Spectrum Next BASIC Graphics Modes

[PeterJ]

I'm finally getting some time to start reading through the Next BASIC manual.

I'm onto chapter 15 'More about PRINT and INPUT'. Page 116 says that the Next has 8 distinct graphics modes broken into 4 groups or layers.

However the table below this text shows 10 layers:



Am I misunderstanding things, or is it a mistake in the text?

Thanks

[arjun]

Perhaps it doesn't consider Layer 3,0 and Layer 3,1 as "graphics mode" as they seem to be "text mode"? I have very little idea about Next so I'm just theorizing here.

[PeterJ]

I just remembered we have the author of the manual here..

[mention]TheSMoG[/mention]

[Joefish]

I see 4 'Layers'. Layers 0 and 2 each only have one 'mode' they can be in, and layers 1 and 3 have a choice of 4 different 'modes' each. So I suppose you could say there are 2 fixed modes and 8 selectable modes. But that would be an odd way of describing it.

I'm confused how you do 'Timex HiRes' with 256 colours though. Is it paletted down to 16 usable colours? Or is it two bytes per attribute? And does this mean it's not taken from the usual screen address in the 16-bit memory range?

[PeterJ]

Hi [mention]Joefish[/mention],

I've not got that far in the manual yet, but it looks like it's described on page 136. Extended Colour Attribute Display.