TI-Planet has posted more info on the colors that are available in TI-BASIC for the new TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. First of all, here is how each color will look like:




There are supposed to be 16 colors, but one is missing. In fact, the missing color is for transparency, allowing background images (which features 65536 colors) to still show up behind what you are drawing.

On the TI-83 Plus, when you store a picture then recall it, the white areas acts as a transparent color (in monochrome calculators case, the OR logic). However, that transparent color is no longer associated to white on the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition. However, as you will notice above, when you display text, a white background appears behind. If, somehow, that white background happens to be actual white and not the transparent color erasing what was displayed on the screen, could this mean the end of dual-layer ASCII?



On the other hand, however, this means that background images might be useable as backgrounds or textures for game graphics (such as the floor or the sky). Also, apparently, the text background might be changeable via Z80 assembly, meaning that if someone was to write an assembly librarie for TI-BASIC programmers, this would give them more freedom.

Another bad news is how the border color on the graph screen has a different color pallette. While you can still use light gray and white on it, the only two other colors that can be used are aqua and light green:



So no lightning bolt flash animation (such as for magic spells in an RPG).

Also, while every drawing/text command will be able to use the 15 colors on the graph screen, the home screen will remain monochrome.

Source: TI-Planet news

Wait, no homescreen colors? What the cabbage? Oh well, I'm sure an Asm lib can be written for it though.

Well at least you can still use some really cool battle backgrounds until workarounds are released.

Yeah the issue about that though is that if, for example, your RPG has 5 different battle backgrounds, then your game is over 100 KB larger, which, for some reasons, tend to turn people away, even if they have over a MB of memory left.

As for dual-layer ASCII, the reason why it's almost a must is because in pure BASIC, that is the only way to have nice looking graphics that don't take several seconds to load, and there won't be ASM libs immediately after the calc comes out:



Also hopefully language apps are still available so we can use some of the extra characters.