Chapter 8: Video Programming

The VERA video chip supports resolutions up to 640x480 with up to 256 colors from a palette of 4096, two layers of either a bitmap or tiles, 128 sprites of up to 64x64 pixels in size. It can output VGA as well as a 525 line interlaced signal, either as NTSC or as RGB (Amiga-style).

See the VERA Programmer's Reference for the complete reference.

The X16 KERNAL uses the following video memory layout:

Addresses Description
$00000-$12BFF 320x240@256c Bitmap
$12C00-$12FFF unused
$13000-$1AFFF Sprites ($1000 per sprite)
$1B000-$1EBFF Text Mode
$1EC00-$1EFFF unused
$1F000-$1F7FF Charset
$1F800-$1F9BF unused
$1F9C0-$1FFFF VERA internal (PSG, Palette, Sprite Registers)

Application software is free to use any part of video RAM if it does not use the corresponding KERNAL functionality. To restore text mode, call CINT ($FF81).