Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!ucsd!sdcc6!sdcc13!dlou
From: dlou@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Dennis Lou)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Amiga OS *IS* state of the art
Keywords: Amiga OS
Message-ID: <17980@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Date: 4 Apr 91 09:52:15 GMT
References: <3058@tpki.toppoint.de> <3075@tpki.toppoint.de> <1044@cbmger.UUCP>
Sender: news@sdcc6.ucsd.edu
Organization: University of California, San Diego
Lines: 33

In article <1044@cbmger.UUCP> peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) writes:
>In article <3075@tpki.toppoint.de> kris@tpki.toppoint.de (Kristian Koehntopp) writes:
>>I had a talk with a friend (He is an A3000 owner) on Amiga and its future.
>>Being more the suit type than me, he said "What is going to hurt future Amiga
>>sales more than a lack of 1280 * 1024 in true color is the lack of 320 * 200
>>in 256 colors." The availability of this video graphics mode makes it easy
>>to port VGA games to the amiga without having the entire graphics repainted
>>by an artist.
>
>That shouldn't be a big problem. There exists decent software to transform
>256-color pictures to HAM on the Amiga with no viewable loss of quality at
>first sight. Ok, though HAMs are not best suited as background for action
>games with BOBs, hmm. But also converting a 256-color picture to 32-color
>lores doesn't give a sooo bad picture, you can easily edit it a little in
>dpaint and get a nice background. Remember, we talk of 320 pixel resolution
>here, that's not such a painful thing.

Just thought I'd remind you that HAM mode programming is MUCH
different that 256 color VGA programming.  The 'Hold' of "Hold And Modify"
has 16 colors based on a 4-bit bitplane.  In 256 color VGA, you
have a 1 byte per pixel mapping on a single plane.  I'd like to hear
how you do 256 color animation on the Amiga like you can on the IBM
(I don't think it's possible).

256 color SVGA (i.e. 640x480x256, 800x600x256, and 1024x768x256) is
a different story altogether, using 8 bitplanes, bank-switching,
single, dual, and overlapping memory windows, etc...  But not many
game programmers use those modes.

-- 
Dennis Lou             |
dlou@ucsd.edu          | "But Yossarian, what if everyone thought that way?"
[backbone]!ucsd!dlou   | "Then I'd be crazy to think any other way!"