I remember magazines at the time reporting they used 256 colors even on ocs/ecs machines, although dont recall them saying it was HAM. Im not saying you're wrong, I've just always been curious about how the got so many colors on ocs/ecs :-)
They have different tricks for changing the palette per scan like E-Ham and things.
Something fun if you have an OCS/ECS Amiga is to show hundreds of colors at once.
Load up DPaint and select a 32 color mode. Create 32 colors in a gradient blues or something. Now create a gradient going left to right across the screen.
Leave dpaint running and go back to Workbench. Load up 3 more instances of Dpaint, and create different gradients in each instance of Dpaint, reds, greens, yellow, whatever just get unique colors.
Now simply drag the 1st Dpaint down to the bottom 1/4 of the screen, drag the 2nd about 1/2 way, the 3rd copy about 3/4 or the way down, and leave the 4th copy of Dpaint up at the top.
Now you have an OCS/ECS Amiga easily displaying 128 colors at once on your monitor.
That essentially what some of these tricks do, only for hundreds of pallets (on for each line) and they do it really fast.
People always think Amiga can only show 32 colors (besides HAM), but that's not really true. Amiga OCS/ECS can show 32 colors Per palette. There isn't a limit on the number of palettes. So you can create a game with 100s of colors. Maybe the ground you walk on is 32 colors of greens and browns. Then the background is 32 colors of blue for the sky. That's just an easy example of making a game with 64 colors.
Same thing works in Hi-Res. Amiga is limited to 16 colors per Palette. In reality you can technically have 1000s of colors on OCS in hi-res too.
