Pre-shifting and pre-rendering are two rather different things. If you could pre-render all of this, there'd be no question - you'd get 50Hz out of the ST, no p

Pre-shifting and pre-rendering are two rather different things. If you could pre-render all of this, there'd be no question - you'd get 50Hz out of the ST, no problem! You'd use the hardware scrolling, and CPU usage would be something like 0.02%. But you can only fit 16 screen buffers into 512K, and that wouldn't be enough, so you need to do things properly. Regarding the planes: you can modify each independently. Just set up your palette in the right way! For 4 planes, something like: 0000 - light grey (background) 0001 - purple (lines) 0010 - dark grey (shadow) 0011 - dark purple (shadowed line) 0100 - white (ball) 0101 - white 0110 - white 0111 - white 1000 - red (ball) 1001 - red 1010 - red 1011 - red 1100 - pink (ball) 1101 - pink 1110 - pink 1111 - pink Now you can manipulate each plane separately, as appropriate, ignoring the rest, and you'll get the right result. Of course, this limits the number of colours you can have at once, the limit being 1 layer per plane, and then N+1 colours in total for N planes. With the ball demo, you have 2 x 1-bit layers (2 colours each, 1 shared), and 1 x 2-bit layer (4 colours, 1 shared), for a total of 7. All of this applies to the Amiga just as it does to the ST, because both operate using the same principles in this respect. (The Amiga's dual-playfield mode existed, I suspect, only because it was- cheaper than having more palette entries! If you had 64 palette entries, there'd be no need for it.) (As for the resolution, I think the ball demo was 320x256 pixels? - certainly seems to have been the case judging by the screen grabs I could find. So I think my calculations stand. Don't ask me why they didn't go for 640x256x4bpp, because I have no idea.)