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Amiga Graphics Archive

265 points by sph 7mo ago

krige 7mo ago
I have that Sachs Lagoon image printed on my wall, it's gorgeous.
Rob_Polding 7mo ago
This brought back some memories. So nice to see art from an era where you really needed talent to be able to produce it. Such a nice contrast to the AI slop which takes no talent to produce!
- wallhz 7mo ago
  [dead]
- hmstx 7mo ago
  In an interesting twist of fate, one of the master copyists featured prominently in the Scener section of that site has come back in the last few years to win graphics competitions again with both - directly ripping newer, lesser known artists instead of the classic Vallejo/Sorayama from the 90s. https://ibb.co/GpDVf2r https://ibb.co/GpDVf2r - switching to midjourney from ~2023 to now, so the sources are near untraceable (this was also supposedly leaked). It still takes some talent to do a good looking copy, but it's not the same talent - and very dishonest when such literal use of reference is not credited. In fact it's been an issue in the 16bit demoscene with graphics (standalone and in demos) suddenly getting more plentiful, with subjects constructed and lit a lot better, etc. and people being called out for suspicious works (and usually getting away with it, "because the whole point was to support our insane image compression code with a ton of images" etc.)
wmil 7mo ago
So for anyone looking into old school graphics programming, bit planes are pretty confusing when you don't understand why they exist. Two big reasons. First, it's about running memory chips in parallel to increase bandwidth. Image data was hard to get to the screen fast enough with hardware in that era. Second it allowed for simple backwards compatibility. Programs were used to writing directly to video memory, and in an EGA card the start of the video memory was valid CGA data. The rest of the colour data was in a separate bit plane.
- flohofwoe 7mo ago
  It also saved memory with "odd" number of bits eg 3 bitplanes for 8 colors per pixel.
  - mrandish 7mo ago
    Yes, I too remember the memory savings being the key aspect of bitplane design choices in the early and mid 80s. The increased granularity in varying the trade-off between memory for graphics vs program code being the secondary aspect. The downside to bitplanes vs chunky pixel formats was having to write to four different memory addresses to fully change one 16 color pixel. One case where bitplanes could be faster was high-res bitmapped text. As long as your text was monochrome (all in one bitplane), you could write an 8 pixel wide character with one byte. This was a big deal when it came to scrolling a screen full of bitmapped text.
    - vidarh 7mo ago
      Memory savings and by extension memory bandwidth for low color modes, as you indirectly point out with the text example. The early Amigas had a memory bandwidth of ~7MB/s, and the chip RAM bandwidth was shared with the custom chips... Anything that'd reduce needed memory transfers was a big deal.
- fredoralive 7mo ago
  I don't think the Amiga has either parallel / per plane chip memory, or any need for backwards compatibility with CGA.
  - ZFH 7mo ago
    It was all about saving RAM on the Amiga.
  - amiga386 7mo ago
    Indeed. As per this timing diagram, Denise accesses each 16-bit word of each bitplane sequentially. Any bitplanes you turn off, the more cycles available for blitter... or CPU! Fun fact! The Amiga Workbench is 4 colour hires by default, because hires is impressively businessy... but 8 or 16 colour hires would lock out the CPU most of the time, as the chipset would have to dip into the 68000's even cycle RAM accesses and stall it. 4 colour hires lets the CPU (on a chipmem-only system) run at full speed! http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node02D4.html http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui...
urbandw311er 7mo ago
Oh, this is a glorious and nostalgic romp back through past memories. Thank you!
TacticalCoder 7mo ago
Color cycling in the picture file format was so epic! Fun memory: I was with my best friend at another friend's place and his father called him to do some chore. He had to quickly mow the small lawn or something like that. So we decided to prank him: I don't remember all the details but basically we launched Deluxe Paint and simulated an Amiga "guru meditation" using a font that wasn't even correct (I think because we were in 320x256 while the real guru meditation was using a mode with smaller pixels). Then in broken english we wrote something like this: "Hardware failure. If you reboot or turn off your computer it is going to broke forever" We then did a color cycling between red and black for one of the color and put the drawing software in "full screen". When our friend came back, we played dumb and said we had no idea what happened but that apparently we really shouldn't turn the computer off. We managed to hold it for something like ten minutes while he though his computer was done for good but we were dying inside. All three of us remember that prank to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation P.S: as a side note with the help of Claude Code CLI / Sonnet 4.6 I managed to recompile a 30+ years old game I wrote in DOS in the early 90s (and for which I still have the source files and assets but not the tooling) and I was using converter (which I wrote back then) to convert files between the .LBM format and a "tweaked" (320x200 / 4 planes) DOS mode I was using for the game (which allowed double-buffering without tearing). I don't remember the details but I take it that if we had .LBM picture files, me and the artist where using Deluxe Paint on the Amiga.
