TacOps displays 16 colors. Dithering and the use of the custom palette feature of the Mac creates the impression of more. Limiting screens to 16 colors allows the program to run and scroll quickly in color on Macs having as little as 4 meg of memory - smaller scenarios will run on 2 meg Macs. I did not compile a version specifically optimized to switch the code into a FPU but the program does take advantage of an 040 cache if you have such. If the program was any faster you would not be able to analyze what was going on.
Rough terrain has the main colors of the elevation but is irregularly textured.
The main priority for the battle maps is that they clearly indicate to the user the type of terrain at a particular point. A lot can be done with just 16 colors on a Macintosh with dithering and custom palletes. At 16 colors the whole game package occupies less than five megabytes. TacOps is a computer implementaton of a sort of combination of a traditonal board wargame and lead miniatures. It really doesn't take 256 colors to clearly and attractively communicate the terrain, the situation, and the battle action in a wargame of this type.