I agree that this is not really "rendering" the image on the Amiga, it's merely using the Amiga's display hardware but no processing is happening on the machine

I agree that this is not really "rendering" the image on the Amiga, it's merely using the Amiga's display hardware but no processing is happening on the machine. Converting the image to HAM is a bit like (re-)rendering, but that's a one-time operation and done elsewhere. Anyway, the HAM converter used sounded interesting (ham_convert [1]), it does various optimization/search passes to try to generate good HAM. There's similar code in gimpilbm, the ILBM plugin for the GIMP [2], but not quite as advanced. Perhaps something worth looking at and adding. Disclosure: I happen to be the maintainer of gimpilbm. 1: http://mrsebe.bplaced.net/blog/wordpress/?page_id=374 http://mrsebe.bplaced.net/blog/wordpress/?page_id=374 2: https://github.com/unwind/gimpilbm https://github.com/unwind/gimpilbm