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"OCS and ECS allowed 32 out of 4096 colors at once." Per horizontal line! Copper could swap out palettes between/during horizontal lines. There was also 64-col
by vardump 6y ago
"OCS and ECS allowed 32 out of 4096 colors at once."
Per horizontal line! Copper could swap out palettes between/during horizontal lines. There was also 64-color extra halfbrite mode. Another 32 colors were at 50% brightness.
- pezezin 6y agoWas it fast enough to replace the palette during horizontal blanking? A quick Google search took me to this forum: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=50518 http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=50518 According to the information provided there, trying to do a 32-color full palette swap every scanline would starve the CPU.
- vardump 6y agoYeah, it would steal a lot of DMA time, and would starve a CPU not executing code & accessing data in the Fast RAM. But at least you can display pretty pictures without HAM fringing. :-)
- pezezin 6y agoFair enough. I'm always amazed at the kind of tricks expert programmers could pull off on those old 2D machines. Have you seen the Sega MegaColor demo? A crazy guy managed to play full color video at 30 fps in the Sega Megadrive. No graphics, no sprites, just change the background color for every pixel through DMA!
- ChainOfFools 6y agoto be fair these copper list tricks had their own performance tradeoffs and didn't see any use at all for years after the Amiga was introduced, and even then only really suited static image display. nonetheless I still fondly recall the thrill of seeing the all-stops-out pinnacle of this technique in a demo that ran at super hires, extended overscan PAL interlace, displaying a pin sharp image of portraits and wildlife in full 4096 color depth at something like 1510 x 602, on 1989 (!) consumer hardware (Amiga 3000).