Hardware Palettes
Modern computers have video cards that display at least 256 simultaneous colors at 1024×768 resolution. Because a limited number of colors can be shown at one time, video boards must keep track of which colors to use. For example, the 256 colors that can be shown at one time are selected from a range of 256×256×256=16,777,216 possibilities. The range of colors is determined by the video board's use of 3 bytes of information to specify the red, green, and blue (RGB) elements of a color. Most high-end video boards support a video mode, true color, that can display all 16,777,216 possibilities simultaneously.
To show a color onscreen, the video board first sets the RGB values for all the colors that can be shown at one time. These ...
Get Microsoft Windows 2000 API SuperBible now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
