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> each 8x8-pixel block can show one or two different colors, but never three or more

That's not entirely true. If you modify the colour attributes between the drawing of each row, you can get eight separate 2-colour palettes in an 8x8 block. I believe I saw somewhere that people had managed this horizontally as well somehow.

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Though it is naturally out of realm of Spectrum BASIC the author had this exercise with.

Indeed, but they mention the possibility of redoing it in assembly.

From what I remember there were two major challenges with tricks like that.

The frame timing was based on one single interrupt at the top of each frame and you had to count down using CPU cycles to trigger the change. This meant no variable path code.

Secondly it needed doing every frame so a lot of those precious CPU cycles were taken up with the fancy display so less available for the game logic.

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