- sph 7mo ago
  You might enjoy this GDC talk by Mark Ferrari of LucasArts fame, where he goes over his pixel art technique, as well as how he did color cycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
- binaryturtle 7mo ago
  Once I played a similar prank to a computer science teacher. Back in the Windows 3.x for Workgroups era this was. I made a screenshot of the desktop (showing a window), and put it on as wallpaper. Took the man a little while to figure out why that window couldn't be closed (after a hard reboot later when the window popped back up :) )
adaptit 7mo ago
Always cool to see these kinds of retro computing resources pop up.
lysace 7mo ago
I missed out on the Amiga (introduced in 1985) at the time, being an early PC adopter. Went from CGA (1981) directly to VGA (1987). In terms of colors the most popular VGA modes (320x200 or 320x240, 256 color palette, 18 bit color depth) are superior to the most popular Amiga graphics modes (320×200 or 320x256, 32 color palette, 12 bit color depth). But somehow Amiga graphics is still often nicer.
- gxd 7mo ago
  It's because of the artists. The Amiga was a much more affordable art-making machine, so many artists made graphics ON the Amiga FOR the Amiga. There were even some good-looking VGA games that under utilized the PC's capabilities because they were essentially converted Amiga games. Now for the shameless plug... My game's protagonist is an Amiga fan and the Amiga has a little cameo in it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
- ekianjo 7mo ago
  Amiga happened way before VGA was mainstream.
  - lysace 7mo ago
    Amigas reached hobbyists in large numbers way earlier, yeah.
  - rjrjrjrj 7mo ago
    Amiga 1000 was released in mid-1985, although I think few units were shipped before 1986. Amiga 500 was 1987 - same year as VGA, its little brother MCGA, and the Mac II. Not sure when VGA would have been considered mainstream... 1989 maybe? Mac LC was 1990, so probably before that. VGA and Mac color were better for most practical things. Square pixels and far fewer resolution/flicker/color tradeoffs.
    - mrandish 7mo ago
      > Amiga 1000 was released in mid-1985, although I think few units were shipped before 1986. It was announced on July 26th, 1985 at Lincoln Center with Andy Warhol painting Blondie (Debby Harry) live on-stage (a demo which was re-created at the Computer History Museum this past Summer as part of the Amiga 040th celebration). But you're right it wasn't commonly available until the late Fall. I managed to get mine at the end of November.
jbjbjbjb 7mo ago
There’s something about the Amiga era font and graphic style that I love and I always feel is unique to the Amiga but had trouble pinning it down to a particular developer or graphics artist. Ruff n Tumble is a good example, with like chunky futuristic font, the strong gradients all over everything and even the colours. It’s not common to all games though.
- reaperducer 7mo ago
  pinning it down to a particular developer or graphics artist Jim Sachs was one of the early masters. The Wikipedia article about him does not do him justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Sachs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Sachs One amazing thing was that even after the Amiga became available, he continued simultaneously making great art on the C-64.
  - mrandish 7mo ago
    I met Jim at users groups and trade shows and had to the opportunity to hang out with him several times. Not only an incredible artist but extremely humble and just a very nice human.
    - reaperducer 7mo ago
      The July, 1988 issue of Run Magazine has profiles of then-leading-edge computer artists using Commodore gear.
- shevy-java 7mo ago
  Yeah, I agree. I also had C64 and DOS, and while both had tons of games, the Amiga was a bit different. In a way the Amiga was kind of a stronger predecessor to e. g. Xbox or similar variants (there were also TV console games, of course, and I played them too, so these may be called more appropriately the forefront-runner towards Xbox and other consoles, but I feel that the Amiga was kind of positioned in two places here, whereas DOS was more on the application-side, business-side, than games side, even though there were also many good DOS games. Master of Orion 1 is one of my all-time favourites; Master of Orion 2 extended many things, but the gameplay also got slower and I did not like that. I loved the fast play style that was possible, also in other games, civilization 1, simcity 1 and so forth).
takahitoyoneda 7mo ago
[dead]
shevy-java 7mo ago
I liked the Amiga. I would not really use it today, but I recall having played many games in the 1980s. Those kind of games are mostly dead now (save for a few Indie games perhaps). Today's games are usually always the same - 3D engine with some fancy audio and video and a dumbed down gameplay. (Not all games, mind you; for instance, I liked the idea behind Little Nightmares. I never played it myself, don't have the time, but I watched several clips on youtube and I found the gameplay different to the "canonical" games we now have, as perpetual repetition of a money-sell grab.)
pwillia7 7mo ago
