The Enterprise's 40-column text video driver only allows two colour palette choices (0,1) or (2,3).
The Enterprise's 80-columm text video driver allows four colour palette choices (0,1), (2,3), (4,5), (6,7) ... but does so by enabling the Nick video setting that clips off the right hand side of text characters.
This works, but it looks really ugly, and from my personal point of view, it makes the Enterprise look really bad in comparison to the Amstrad CPC and the BBC Micro!
From what I can see, programs like EPDOS, HEASS, FENAS, etc implement their own 80-column text ouput routines so that they can avoid this and use the full 7-pixel width, even though that limits them to two colour palettes, the same as 40-column text.
Does anyone know of
any Enterprise programs that use the 3rd or 4th colour palettes in 80-column text mode?
Can anyone think of a reason why I should not just patch EXOS to use the full 7-pixel width and limit 80-column text to two palettes?
From what I can see, all of the Intelligent Software languages only use two palettes anyway, because they need to work in both 40-column and 80-column text modes!