A500 potential

[Tricky]

SamuraiCrow wrote:
@Tricky

That could work for Gourand shading, certainly, but I doubt it would be all that useful without texture mapping, considering that there is a high-color to HAM8 converter for the AGA chipset.

The idea is to take advantage of the fringing, rather than try to get rid of it.  If you fill the whole screen in the value that changes only the blue value of the RGB signal, and put a red pixel on the left side of the screen, and a black pixel to the right on the same scanline, what you will see will be a red line all the way from the red pixel to the black one.  Draw the outline of a polygon in such a way, and you don't need to waste any software time filling it in, as is the traditional way using the Blitter's polygon filling mode.  Drawing lines doesn't take much time, but filling large polygons does.  So you basically get solid vector graphics for the price of wireframe.

Also an A500 doesn't have a high-colour to Ham8 converter!

[Waccoon]

@Tricky:

How much overhead we talkin', here?  Figuring out which values to put next to each other isn't free.  :-)

HAM was clever for saving memory, but really didn't have any other advantages.  Even in its heyday, HAM was useless except for static pictures and letting Commodore advertise the Amiga as a 4,096 color system.  It was even more uselss on AGA due to the rediculous speed of the new blitter (the same as OCS, basicly).

[Tricky]

@Waccoon

A simple primitive such as a cube or dodecahedron wouldn't be any problem to render anyway.  Just draw all the right-hand edges of the polygons first in black, then the left-hand edges in whatever colour the face should be (from the 16-colour base palette).

As long as you have no intersecting faces it should be fine.  It gets a bit more complex once you start trying to draw one polygon over the top of another.  But I'm sure there are ways round that.

I will get round to trying it out, one day...

[magistral]

@Tomas

Yes, if AGA were released in 1990 or so...

Commodore sits down and watched how PC killed Amiga...

[TjLaZer]

Everyone thinks VGA and Commodore's lack of R&D Killed the Amiga, I don't think that is the case!  Marketing was the problem, Commodore's Amiga was the underdog in the industry, even in it's hayday.  It simply never caught up and when VGA came out things did not get better.

[Speelgoedmannetje]

magistral wrote:
Yes, i think the potential of A500 never was fully exploited. Non HAM games, workbench with 4 colors... why? Commodore never realised that a 32 color version would be VERY different?

Rember that Windows 3.0 was 16 colors in 1993, why not have a 32 color workbench in 1987? The serious problem of A500 was memory limitation... i think today's computer world would be very different if the A500 was 2 Mb RAM and Commodore was a little more "clever".

Greets.

I can play for instance Lionheart (wich really takes advantage of Amiga hardware) under Workbench 1.3 perfectly on a standard a500. Such is NO WAY possible under windows 3.0, even on a 486. Until directX came around, one just wouldn't play games while running Windows.

[weirdami]

I never used the workbench at all until I got an A1200 because it had a hard drive. I was using an A500 before then. I liked using CLI better and I never saw the point of WB. Even now on non-Amiga GUI's, with all the RAM and hard drive space these days, I don't have a background picture and junk like that because I don't like to waste system resources. Who cares that it was a 4 color WB. Do you really just sit there and stare at your fancy background in awe at how many colors it has? I'd prefer to use system resources for something useful.

[mr_a500]

Even now on non-Amiga GUI's, with all the RAM and hard drive space these days, I don't have a background picture and junk like that because I don't like to waste system resources. Who cares that it was a 4 color WB. Do you really just sit there and stare at your fancy background in awe at how many colors it has? I'd prefer to use system resources for something useful.

What are you running now? MS-DOS or some Linux shell? Ooooh, all those GUI elements are taking up system resources... better use the shell. ;-)

"New for MacOS 10.6: Now command line only! That's right - we've gotten rid of the system resource-wasting GUI for the wonderful streamlined look of the text prompt. Buy a Mac today!".

It's not just about staring at fancy backgrounds.

[uncharted]

The big problem with Workbench 1.x was that it looked like a toy.  While in theory the colours were a good choice (high contrasting), it looked silly.

It didn't help that the UI was an inconsistent mess.  For example, take a look at the format requestor, totally different buttons to everything else!  Contrast that to MacOS which despite being monochrome looked much sleeker, and more professional, and more importantly had a good consistent GUI toolkit right from the very start.

[Tricky]

uncharted wrote:
The big problem with Workbench 1.x was that it looked like a toy.  While in theory the colours were a good choice (high contrasting), it looked silly.

This doesn't seem to hurt Windows XP!

[Argus]

Yeah, it's funny how XP and MacOS use those silly 'pastel' colours now. Almost Workbench 1.3-esque.

[Iggy_Drougge]

Argus wrote:
Yeah, it's funny how XP and MacOS use those silly 'pastel' colours now. Almost Workbench 1.3-esque.

OSX is about as gray as WB2.0. No pastels, almost no colours.