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I was looking through my old Dragon notes and jottings and turned up this old dodge which may be news to some readers.
By poking values into address 178 (&H B2) when in PMODE 3 OR PMODE 1 you have striped paint.

10 PMODE 3,1:SCREEN1,1:PCLS
20 C=C+1:POKE 178,C
30 LINE(0,0)-(100,100),PSET,BF
40 IF C <255 GOTO 20
50 GOTO 50

If you use this on a Dragon and a fuzzy old TV combination then some values will appear to blend and give an in-between color:
so try POKE 178, 53 for a bluish purple, or POKE 178,54 for a pretty pink. The rest is up to you.

Hello,

I think a number of m/c adventure games at the time used this trick to generate artifacted and "framed" colors in the backgrounds. The graphics versions of the "Mark Data" adventures (licensed by Dragon Data) used this, for instance.

I guess there must even have been an article about doing so in "Dragon User".

I myself used the same trick when designing the "Paint" function in my "Pixie!" drawing tool: One of the available modes enables one to enter the value to be POKEd into memory location 178.

With a monochrome display, this is a bit of a limited feature, of course, but it still helps improve a bit over an otherwise limited colour availability - and in a very easy way.