Multicolour Mode
Medium resolution mode, known as Multicolour Mode,
halved the horizontal numbers of pixels to 160 (making rectangular
pixels!) and increased the number of colours you could have in each
attribute square. (Each square now being 4x8 pixels).
In this mode you could have up to three colours per square, plus a global
background colour. This mode was much more flexible than hi-res mode, and
produced very nice results, despite the lower resolution and colour
restrictions.
Most colour bitmap art on the C64 was drawn in this mode. There were a
variety of drawing programs that automatically handled the colour
attributes for you. All you had to do was be careful not to put too many
colours in a small area, otherwise like the hi-res mode, you could get
colour clash, though this wasn't as noticeable.
Here's an example of a multicolour mode picture - the same picture as in
the previous Spectrum screen.
As you can see, the picture above is lower resolution than the Spectrum version, but has much better colour definition, with virtually no noticable colour clash.