I remember reading a 1990 magazine with a small advertisment for "MacroPaint", a paint program which claimed to be able to display 4096 colours in high resolution without any add-on hardware. They showed two pictures and said "This is your Amiga on HAM...This is your Amiga on MacroPaint." The MacroPaint imaga did look like high-res HAM!
It sounded great, but I never heard anything about it after that and I couldn't find the program anywhere for 15 years. This year I finally got MacroPaint. The program isn't that great, but it does actually display 4096 colours in high-res (with some streaking). It's called "dynamic high-res" (also SHAM and PCHG) and is possible by changing palette on every line.
Then I found HamLab which can convert images to dynamic-highres. I started converting jpegs and gifs into dynamic high-res (and display with Visage) and it's amazing! Some pictures have problems with streaking, but about 90% of the images are waaay better than HAM or dithered 16 colour. Some pictures are so crisp and colourful, they look like 16bit! (now I'm converting most of my images to dynamic high-res on my A500)
So I'm wondering - why wasn't it popular? Why weren't there more paint programs or image converters to use dynamic-highres? AGA didn't come out until 1993 and dynamic-highres was around since 1990. It's unbelievable that for 3 years before AGA, there was the possibility to display 4096 colours in highres using software-only, but very few people were interested.
Was it the "dynamic-highres streaking" that turned people off? Digi-Paint allowed you to paint in HAM while minimizing HAM fringing, so it shouldn't have been hard to make a dynamic-highres paint program which minimized streaking. If you search Aminet now, there are a very small number of programs supporting dynamic-highres, SHAM or PCHG. Yes, AGA killed the need for dynamic-highres, but it had a whole 3 years to get popular and failed. Why?