NTSC defined a system of 525 lines being displayed at 60Hz with the odd lines an image being displayed the first field of 262.5 lines and the even lines being displayed the second field of 262.5 lines. the color or hue of a chroma signal was determined by the phase of the 3.58MHz sine wave relative to a 'color burst' reference phase and the saturation of the color was determined by the amplitude of the sine wave. While the luma signal was an analog waveform of varying voltage levels corresponding to the brightness of the image as captured. In color NTSC, a 3.58MHz color subcarrier sine wave is transmitted alongside a bandwidth-unlimited luma signal (generally 4.2MHz due to over the air broadcast limitations). Color was added to by the NTSC to be backwards compatible with the black and white standard in 1953. Brightness and sync were present when the NTSC defined as the black and white television standards in 1941. A color NTSC signal is made up of three components, brightness/luma, color/chroma and sync. In this article, let's take a deep dive into how artifact color works on the Apple II and how it was adapted for systems where artifact color could not exist and how artifacts can change according to the display technology inside a display.Īrtifact color is based on a quirk of the NTSC method of decoding color.

But the color method used did not translate to PAL countries and later improvements to color filtering could modify the colors shown.

The design of the Apple II was so solid that its color works rather well on almost anything that can accept a composite signal, even today. It worked by exploiting quirks in the NTSC color system called artifact color which TVs were attempting to suppress.

The Apple II computer are unique in that not only was it the first home computer ever released to the mass market, it was the first computer released to support color graphics, all the way back in 1977.

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