I made a DeluxePaint/Amiga LORA you can use with Stable Diffusion/FLUX a while back for the lulz[1] I also used that LORA and some video models to try to make a little movie with the same style[2] Here's a guide on how to generate LORAs too if you're interested[3] Finally, there's a DeluxePaint clone someone released that is pretty cool to play around with[4] [1]: https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be [3]: https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-full-guide/ https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-ful... [4]: https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter
- realityloop 7mo ago
  FFS ruining it for ppl that are old enough as well. I really wanted to try this out :/ Access Restricted for Australian Visitors As of March 16, 2026, Civitai is no longer accessible to users in Australia. This is due to Australia's Age-Restricted Material Codes, registered under the Online Safety Act and enforced by the eSafety Commissioner. These codes require platforms that host user-generated content — including AI-generated imagery — to implement age verification measures such as facial age estimation, digital identity wallets, or photo identification checks before allowing access to age-restricted material. Simple self-declaration of age is no longer considered sufficient. Non-compliance carries civil penalties of up to AUD $49.5 million per breach.
  - BrissyCoder 7mo ago
    Thank you eSafety Commissioner!
  - pwillia7 7mo ago
    police state australia https://wormhole.app/E4zA1z#Q3aQLs6wRmlLkeghIYyZEQ https://wormhole.app/E4zA1z#Q3aQLs6wRmlLkeghIYyZEQ
ulfbert_inc 7mo ago
Somewhat related, new version of Amiga Vision collection just dropped. Very high quality product you can get for free if you are an Amiga fan. Can't get enough of included demos on my MiSTer setup.
appstorelottery 7mo ago
This is great stuff! As a side note, I wonder if anyone has created a HAM viewer that runs in the browser? I remember HAM flickering by necessity and being amazed by 4096 colors on-screen at once. There was a certain quality of HAM images on the Amiga that made them instantly identifiable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify
- vidarh 7mo ago
  HAM doesn't flicker. The issue with HAM is that you're limited in terms of abrupt colour changes. It's straightforward to convert HAM to PNG etc. It would have sometimes been used together with interlaced mode to double the number of lines and that did flicker.
- FireBeyond 7mo ago
  Flickering? I don't recall flickering, but I do recall that EHB (extra half brite) to get to 64 colors might have had fringing issues, but that's about it. Interlacing might have flickered too, depending on your monitor. (Most monitors Commodore made would flicker in interlace mode, but I believe there were some higher end ones that did not).
- timbit42 7mo ago
  I remember HAM being stable until you moved the mouse and then it would flicker until you stopped moving the mouse because the scan line interrupts would be interrupted by the mouse, throwing the sensitive scan line timing off.
- bitwize 7mo ago
  You were probably seeing an interlaced video mode, which flickered HAM or no HAM. The signature of HAM was there would be odd color barf at the edges of objects if the colors changed too quickly going left to right because of the hold-and-modify encoding. You saw that a lot with ToasterPaint but when it rendered to the video output it was fine (and even in 24bit color).
whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
The Photon Paint eye image in CRT mode flickering is so accurate to how it felt at the time https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/PhotonPaint.crt.html https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/PhotonPaint.crt.html
tomhow 7mo ago
Previously... Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431514 - Nov 2023 (20 comments) Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783531 - Aug 2018 (27 comments) The Amiga Boing Ball Explained - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330689 - Aug 2016 (56 comments) The Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10972849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10972849 - Jan 2016 (24 comments)
drzaiusx11 7mo ago
I couldn't afford the Amiga in its day, but I often drooled over it's imagery in magazines etc. I really need to pick up a mister fpga setup and see what I missed out on back then. Any recommendations for hardware for that? I can and do build my own hardware, but I think there's a bunch of options nowadays and likely some are better than others...
- WeZzyNL 7mo ago
  I guess the SuperStation One?[0] [0]: https://retroremake.co/pages/superstation%E1%B5%92%E2%81%BF%E1%B5%89 https://retroremake.co/pages/superstation%E1%B5%92%E2%81%BF%...
  - drzaiusx11 7mo ago
    Says it's for preorder, so my guess is that's a recommendation without having one? Or are you working on this project?
kstrauser 7mo ago
A super minor nitpick: it’s jarring to see the Amiga referred to as 16 bit. It wasn’t described that way at the time: it was universally (that I saw anyway) called a 32 bit machine, and reasonably. It had a flat 32 bit address space (although the 68000 itself didn’t support all those address lines because what kind of supercomputer would need 4GB of RAM?). All the registers and operations were 32 bit. Some of the internal operations were implemented in 16 bits, but that was invisible to programmers. Newer models with definitively 32 bit CPUs like the 68060 were nearly 100% backward compatible with older models at the CPU instruction level, even if newer OSes weren’t backward compatible at the API level. In fact, the only program not forward compatible at the instruction level that I remember offhand was Microsoft’s AmigaBASIC. It used the top bits of pointers to store data because the 68000 would ignore them when accessing RAM due to that lack of address lines. I just don’t see a way to justifiably call the Amiga a 16 bit machine. Although the A1000 had some 16 bit hardware paths, a maxed out A3000 definitely wasn’t 16 bit, and they were nearly completely compatible with each other minus newer features. Amiga was full-on 32 bit machine. It’s weird to hear it called anything else.
