Am I the only one who doesn't hate AGA?

[Hattig]

Considering Commodore's management, at least AGA came out of the door, with all its flaws...

But what was needed were AGA Amigas at more price points.

£399 - Amiga 1200
£599 - Amiga 1400 (28MHz '020, 2MB + 2MB, HD Floppy) "50% more for over twice the power!"
£799 - Amiga 2200 (28MHz '020, 2MB + 2MB, HD Floppy, External Case*)
... Amiga 4000 '030 ... Amiga 4000 '040

* The Amigas from 1992 onwards should have migrated to a small chassis (similar in size to the original PS2 for example) containing the hardware, and an external keyboard. The chassis would have had the motherboard and two 3.5" bays (two floppies or one floppy and a HD), and access for memory upgrades (SIMM slots) and trapdoor expansion.

[Hattig]

It's easy to spot The copper can change the color palette every scanline without keeping the CPU busy. It makes for beautiful gradients and quite flexible colors. I think Lionheart is the prime example, but the game itself is not so fun IMO. Had much more fun with Fire & Ice

That's not colour cycling in the normal meaning for computers.

The copper can make beautiful gradients, and certainly enhances Lionheart (which I found to be a good game myself). Fire and Ice had some neat copper effects too, the watery reflections at the bottom of the screen for example.

The Megadrive had very specific hardware to do 16 colour tiled graphics, where each tile can select its palette to allow for 64 colours total. Tile based graphics systems NEED sprites however. The Amiga did have BOBs and a Blitter, but I don't exactly know how many BOBs could be blitted per frame in, e.g., 32 colours.

[Hattig]

It's pretty much a function of object size and number of planes versus the amount of blitter time available per frame. I don't have any specific numbers, though.

That's true - and restoring the background the BOB overwrote originally too, even if that is a faster block blit function.

The Megadrive's sprites (max 20 per scanline, although the hardware could manage 80 sprites) were up to 32x32 in size. Obviously AGA sprites were 64 pixels by anything, but in 16-colours you're limited to a mere 4 sprites on a scanline, requiring some software management to have more on a screen - not particularly stressful software, it was common on the C64 and so on to do this. AGA certainly could have benefited from more sprites, but at least there were BOBs.