I just noticed these composite threads, so in case it's useful I can add a few notes:
Thank you, your presence is indeed most welcome!
Re: the Mobygames composite mode screenshots, I added most of those; all of the ones I did were captured off of a true IBM CGA card.
Did you also use a real IBM 5150 PC? I'm asking because we've discussed how the ROM font in your pictures is not 100% correct (shifted by one pixel), and the thing is that the ROM font in graphics modes is NOT a function is the CGA card, but of the PC's ROM BIOS (the CGA, unlike the EGA, does NOT come with its own BIOS), it's stored at F000:FA6E.
Re: Ms. Pac-Man, yeah the hues are off in those. I'm not sure how that slipped by me, but I just double checked and the color in the new Dosbox shots is much closer (I'll have to submit some corrected versions to moby...).
Good that we cleared that up. So much for that "trebor" person telling me what he "knows" for a fact...
KQ1 in composite mode is indeed rather dark; my moby shots might overdo it slightly, but I think they're pretty close.
Right... it writes 0x27 to the color select register 0x3d9, which makes things pretty dark.
Not necessarily true in some cases I think, though it could depend on what's considered composite mode. In 640x200, the foreground color could be altered to any of the 16 colors; on a composite monitor this seems to effectively provide a new palette of colors.
You're right, if the lower four bits of port 0x3d9 contain something other than 7 or F, the whole "monochrome" signal becomes "tinted". My point was that individual pixels' colors were the result of cross-color artifacts (hence this mode sometimes being called "artifact color").
So NewRisingSun, do you have any plans to try to integrate your findings into MESS?
I'm not going to mess with MESS' code (hohoho 😵), but I can send them some code if they ask for it.