Color, the SCO console vs FacetWin

[Brian K. White]

John Esak wrote:

> This question is, oh I don't know... about the electronic level of
> things inside the drivers of each system I guess. Here is the
> situation. If I run FacetWin's terminal emulator on the PC side into
> the Unix box and issue a "setcolor" command, I get the display of
> colors just fine. Everything looks great. I mean really, how can you
> judge these things?  It looks fine to me and everyone else. No
> problem. The very same is true of the Unix side of the switch. If I
> issue a "setcolor" command, the display is perfect, crisp clear, just
> fine. The only difference and it is significant and dramatic to me...
> is that the brightness of the colors on the Unix side (direct console
> in other words) is WAY brighter. I don't mean a little brighter. I
> mean WAY WAY brighter. So much so, that I can see the little word
> "red" next to the red block of color. When I switch to the PC side

Really simple why the two terminals render the same colors a little
different. The comparison is not apples-apples.

On the unix side, the unix display driver sets a particular set of levels
for rgb in response to the various ansi color codes.

In facetwin, and any other terminal emulator (in Windows or Mac or X or
wherever), the terminal emulator may choose to use other values to render
those same ansi codes and the scale that those values live in might not be
exactly the same since on the unix side it acessing the hardware directly
and on windows it's faking that so the same rgb value may (probably will
actually) result in not the same physical brightness & hue.

Never mind, we have a terminal emulator writer right on the list... I'm sure
he can point out the salient factors  a little more clearly not to mention
more correctly :)

I just know every different type of terminal emulator Ive ever used has
rendered the same ansi colors at least slightly, sometimes greatly
differently. with the exception that dos, unix & linux consoles work about
the same.

I have noticed that facetwin in particular uses somewhat darker versions of
some colors. Most notably the cyan. Cyan is the menu background color for
our filepro app and it looks fine in facetwin, but just as an example, the
same app doesn't look too good in this java telnet applet
http://nj.aljex.com/jta (login as "demo") because the cyan is so much
brighter. Some other emulators are the same. The console is somewhere
between facetwin and that example for how bright the cyan renders.

Yellow is probably the color that changes the most from terminal to
terminal. Sometomes it's bright yellow, "baby sh__ green", red, or brown.
And it's just the "plain" version of the color. Usually the "bright" version
is similar to others and clearly yellow.

(if the enter selection prompt flickers annoyingly in that demo, it's not
your computer, the applet doesn't work well in recent versions of windows &
java jvm, we don't actually use this thing it's just something I was playing
with one time. It's also a crushing cpu hog. It's pretty old and there are
more and newer versions now that probably work better but I didn't like some
things about it the last time I looked and it's basically a different
discussion...)

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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