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 | Sprite Image Data (up to $1000 per sprite at 64x64 8-bit) |
| $1B000-$1EBFF | Text Mode |
| $1EC00-$1EFFF | unused |
| $1F000-$1F7FF | Charset |
| $1F800-$1F9BF | unused |
| $1F9C0-$1F9FF | VERA PSG Registers (16 x 4 bytes) |
| $1FA00-$1FBFF | VERA Color Palette (256 x 2 bytes) |
| $1FC00-$1FFFF | VERA Sprite Attributes (128 x 8 bytes) |
Application software is free to use any part of video RAM if it does not use the corresponding KERNAL functionality. To restore text mode, call CINT ($FF81).