Colors on the Amiga

[Hattig]

Whoa, lots of dots there … use … … an ellipsis!

…

nice, eh?

Yeah, it was possible to achieve a lot of nice effects by programming the graphics chip in the Amiga, a lot of people never bothered to learn it that well though because the default stuff was so good.

Btw, I never thought much of EHB mode on the Amiga. I think that it would have been much better to use the 6th plane as an inverse plane. I.e., black → white, red → cyan. Would have allowed for a lot of extra colours in games instead of just darkening games (although useful for shadows, e.g., in Settlers).

[Hattig]

@pwest:

Many C64 graphic "modes" use this method to ge decent looking images.

If you kept the palette constant, and switched between two screens you'd get a possible 136 'colours' on screen (I worked this out previously on an Amstrad CPC forum, heh). A lot of these would be too flickery to use though, so you'd get more like 60 usable colours. As a picture also has colour gradients in the palette already the options reduce even further.

Changing palettes between screens wouldn't work either. If you want white in a picture, you've got to have white in both palettes. Same with black, and any other colour!

[Hattig]

@Kephren:

Lionheart was one hell of a game graphically.

Considering that it was OCS and ran great on an A500 ... and from what I could see ran in two playfields, both 8 colours, the fact that there must have been hundreds of colours on screen at the same time due to clever copper manipulation ... whoa. And then it had that 3D backdrop (like the floor in SNES Streetfighter 2) of marshes on the first level.

Dammit, I must play that game again. Pretty damned difficult though.