- wk_end 7mo ago
  This is a classic dispute when it comes to the 68000. I'm inclined to agree with your perspective, actually, but my impression is that it's highly contested. Commodore and Atari marketed their 68K machines as 16/32-bit, which is I guess technically the most correct. And other 68000-based machines, like the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, were marketed as 16-bit - it even says it right on top of the unit!
  - vidarh 7mo ago
    Yeah, I second that 16 bit or 16/32 was far more commonly used than 32, due to the 16 bit bus.
    - kstrauser 7mo ago
      The bus always seemed like the oddest part to zero in on. By analogy, an Opteron in 2003 was a 64 bit CPU with a 32 bit HyperTransport bus, but no one called an Opteron system 32 bit. The width of a particular internal implementation detail is a strange duck IMO.
01100011 7mo ago
I'm getting older and forgetting a lot, but I hope I never forget the feeling of seeing this as a kid in 1989. You can see and experience old things, but it's impossible to recreate the context in which they were originally experienced. You can't erase your experience of 40 years of technical progress which makes this sort of thing feel merely quaint in comparison.
- btbuildem 7mo ago
  Those memories are crisp and vivid
btbuildem 7mo ago
Aghh so many classic games are missing from here!
mrandish 7mo ago
There's just something uniquely special about hand-drawn pixel art at resolutions around 320 x 200 with 16 to 256 colors - especially when viewed on analog CRT screens with their scanlines and phosphor glow which blend colors and soften the hard pixel edges some people today think as "retro" (which isn't at all how this art actually looked in the 80s to the artists or their audiences). I think a key aspect of the magic is that the technical constraints force art to be representational instead of photo realistic. There just weren't enough pixels or colors, so artists had to make intentional choices about where to focus their limited pixels and palette to imply the detail they couldn't fully draw and that made their images evocative in ways photo-realism usually isn't. Earlier digital graphics with 4 to 16 colors and resolutions around 160 x 120 to were generally 'moving icons' as seen in arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Galaga and most late-70s and early 80s home computers (Apple II, Atari 400/800, C64, etc). Of course, this wasn't just due to pixel and palette limitations but also the 8-bit CPUs at sub-4 MHz clock speeds and limited memory (usually 8k to 32k game size). It wasn't until around the mid-80s when arcade and personal computer hardware with 16-bit CPUs at 8 Mhz+ and 256K memory hit that magic middle-ground we see as unique to that era of computer and arcade graphics. By the mid-90s it was already starting to vanish as palettes grew beyond 256 colors and resolutions exceeded 15Khz analog video (roughly 240 lines high). A great example of the peak visuals possible from the painstaking care and artistic virtuosity of this era can be seen in the incredible hand-drawn sprites of "Street Fighter II": https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_sheets/index.html https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_sheets/index.html. The other reason I think so many of us see the art style of this era as uniquely special is it ended suddenly with a huge leap to deep color palettes, higher resolutions and 3D rendered graphics. This happened due to the unique nature of analog 15Khz video and the desire to avoid interlace flicker, causing resolutions for most consumer-priced computers and game consoles to max out in the mid-80s at less than 240 vertical lines. Since artists generally want to work in roughly square pixels, this limits horizontal resolution to around 320. So, for nearly a decade the benefits of using the existing televisions consumers already had, limited the visual output of home computers and game consoles to 240 lines. It even froze the evolution of most arcade machines due to the cost savings of using CRTs made for TVs. Even one of the last 2D arcade hardware platforms, Capcom's 1996 CPS III, was limited to 384 x 224 resolution. After this unprecedented 'hold' of nearly ten years on the march of pixel progress, the next increment most consumers saw was a huge and seemingly sudden leap - a doubling of vertical and horizontal resolutions and a jump from 4 and 8-bit palettes (16 to 256 colors) straight to 16-bit palettes (65,535 colors). And this happened at almost the same moment the rush to 3D rendered graphics killed any interest in hand-drawn pixels. In just a few years, virtually all the computer and game pixels consumers saw changed dramatically in both scope and style, creating a clear divide between hand-drawn 2D pixel art at analog resolutions and everything that came after.
diabllicseagull 7mo ago
I came across this archive not long ago. Avril Harrison has some insane artwork!

