If it signed Amiga's death warrant, it was one of a long list of signatories. If I understand correctly, the performance impacts are complicated and are both w

If it signed Amiga's death warrant, it was one of a long list of signatories. If I understand correctly, the performance impacts are complicated and are both worse and better than your quick explanation goes into. An example of how it might be worse: suppose I'm drawing a one-pixel-wide vertical line on a 32-color (5-plane) screen. I not only only need to 5 writes, but I also need to do 5 reads. Because it's a byte-addressable system and I need to change 1 bit but leave the other 7 bits unchanged. So I must read, apply a mask, and write. One the other hand, if I'm copying a bitmap or filling an area, it doesn't create much performance penalty at all. Who cares whether I copy 500 bytes from one buffer memory location to another or 5 sets of 100 bytes from 5 memory locations to 5 others. It also doesn't create much of a performance penalty if I'm drawing a horizontal line because those neighboring pixels are neighboring bits and you can do them all in one go. (You can get crazy and apply this to nearly-horizontal lines too.) An interesting corollary of this is that horizontal lines are way faster to draw than vertical ones.