From the same era was this oddball solution[0], which at the time I had thought was something that never got out of R&D but apparently did exist as a commercial

From the same era was this oddball solution[0], which at the time I had thought was something that never got out of R&D but apparently did exist as a commercial product in laughably limited numbers. The a2024 monitor did not require any changes to the Amiga that drove it, except that software needed to be aware that it existed which naturally almost none did. It basically just used the bitplane model as a tiling frame buffer and rather than displaying four or five bits of color depth, dropped the color depth by half and interpreted different colors as shades of gray using some monitor translation profile type of thing. Again software would have to know how to play ball with this to work, but the effect was that you got a rock solid 60 hertz screen that displayed, initially, 8 or 16 shade greyscale at 1024 x 800 resolution. There was a limitation in that the individual quadrants of the screen could only be redrawn at 10 or 15hz even though the scan rate of the tube was non-interlaced 60hz. Subjectively, having seen this thing in person I didn't get the sense that it made much noticeable difference for the kinds of applications that would use it, which would be principally dtp or coding. The computed vector refresh rate of the entire display field was in general nowhere near quick enough for the raster quadrant paging to be noticeable, except in vertical scrolling. Sadly this was obviously was a desperate if rather clever hack solution to the eye-strain drawbacks of the Amigas interlaced display at high resolutions, so no software support however appeared that would have driven further work in this direction. However had that happen, and the technique applied to this monitor was updated to match the capabilities of the AGA chipset, the resolution would have been potentially as high as 2360 by 1024 at 75hz, (edit: should be 60hz. 75hz possible "only" at 1600x1200) which comfortably exceeds HD (though only in greyscale) but for 1992 would have been safely well out in front of almost anything else at any price range, let alone a few thousand dollars. Given the awkward aspect ratio, a more sensible use of that resolution would have been splitting it vertically into a dual monitor setup, although one would need two identical monitors to make that work. and the Amiga's version of multiple virtual desktops, pull-down screens, would have been impossible to make work effectively, and one wd have to do multitasking entirely on the workbench display in full-screen application windows like the Mac. But at least it would have been preemptive multitasking, which clearly was entirely worth all of the extra associated hazards of multitasking without an mmu-aware kernel. /s [0] https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863 https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863