Support more colors in the HELP menu

[HovKlan-DH]

It would be nice with more color options in the menu (even full RGB?), for an improved user experience, making text easier to read and nicer to look at.

The current implementation limits the RGB color representation to be a combination of foreground and background, including a DARK or an INVERSE option (e.g. 0x16 for yellow foreground on green background). This works for the basic usage, but ideally it could support individual full RGB scale, like #F0E68C for background and #4B0082 for foreground.

This is just wishful thinking from my side, and naturally not very important :-) Nice-to-have feature.

I am MegaBeauvais#9623 on MEGA65 Discord.

[sy2002]

@HovKlan-DH / MegaBeauvais: Thank you for your enhancement request. Using 3 bytes for the foreground color and 3 bytes for the background color is 6 times (!) more memory than the current solution which takes 1 byte for the foreground and background color together. The reason for being such a nit-picker when it comes to memory is described here:

https://github.com/sy2002/MiSTer2MEGA65/wiki/1.-What-is-MiSTer2MEGA65#what-are-the-design-principles-of-mister2mega65

The TL;DR is: The MEGA65 is extremely resource constrained when it comes to fast RAM / ROM. Since the MiSTer2MEGA65 framework is just a tool to port cores, we want to leave as much of the valuable resources to the actual core that we want to port and do not "waste" resources for the M2M framwork.

A compromise solution might be to use a palette, for example 16 freely definable colors for the foreground and the same for the background. We would need a 96 byte palette RAM and then could squeeze the pointers to this palette into 1 byte in the attribute RAM, so this would still meet the above-mentioned constraints.

I am leaving this enhancement request open for the future. Indeed right now we have other priorities but we might revert back to this at a later moment in time.