Haynie's Garage Sale

[matthey]

Dave has added a AAA motherboard to the sale.

I'm sure it will go for an outrageous sum. At least the rest of us will be able to experience the closest thing to AAA, the Natami. Most of the functionality of AAA, plus the CPU and FPU, are in this little board and 2 fpgas...



It will likely include the 3x8 chunky "Hybrid" mode, 8 bit LUT "Half-Chunky", a much faster and more flexible blitter, improved copper, 16 bit audio, built in networking (Gigabit ethernet) and many other suggestions from AAA. Some people are wanting the HAM10 mode too but I think it's outdated with fast 16 bit chunky (hopefully with HW dithering), 24 bit 3x8 "Hybrid" and 32 bit chunky. Dave, you made a great look into the future with AAA! I hope we can interest you in a working Natami to replace your NYX when it's done . Thanks for your interesting writeups and good luck with your garage sale.

[matthey]

@matthey
HAM10 is most likely better than 16 bit chunky because it's  pallete based AFAIK. 16bit is not.
In practice HAM10 would eliminate HAM artifacts almost completely (it already got better with HAM8).

I think HAM10 would be able to display a nicer static picture than 16 bit chunky with dithering but 16 bit chunky is easier to work with. HAM10 probably would have made sense at the time of AAA though as memory was still expensive. Memory display bandwidth was still very expensive then also and HAM10 would have used substantially less bandwidth than 24 bit "Hybrid" mode which itself was probably created to save bandwidth over a 32 bit chunky mode. There is a good proportion of people who want Natami to have HAM10 and >8 bit planar but I think it's a waste of resources. Yea, it would be neat to see more AAA modes but it's more important to get the planned hardware 3D support for example. Another disadvantage is that all the new display formats will have to be supported in the operating system.

[matthey]

It sounds like you'll see a good deal of the AAA fun in Natami. Not sure about HAM10 or chunky HAM8. And being a video guy, I'd like to see some YUV modes....

Please let the Natami team know what kind of video modes and support you would like to see. We don't want weak video support in the Natami when the Amiga and video are nearly synonymous after the Video Toaster . One of the great things about the Natami project is how open and friendly everyone is. As SamuraiCrow has mentioned, we would be honored to have you visit and give some ideas.

http://www.natami.net/