64 color ehb mario bros Wii screenshot

[fishy_fiz]

I was bored and playing around with PPaint earlier tonight, and for no particular reason decided to convert a few game screenshots into ocs/ecs ehb graphics. Bare in mind there was no manual tweaking here, no customised palettes, simply loading a png image and changeing screenmode to ecs ehb. I had a look and for this particular image there's only 51 colors so with a better custom chosen palette and a little manual tweaking it could look better than it does, but I was still sort of impressed with the quality of gfx we could have for games using a gfx chip designed 25 years ago. Sure, we couldnt have the actual game in the image with its effects, but just as a random example, if we still had people pumping time and money into 68k amigas we could still have games that dont look too out of place still these days (handheld minimig or similar for a cheap enough price could be cool).
Anyway, just thought it was cool and got feeling nostalgic.

http://i41.tinypic.com/wss8ba.jpg

[XDelusion]

That actually looks quite nice! I'd love to see a game based on stop motion claymation, it would work perfectly with the limited colors like that!

[LoadWB]

I think the problem would be not so much the available colors, but how and where those colors are used.  Someone like Cammy is much better suited to comment on this in terms of Amiga's EHB, and I speak only from my experience with other machines with 16 and 32 colors -- yeah, I had 16 or 32 colors to play with, but getting two or more colors I needed in the same area can be quite a chore, if not impossible.

[fishy_fiz]

While EHB can get some good results you really need to be selective about the sorts of images being displayed for best results. One of the most important things for lower color images is having at least a few colors/tones that can be used per "range", and getting the additional half bright palette to share "ranges" with the user selectable palette doesnt always work unles care is taken. For the right gfx style though you can get about 8-10 ranges each with about 8 shades (no absolute rules, but for example), which can produce some nice results not too dissimilar to a "real" 64 color palette. Still though, I guess the main point really was just that its cool something resembling modern retro gaming could still in theory be possible on a 25 year old custom chipset  

[ChaosLord]

@LoadWB

In 64 color mode all 64 colors are available everywhere and anywhere on screen simultaneously.

[Hattig]

I imagine that you'll also need to reduce the resolution to the standard Amiga graphics mode for games (320x256 + overscan).

And then stick in a copperlist for the sky!

I think that cartoony 2D games can always be represented quite well on lower colour 2D hardware. Whether it can do the gameplay justice is another issue altogether.

[Louis Dias]

@fishy_fiz

The thoughts you have are shared by the NATAMI team.  Spur 68k development with newer custom chips that maintain backwards compatibility where possible.

[Amiga_Nut]

Or even better 320x512 in 64 colours if possible.

I mess about with stuff like this all the time, I just wish there was a way to render test images to real HAM mode within the hardware spec and Dynamic HAM.

Sadly I have never found a program that can do this.