Could Sinclair have done this back in the day?
Yes, but more than one ULA would have been required and it would have been much more complicated and therefore expensive. It would take "...gazillions of gates and flip-flops. 64 * 8 Flip-Flop/latches for the palette storage = 512, plus a 640 2-input-nor gates for the multiplexing (4*16*8 + 16*8 ). That would take 832 matrix cells of the ULA, plus the other necessary circuitry. The 5C000 ULA had 440 matrix cells in total, so you'd need at least two ULAs of that size. This is so impractical that external memory would have been required for the palette. Propagation delay will have been the major issue, leading to other colour effects similar to the two-levels-of-intensity effect and the edge-artifact with flashing cells. As devices are much larger and efficient these days, it is likely to fit into a reasonably cheap CPLD. Worse case, a small amount of external memory may be required, or FPGA is used instead, as this will have the internal memory required. The design has been proven, but not synthesized, so I don't know how big a CPLD/FPGA is required." -- Chris Smith.
