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This article contains a visual explanation of NTSC color artifacting, and how it can be used to get 1024 colors out of IBM's 1981 original PC CGA:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...

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I remember this being used in games on the Atari computers, but only those that were ports of Apple games and Apple’s crude graphics. By skipping horizontal pixels, they’d get composite NTSC to smear the area into a color.

But the Ataris had S-video outputs (in 1978!), which of course is not composite. The color resolution is too high to produce artifacts when using separated video, so those games were essentially black & white on a good monitor like the Commodore 1702 hooked up with separated Y & C signals.

The Ataris were great, forward-thinking computers.

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