265 points by sph 7mo ago

krige 7mo ago

I have that Sachs Lagoon image printed on my wall, it's gorgeous.

This brought back some memories. So nice to see art from an era where you really needed talent to be able to produce it. Such a nice contrast to the AI slop which takes no talent to produce!

wallhz 7mo ago
[dead]
hmstx 7mo ago
In an interesting twist of fate, one of the master copyists featured prominently in the Scener section of that site has come back in the last few years to win graphics competitions again with both - directly ripping newer, lesser known artists instead of the classic Vallejo/Sorayama from the 90s. https://ibb.co/GpDVf2r https://ibb.co/GpDVf2r - switching to midjourney from ~2023 to now, so the sources are near untraceable (this was also supposedly leaked). It still takes some talent to do a good looking copy, but it's not the same talent - and very dishonest when such literal use of reference is not credited. In fact it's been an issue in the 16bit demoscene with graphics (standalone and in demos) suddenly getting more plentiful, with subjects constructed and lit a lot better, etc. and people being called out for suspicious works (and usually getting away with it, "because the whole point was to support our insane image compression code with a ton of images" etc.)

wmil 7mo ago

So for anyone looking into old school graphics programming, bit planes are pretty confusing when you don't understand why they exist. Two big reasons. First, it's about running memory chips in parallel to increase bandwidth. Image data was hard to get to the screen fast enough with hardware in that era. Second it allowed for simple backwards compatibility. Programs were used to writing directly to video memory, and in an EGA card the start of the video memory was valid CGA data. The rest of the colour data was in a separate bit plane.

