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Yeah, that part: The Lorraine chipset was also very powerful. It took advantage of blitters, chips that allowed information to bypass the CPU completely. Thank

by unwind 4y ago

Yeah, that part: The Lorraine chipset was also very powerful. It took advantage of blitters, chips that allowed information to bypass the CPU completely. Thanks in part to the blitters on the mainboard, the machine was capable of displaying up to 4,096 colors. Was really confused-sounding. The Amiga only had one blitter, and it was not a discrete chip (part of Agnus I think). The "bypassing" is probably a reference to the DMA that the custom chips used in order to work independently from the CPU. I grew up/learnt coding on the Amiga, loved it sooo much. Edit: copypasta fix.

andoma 4y ago
Cut my teeth on the Amiga as well. Still have the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual in my bookshelf. Can't throw it out now? I was around 11-12 years old when I started to program on it. Certainly didn't understand some parts, in particular I remember the blitter's truth table [0] was confusing to me at the time. But it was a pang of nostalgia when I realized the new AVX-512 VPTERNLOGx [1] instructions uses the exact same table as the Amiga's blitter. Must be a perfect fit for Amiga emulators :) [0] https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms [1] https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/vpternlogd:vpternlogq https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/vpternlogd:vpternlogq
- acherion 4y ago
  > Still have the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual in my bookshelf. Can't throw it out now? If you do decide to ever dispose of the book, please don’t throw it away. Sell it so that this knowledge can be passed down to someone who wants to learn. Reprints of these kinds of books aren’t being made anymore, and the only other knowledge source would be (rather old) programmers from the time, who aren’t around forever.
  - moosedev 4y ago
    I also spent some of my formative technical years on the Amiga. The Amiga Hardware Reference Manual is available on archive.org for posterity: https://archive.org/details/amiga-hardware-reference-manual-3rd-edition/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/amiga-hardware-reference-manual-... I support not throwing out a real, original copy, though :-) As I get older I enjoy reading 30+ year old technical books and learning more about how those old systems worked, more than I do learning the latest framework or language features. It's intrinsically satisfying, but not so great for the career...
vikingerik 4y ago
Yeah, I think what it's trying to say is more like this: the blitter is what made it practical to move around enough image data with enough bit depth for the 4096 colors. For PCs without a blitter to get to comparable results took several more years of increases in CPU and memory speed.

by unwind 4y ago

andoma 4y ago

Cut my teeth on the Amiga as well. Still have the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual in my bookshelf. Can't throw it out now? I was around 11-12 years old when I started to program on it. Certainly didn't understand some parts, in particular I remember the blitter's truth table [0] was confusing to me at the time. But it was a pang of nostalgia when I realized the new AVX-512 VPTERNLOGx [1] instructions uses the exact same table as the Amiga's blitter. Must be a perfect fit for Amiga emulators :) [0] https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms [1] https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/vpternlogd:vpternlogq https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/vpternlogd:vpternlogq

acherion 4y ago
> Still have the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual in my bookshelf. Can't throw it out now? If you do decide to ever dispose of the book, please don’t throw it away. Sell it so that this knowledge can be passed down to someone who wants to learn. Reprints of these kinds of books aren’t being made anymore, and the only other knowledge source would be (rather old) programmers from the time, who aren’t around forever.
- moosedev 4y ago
  I also spent some of my formative technical years on the Amiga. The Amiga Hardware Reference Manual is available on archive.org for posterity: https://archive.org/details/amiga-hardware-reference-manual-3rd-edition/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/amiga-hardware-reference-manual-... I support not throwing out a real, original copy, though :-) As I get older I enjoy reading 30+ year old technical books and learning more about how those old systems worked, more than I do learning the latest framework or language features. It's intrinsically satisfying, but not so great for the career...

vikingerik 4y ago

Yeah, I think what it's trying to say is more like this: the blitter is what made it practical to move around enough image data with enough bit depth for the 4096 colors. For PCs without a blitter to get to comparable results took several more years of increases in CPU and memory speed.