so you can change the pallet per line of pixels or something?
Yes. Actually, you can even change the palette in the middle of a line if you like, all without the main CPU having to do the work.
fringing? whats that? Whats HAM? 16 or 32 color?
HAM is a special display mode.
Normally, the colours on the Amiga display are stored in standard bitplanes. See
here for a good description of planar graphics.
HAM is a different way of interpreting the bitplane data, such that some pixels depend on the colour of the pixel to the left of them. If you change that pixel, all the pixels to the right that use this encoding change to the wrong colour, which is known as "fringing". Theres a good description of HAM
here.
Edit: Although I'm pretty sure that article is wrong in one respect. I think HAM uses all 6 bitplanes, and uses 2 of those bitplanes to mean "Indexed colour", "Modify Red", "Modify Green" and "Modify Blue"
