4 ms·
Same for Amiga, games could (and most probably did) use scan line hardware interrupts to change colors, sprites, even screen modes as scan line progressed. Fast
by grujicd 5y ago
Same for Amiga, games could (and most probably did) use scan line hardware interrupts to change colors, sprites, even screen modes as scan line progressed. Faster CPU or blitter wouldn't mess up anything for most games which properly used available hw resources. Of course, you can always make code dependent on CPU timing, but it was not necessary on these machines.
- rbanffy 5y agoThe big architectural problem of the Amiga was that so much of its graphics and sound was tied to TV signal clocks. It's not a big issue if you are building a gaming console, but it became a problem for a computer when it was much more complicated to make it output higher resolutions than 400i (and 400i was already quite painful to use). When PCs with VGA cards started to become commonplace, it became abundantly clear the graphical prowess of the Amiga would be surpassed in a very short time and that it's only remaining role would be in the analog TV production niche.
- grujicd 5y agoYeah, true. Bitplanes were also problematic... It was a nice way to get 32 or 64 colors. Without bitplanes you were limited to what would fit in a byte - so you typically had 2, 4 or 16 colors per pixel in that era, full byte for 256 colors was too much. Amiga could display 32 or 64 colors as well, by having each bit in an independent bitplane. Which is fine if you were copying blocks for 2d games, especially with hw blitter. But if you had to draw individual pixels, you had to touch 5 or 6 bytes for each pixels. You were DOOMed :)