so, there's this 'color pong' game out there for 83, and it doesn't work on 84s. It apparently messes with those you'd-be-well-advised-to-just-leave-this-alone commands for LCD port $10. I've never seen it run on an 83, but it supposedly gets you some yellowish and bluish colored pixels for an otherwise ordinary pong game. If you try to run it on an 84, however, this funky pattern happens in the upper left corner of the screen, and then it kinda flickers and fades. After doing this, the calc is still on, but the screen doesn't work, until you reset it (i can navigate the menus blind!)
Inspired to mess with the port after seeing the thread on the exclusive flipping commands, i replicated the color pong affect by sending $10 to the port (i haven't tried the other power supply instructions yet)
Does anyone know what in the heck $08 - $13 do to the LCD? is it harmful? and should i pursue a further study of these commands?
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According to the official Toshiba documentation, it changes how much power is sent to the LCD. The reason you might not want to mess around with them is the potentially harmful effect on the LCD b/c of different power settings.
As for me, sending $10 to port $10 made the LCD turn off, or at least made the contrast extremely low, and until I did a full RAM Reset (b/c I couldn't figure out how to fix it), I had to have the contrast on 9 to see anything.
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I tried this on my 83+SE and it just turns off the LCD until I turn the calc off/pull a battery. Maybe it doesn't work at all?
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ok, this is weird.... i can't find it on ticalc.org anymore!! I swear, though, the last time I saw it, someone had commented and said it worked for them....
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http://calcg.org/cgi-bin/files.cgi?id=1471 (http://calcg.org/cgi-bin/files.cgi?id=1471)
Well, it's still here (link c/o Flygon)
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Yeah it was taken down from ticalc.org because it was a hoax.
The game dates back in 2001. I tried it back then on my 83+ and 83+SE before it got removed. It is not even LCD colors. The LCD power is changed in a way that it seems contrast is at a high level (if the author isn't lying and it's not the contrast actually being changed) so that the black looks a bit blue-ish and the rest dark yellow, like when setting your contrast in the high 8s.
I remember getting fooled back then with it. I was like "ZOMGCOLORZ!!!11!1!1oneoneone" and was very disappointed when I ran it. The game actually ran, though.
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yeah, i just took a look at the hex code and all i found relating to the LCD were these:
D310CD <- low contrast
D3103E <- ??? isn't supposed to do anything according to WikiTI
D310EF <- high contrast
but i still don't understand.... the weird effects on the screen it created were consistent with messing with the power supply!
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Well, it is colors. Sort of. :P
Realize that there is no way to get the LCD to display more than two colors anyway, because there's no way to assign more than one bit to a pixel. But it is colors, in a messed-up and possibly LCD-damaging way. (It's somewhat like the contrast, IIRC)
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Could you post pics of it in action, as proof? On my regular 83+, it looked a bit colored, but very barely. The black was slightly blue-ish, but more close to black, while the white looked close to brown/yellow. I could barely see anything. It's not my calc that isn't compatible I am sure, because my calc hardware is from July 2000, long before the program was made.
Otherwise we could pretty much say that The Reign Of Legends 2 Totem dungeon features colors as well.
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It doesn't work for me. And as you said, it'd be more like just having high contrast and the hues associated w/that than anything else.
And yes, all monochrome/grayscale games feature color! :P