Is a HAM background possible for OS3.1?

[Paulie85]

I currently use a 16 colour WB which is nice and fast, but I am not a fan of the dithered wallpapers. Having used AMOS back in the 90's, I seem to recall being able to overlay one screen on top of another(dual playfield?). So, I was wondering if there is a tool which would,for example, allow me to make my WB background transparent and then overlay it on a HAM screen.

Is this at all feasible?

[mongo]

Is this at all feasible?

No.

[Thomas]

You can only have either DPF or HAM, not both. With DPF you can have 2 playfields with 8 colors (ECS) or 16 colors (AGA) each. HAM needs all 6 or 8 bitplanes, there is no room for a second playfield.

One could hack Workbench into HAM mode, but it's not yet possible to have a proper looking background then. A new picture.datatype would have to be written which recognises a HAM screen as destination.

[lost_loven]

anyone try this ? I seem to remember way back when there was something called ham bench.. Maybe this would be it?
 
http://aminet.net/package/util/wb/hamwb

lost

[ChaosLord]

I currently use a 16 colour WB which is nice and fast, but I am not a fan of the dithered wallpapers. Having used AMOS back in the 90's, I seem to recall being able to overlay one screen on top of another(dual playfield?). So, I was wondering if there is a tool which would,for example, allow me to make my WB background transparent and then overlay it on a HAM screen.

Is this at all feasible?

Not feasible.  Not practical.  No usable.

[utri007]

I tried it couple of days ago. It seems that every icon, picture etc would need to be converted to HAM, so that they would look good.

With natively 256 colors icons and background pictures, it looks like they were converted to 16 color icons and pictures. Example pictures works, but that dosn't help.

[psxphill]

I tried it couple of days ago. It seems that every icon, picture etc would need to be converted to HAM, so that they would look good.

Yeah you'd need to patch the icon loading to be able to map to ham.
 
The background picture would have to be updated every time an icon moved to pick the best base colour for the right hand edge and then update the r/g/b channels, you'd have to make sure you didn't overwrite a base colour change though. There might be more rules you'd want to add to try to reduce the amount of visual change in the background when icons move. If you want transparent icons, then the right hand edge wouldn't just be for the icon but for any transparent pixels that follow an opaque pixel.
 
It is possible to code something like that. Good luck finding someone to do it.
 
You'd be better off using a video mixer and framestore.

[Paulie85]

Thanks for the help.
I've just tried the HAMWB package but haven't been able get it working properly.
I don't see any example pictures included but any HAM images I've tried to use as backdrops look like 16 colour images. The docs state that it allows you to use a web browser in 4096 colours so I tried AWeb but it just looks like it's using 16.
Apparently a Rexx script is included to allow icons to be converted to HAM so I will try that later.

[Khephren]

Could be you need a more recent ilbm data type, or perhaps the graphics libs just don't support it. Iv'e tried in vain over the years (...decades!) to get ham back drops.

I can get HAM icons. But Those are what I don't want. I figured if I could get HAM backdrops, but all gadgets/icons ran in the palette entries, there would be little fringing.

Performance wise, you'd need various patches to run at a decent rate on an 030 and above, by shunting things into fast ram etc. Perfectly doable, my workbench runs very well in 128 colours, I only reduced it to 64 to save on chip ram.

[itix]

I currently use a 16 colour WB which is nice and fast, but I am not a fan of the dithered wallpapers. Having used AMOS back in the 90's, I seem to recall being able to overlay one screen on top of another(dual playfield?). So, I was wondering if there is a tool which would,for example, allow me to make my WB background transparent and then overlay it on a HAM screen.

Is this at all feasible?

I used to hack my Workbench screen to use dual playfield where Workbench was on the top and animated graphics were on the back.

[minator]

Is a HAM background possible for OS3.1?

Of course:

[Lurch]

http://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/WBHacksAGA

Works great :-)

[paul1981]

Of course:

HAM ate.

[Karlos]

Of course:

:lol:

When I read the title of this thread, I was going to make a similar post, but when I logged in, I saw it'd been done. Surprised it took this many posts though

[Lurch]

Nothing like pulling a hammy.