Hiya,
Yes I did actually spend quite a bit of time looking at those HAM8 C2P routines, I wanted to use them to display the GUI in ScummVM AGA which is natively rendered in 16 bit color. I had really trouble getting my head around what to set the palette values to so in the end I gave up and had to covert the 16 bit color values to 8 bit color values in real-time using a look-up table. I'm probably going to have to use the same approach for my current port of DosBox 0.74 to AGA
Anyway it appears that rendering HAM8 (via C2P) is not really any slower than normal 8 bit C2P, the real overheard is generating the color values to be used (which is very slow to do dynamically). I guess this is the reason that HAM8 C2P hasn't been used in any games, for the demos that used HAM8 (eg the awesome
Push), I assume they just pre-calculate the palette entries.
Then again MooVid has a fast dynamic HAM8 display mode so there must be way...