I believe you can manipulate the colour bleed between pixels on the composite output from a high resolution mode to achieve high-colour output. (They actually have a 1024-colour mode in part of the demo.)
There are probably a bunch of weird limitations on the adjacent colours you can achieve, but it’s an impressive effect regardless!
On Atari ST, it was possible to change the palette colors in midflight, and using that trick to display more colors on screen. The technique was used by Spectrum 512 and Quantum Paint and many demos.
You could also go beyond that by changing the image 50/60 times a second, which would then blur together. Enabling you to display colours that aren't even in the ST's palette.
I'm not aware of the specifics anymore but by using well-placed NOPs when drawing a scanline you could make the borders disappear on the Atari ST thus getting a higher resolution. This was one of the many advantages the Amiga had over the Atari ST: being able to use the whole screen while the ST had a screen like a letterboxed movie except on all four sides of the screen.
Toggling the register to change between 50/60Hz mode at the right time, specifically, could reset the counter in the ST's Video Shifter and trick it to carry on drawing screen when it should have been outputting blank border. Top and bottom borders were however much easier, because you could open them with just one carefully-timed interrupt each (I used Timer-B, which was linked to horizontal blank and counted lines, if I remember!). Described as far back as the B.I.G. Demo (check the scrolltext).
Opening the left and right borders however required doing it for each line, I recall, which uses a lot more CPU time. (Unless, of course, there's a trick I don't know!)
Spectrum 512 uses NOP timings to swap the palette at regular intervals throughout the screen; the "4096 colour interlaced" mode just flickered between one colour and another on alternate blanks to give the visual impression of flickery intermediates (before the STe came out, which used the high bit of each nybble to actually have 4-bit-per-channel palettes of 16). That technique, in turn, came from the C64 scene, as did the border trick, though I think they wrote the screen address?
What's old is new again: plenty of lower-end TN LCD panels pull the same colour trickery to fake 8-bit colour from 6-/7- bit panels (or, reportedly, 10-bit deep colour from 8-bit ones in some cases).
This demo is crazy. I don't think CGA even gives them a VBL to hang off! Wonderful.
You're close with respect to the C64 border trick.
On the C64, you could pull the border in the width / height of one character in order to support smooth scrolling (coupled with registers to set a 0-7 pixel start offset for the character matrix). This was done so that the borders wouldn't move in/out while scrolling.
By turning this option on/off precisely timed, the VIC graphics chip never found itself at the "correct" location to enable the borders, and so never did.
Opening the top/bottom borders was done very early because it didn't require much timing.
Opening the left/right borders with static sprites happened soon afterwards.
Opening the left/right borders with moving sprites was particularly nasty because the VIC "stole" extra bus cycles from the CPU for each sprite present on a given scan line, so if you wanted to move sprites in the Y position and open the borders, you needed to adjust your timing by the correct number of cycles for each scan line, often done by jumping into a sequence of NOP's. There were additional complications, but that's the basics.
I think DYSP (Different Y Sprite Positions) on C64 was first achieved in 1988.
What's old is new again: plenty of lower-end TN LCD panels pull the same colour trickery to fake 8-bit colour from 6-/7- bit panels (or, reportedly, 10-bit deep colour from 8-bit ones in some cases).
That's known as temporal dithering/FRC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_Rate_Control ). To get the 2 more bits of "fake" colour depth requires a 4-frame cycle, on which you display either the darker or lighter colour in sequences like 0000, 1100, 1110, and 1111. It's a form of PWM and the same technique used to drive those large outdoor graphic LED display signs, although to avoid flickering the frequencies are in the tens of kHz.
Vague details from memory: To make the vertical borders disappear, you could reset the refresh timing (maybe it was just by switching from 50Hz to 60Hz mode) halfway through a frame, and the video chip on the ST would desync from the retrace in the CRT. The only way I know to draw on the horizontal borders of a vanilla ST was by perfectly timed border color changes - I used that along with the compiled sprites technique discussed elsewhere in this post, to write a border-less horizontal scroller.
The Amiga had such tricks as well to display 4096 colors at the same time on screen while it could only display up to 32 specs wise. Not sure how they do it on PC, but there's probably a way to achieve it as well.
CGA's "Composite" mode contains output artifacts, a trait also found in other early microcomputer graphics like those of the Apple II or Atari 800; with careful use of dithering, CGA can be expanded to a larger effective gamut[0] although most games wouldn't be as ambitious as this demo. It's not as well-known or used as the 4-color modes because it wasn't supported by later PC graphics adapters, nor was it in the spec of the standard monitors of the era. You can see this system struggle to reproduce the demo's intended look: [1]
You could either set any pixel color to any of 16 palette entries OR hold red & green from left side pixel, modify blue, hold red & blue, modify green, etc.
You could also change those 16 colors for every scanline (horizontal line).
Overall there was a lot of control, but software such as Deluxe Paint did not support full possibilities of HAM mode.
the most impressive ascii art effect I ever saw was during movement. the minute it stops the motion blur goes away. in effect, I concluded I was looking at temporal antialiasing-like effects. (forget which demo it was, some 3d thing.)
I wonder how much you could improve the effect (i.e. the woman after the 4:00 minute mark) by making it move. From the way it's drawn I'm not sure if you could get even 2 fps though.
I wanted to do some more impressive animation with the 1K color mode, but ran out of time unfortunately. One tricky part about doing animation with this mode is that it suffers from the "CGA snow" bug (visual glitching when writing to video memory). To avoid that by writing to video memory only during the vertical retrace/overscan period means that it would take about a quarter of a second to update the entire screen.
Totally deterministic. I think there's even an emulator which models it (though without a cycle-exact emulation of the CPU the snow won't be in the same places as on real hardware).
