Date   : Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:20:55 +0000
From   : public@... (Daniel Beardsmore)
Subject: Compromises

On 2015-01-08 00:05, J.G.Harston wrote:
> Daniel Beardsmore wrote:
>>> Colour 1 is red. Full stop. Colour 2 is green. Full stop. Colour 4 is
>>> blue. Full stop. None of this "add blue and red and get puke" 
>>> nonsense.
>>
>> Maybe, but the choice of colours was rather eyeball-searing
> 
> But is wasn't a choice of colours. It was digital RGB. That specifies a 
> set of colours, there is no choice.

Why was digital RGB a requirement?

As far as I understand it, and maybe I'm totally wrong here, are there not
two levels here?

Level 1) MOS: four bits per pixel, for a total of sixteen distinguishable
colours, with no interest in what they look like

Level 2) Hardware: the DAC generates RGB colour data

Was it technically so infeasible for the DAC stage to generate shades other 
than digital RGB? I don't see this as a MOS requirement (since MOS surely 
couldn't care less what the colours looked like, or even if you had colour
at all) or a memory limit (since we're not recording what the colours actually
are), but simply a limitation of the last stage, that actually chooses what
colours get output.