COLORING BOOK Manual
By Richard Degler
April 19, 2008


This manual is for the Bally Astrocade prototype cartridge "Coloring Book."

Selecting "1 - COLORING BOOK" from the menu starts off in DRAW mode. Turning 
the knob on Joystick One fully to the left changes the DRAWING COLOR (as shown 
by the border color) to White (unless changed to another value).  This is the 
background color, so even though the cursor shows in red you can't actually 
draw anything, only erase what's already onscreen.

Turning the knob right cycles through Green, Red, and Blue (or Color 1, Color 
2, and Color 3 if changed from the defaults).  You can draw in those colors by 
moving the blinking (eXclusive-OR'ed in the same color) cursor around using the 
joystick and pulling the trigger.

Turning the knob all the way to the right causes the border (and anything else 
in blue) to flash, and pulling the trigger then brings up the MENU in X-OR Red 
on the right side of the screen.

MENU choices - select from CLEAR, LINE, FILL, COLOR, LIFE, and DRAW by turning 
the knob, then pull the trigger.

CLEAR - will delete everything from the screen, and then return to the menu.

LINE mode - will change to rubber-band line drawing mode, where each trigger 
pull will set an end-point until the next trigger pull, when a line in the 
selected color will be drawn.

FILL mode - does a (slow) paint bomb fill of the color selected, bordered by 
any color other than the starting point.  Single pixel gaps will allow the 
paint to leak through.  The very top line will not be filled, this seems to be 
a bug.

COLOR - goes to a second menu where each of the four colors (as selected by the 
knob) can be picked from a palette of 256.  Moving the joystick left and right 
will change the color value from 0 to 31  (all the way to the left will change 
to shades of gray).  Moving the joystick up will make it darker, and down will 
make it lighter, from 0 to 7.  Pull the trigger to return to the main menu.

LIFE mode - is a fairly fast Forth version of John Conway's Game of LIFE, until 
the area worked on becomes too large, then it slows way down.  Occasionally, 
stray cells will remain behind when the bounding box is resized.  Growth at the 
edges will come to a stop unnaturally since the playfield isn't actually 
infinite.
Not really a color version - the wiping from generation to generation should 
have been hidden by alternating the red from white to blue (and the green from 
blue to white oppositely).  Since both odd and even generations are on screen a 
the same time, any blinkers will appear to be unchanging.  And since there is 
no way to tell whether red or green will immediately die off, the starting seed 
should have been drawn to the screen already in blue (or whatever the third 
color had been changed to).
Unlike the other modes, the knob does nothing.  Pulling the trigger (often gets 
missed) will return to the menu.  For more information, Google LIFE "cellular 
automata".

And finally, DRAW mode - returns to the drawing screen in the default 
scribbling mode.  Unlike the actual Scribbling game, there is no way to enlarge 
the brush block size.


This is an earlier prototype.  I have seen a version that had SNAP and COPY 
added in, but not one with all the other things promised.  And with only 328 
bytes free (out of 8192) in this binary, I doubt there ever would have been.


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