A500 potential

[magistral]

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.

[Piru]

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?

OCS and ECS chipset don't do 32 colours in hires mode. Maximum is 16, but IIRC that sucks most (if not all?) system resources while the screen is visible (the only moment other stuff gets to run freely is during vertical and horizontal screen blanking).

Making the desktop reeeally slow and suck all system resources wouldn't have been very smart move.

[DamageX]

don't know about games but the A500 was exploited quite a bit by demos, have you seen them?

Piru's right about WB of course. Going from 4 to 8 colors cuts the speed by roughly a third, going to 16 colors looses another third. Whatever bandwidth is used for generating the display can't be used by the CPU or blitter, that is the big limitation of the Amiga which was designed with one memory bus to keep the price down.

I don't think VGA cards were out yet but you could have had an X68000 with its dual-ported VRAM and 65536 color graphics. I think it cost around 400,000 yen.

[Doppie1200]

Please read your own thread 'things never understand' more carefully. You will find it not difficult to understand why HAM is not the best option for a desktop.

2MB ram in 1987 would have made the A500 too expensive. Perhaps in the A2000 this would have been justifiable.

Also remember GUI's came a long way. Despite of a machine being capable it is a learning curve. Point an Click was novel for the masses in 1987. I was still 'pressing play on tape' in those day to load my games. The biggest compition was the Mac and it was monochrome so why invest more?

[SamuraiCrow]

HAM is a difficult mode to use.  Copper chunky is a bit easier and still works in high-res mode (even if it is typically only used for backdrops).

Check out Copper Toy2 for more information about the Copper coprocessor.  There used to be a utility called CopperControl on the Aminet but I can't find it now.  It gives 4096 color graphics at 80x256 resolution on ECS and still allows another screen to be shown in the foreground.

[mr_a500]

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".

This sounds a bit like a comment I made here.

Of course adding more RAM and an 020 to an A500 in 1987 would have been insane - waaay too expensive for what was basically a game machine - but I still think it would have been good for the A2000. I remember that the Mac (which was only B&W then) was at least twice the price of an A2000. I don't know exact prices, but I think they could have added 4Mb of RAM and an 020 and still be under the Mac price. With a little effort, Amiga 2000 could have had a 16 colour "kick-ass" GUI in 1987. (my A500 with 020 in 16 colours is not slow at all)

Even if they wanted to keep Workbench at 4 colours, they still could have attempted to make it look nice and consistent instead of the horrible fonts and icons and pathetic inconsistent GUI that they had. Amiga Workbench could have easily looked better than Mac! (and many people buy things based on looks only)

[SamuraiCrow]

The dealers I went to always had either a Psygnosis game running or a demo that used the Copper to expand the color display characteristics to beyond the normal limitations.  The "looks" of the A500 were impressive when those programs were running.

[TjLaZer]

People fail to realize that back in 1985-1987 the Amiga's GUI was very impressive compared to the competition!  MS-DOS?  Macintosh Finder 5.x?  Atari TOS 1.0?  Hah 4 color Workbenches were the bomb!    

Also it was a speed issue, having more colors bogged down the system and they had to keep the lowly 512k A1000/500 users in mind too.  A default had to be established and the 4 color WB was it.

[x56h34]

I doubt that many A500 owners worried about the GUI at all, back in the day, as much as they did for the games that they mostly played. :-D

[mr_a500]

Sure, WB was OK for 1985-1987. What about 1990 with 2.0? Compare WB 2.0 with the competition. The fonts are ugly (topaz got worse!) the new icons look like crap and everything looks dull and unprofessional. They could easily have kept it at 4 colours and made it look nice. And if they had an awesome 16 colour WB in 1990, maybe Amiga would have sold more ....in the years they screwed up and delayed AGA while competitors had more colours.


Edit: I'm talking about the "professional" Amigas here, not the "game" Amigas like the A500 (which wouldn't lose sales because of the crappy WB look)

[Argus]

Since a little fast ram does a lot to speed up wb, it always struck me as strange C= didn't just add two 30-pin simm slots to the A500 or the A1200 designs.  It would have been pretty easy to do and Macs of the late 80s/early 90s had them.  That way, users could have upgraded their machines to 8mb of addressable fast ram on the m/b easily, kind of like the 4mb simm slots on an Atari 1040STe.

[Tricky]

I have thought about using HAM mode as part of a 3D engine, where the "hold" effect is used to fill the polygons without needing to use the blitter (except for the outlines).  Essentially if you fill the whole screen with the value that holds, for instance, the blue value, you'd only need to draw the edges to get any red/green/yellow polygon instantly with the hardware.

I haven't thought about it too hard, but I reckon a super fast 3D engine in 4096 colours should be possible (not texture mapping, just plain faces).

[SamuraiCrow]

@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.

[Tomas]

Sure, WB was OK for 1985-1987. What about 1990 with 2.0? Compare WB 2.0 with the competition. The fonts are ugly (topaz got worse!) the new icons look like crap and everything looks dull and unprofessional. They could easily have kept it at 4 colours and made it look nice. And if they had an awesome 16 colour WB in 1990, maybe Amiga would have sold more ....in the years they screwed up and delayed AGA while competitors had more colours.

This is what sucked with Commodore.. They never really developed the machine, but instead they milked it for all it was worth. All they did was add a bit more ram here and there and didnt even really upgrade the gfx chipset since 85 before the a1200 was released with aga. When the aga was released, it was already behind the pc gfx in many areas.  :-(
This is one of the things that killed the Amiga in my opinion.

It was way ahead of its time when it was released, but the pc drove by when Commodore just sat by and did no investments in upgrades.

[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!