Editing MicroBee (section)

== Colour ==

A colour machine was also released in 1983, called the "32K Personal Communicator".  This added a second byte of RAM for each character position, allowing each character to have 2 colours.  The foreground colour has 32 possible values (5 bits) and are determined by the contents of the 82S123 [[Programmable ROM|PROM]] located on the colour board.  Not all foreground colours combinations are unique with only 27 being possible.  The background colours were made up from the remaining 3 bits of the colour RAM byte (8 colours) and another 3 bits on a colour control port that controlled the [[RGB color model|RGB]] background intensity level.  This allowed the intensity of each of the RGB colours to be set to full or half intensity but only 7 different values could be in effect at any one time and changing the intensity value would affect the entire display.  The extra colour circuitry required an additional board mounted under the main board, with numerous messy connections to the main board.

The Premium, 256TC and Teleterm models released in 1986 incorporated colour on the main board and used a different colour design compared to the earlier model and was not compatible for the resultant colours that were produced but application and system software will work on either hardware designs.  The later colour design was largely compatible with the [[Color Graphics Adapter]] used on the [[IBM Personal Computer|IBM PC]] where 4 bits were used for the foreground and another 4 bits for the background colours.