flohofwoe 7mo ago
It also saved memory with "odd" number of bits eg 3 bitplanes for 8 colors per pixel.
- mrandish 7mo ago
  Yes, I too remember the memory savings being the key aspect of bitplane design choices in the early and mid 80s. The increased granularity in varying the trade-off between memory for graphics vs program code being the secondary aspect. The downside to bitplanes vs chunky pixel formats was having to write to four different memory addresses to fully change one 16 color pixel. One case where bitplanes could be faster was high-res bitmapped text. As long as your text was monochrome (all in one bitplane), you could write an 8 pixel wide character with one byte. This was a big deal when it came to scrolling a screen full of bitmapped text.
  - vidarh 7mo ago
    Memory savings and by extension memory bandwidth for low color modes, as you indirectly point out with the text example. The early Amigas had a memory bandwidth of ~7MB/s, and the chip RAM bandwidth was shared with the custom chips... Anything that'd reduce needed memory transfers was a big deal.
fredoralive 7mo ago
I don't think the Amiga has either parallel / per plane chip memory, or any need for backwards compatibility with CGA.
- ZFH 7mo ago
  It was all about saving RAM on the Amiga.
- amiga386 7mo ago
  Indeed. As per this timing diagram, Denise accesses each 16-bit word of each bitplane sequentially. Any bitplanes you turn off, the more cycles available for blitter... or CPU! Fun fact! The Amiga Workbench is 4 colour hires by default, because hires is impressively businessy... but 8 or 16 colour hires would lock out the CPU most of the time, as the chipset would have to dip into the 68000's even cycle RAM accesses and stall it. 4 colour hires lets the CPU (on a chipmem-only system) run at full speed! http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_guide/node02D4.html http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui...

urbandw311er 7mo ago

Oh, this is a glorious and nostalgic romp back through past memories. Thank you!

TacticalCoder 7mo ago

Color cycling in the picture file format was so epic! Fun memory: I was with my best friend at another friend's place and his father called him to do some chore. He had to quickly mow the small lawn or something like that. So we decided to prank him: I don't remember all the details but basically we launched Deluxe Paint and simulated an Amiga "guru meditation" using a font that wasn't even correct (I think because we were in 320x256 while the real guru meditation was using a mode with smaller pixels). Then in broken english we wrote something like this: "Hardware failure. If you reboot or turn off your computer it is going to broke forever" We then did a color cycling between red and black for one of the color and put the drawing software in "full screen". When our friend came back, we played dumb and said we had no idea what happened but that apparently we really shouldn't turn the computer off. We managed to hold it for something like ten minutes while he though his computer was done for good but we were dying inside. All three of us remember that prank to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation P.S: as a side note with the help of Claude Code CLI / Sonnet 4.6 I managed to recompile a 30+ years old game I wrote in DOS in the early 90s (and for which I still have the source files and assets but not the tooling) and I was using converter (which I wrote back then) to convert files between the .LBM format and a "tweaked" (320x200 / 4 planes) DOS mode I was using for the game (which allowed double-buffering without tearing). I don't remember the details but I take it that if we had .LBM picture files, me and the artist where using Deluxe Paint on the Amiga.

sph 7mo ago
You might enjoy this GDC talk by Mark Ferrari of LucasArts fame, where he goes over his pixel art technique, as well as how he did color cycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
binaryturtle 7mo ago
Once I played a similar prank to a computer science teacher. Back in the Windows 3.x for Workgroups era this was. I made a screenshot of the desktop (showing a window), and put it on as wallpaper. Took the man a little while to figure out why that window couldn't be closed (after a hard reboot later when the window popped back up :) )

adaptit 7mo ago

Always cool to see these kinds of retro computing resources pop up.

lysace 7mo ago

I missed out on the Amiga (introduced in 1985) at the time, being an early PC adopter. Went from CGA (1981) directly to VGA (1987). In terms of colors the most popular VGA modes (320x200 or 320x240, 256 color palette, 18 bit color depth) are superior to the most popular Amiga graphics modes (320×200 or 320x256, 32 color palette, 12 bit color depth). But somehow Amiga graphics is still often nicer.

gxd 7mo ago
It's because of the artists. The Amiga was a much more affordable art-making machine, so many artists made graphics ON the Amiga FOR the Amiga. There were even some good-looking VGA games that under utilized the PC's capabilities because they were essentially converted Amiga games. Now for the shameless plug... My game's protagonist is an Amiga fan and the Amiga has a little cameo in it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
ekianjo 7mo ago
Amiga happened way before VGA was mainstream.
- lysace 7mo ago
  Amigas reached hobbyists in large numbers way earlier, yeah.
- rjrjrjrj 7mo ago
  Amiga 1000 was released in mid-1985, although I think few units were shipped before 1986. Amiga 500 was 1987 - same year as VGA, its little brother MCGA, and the Mac II. Not sure when VGA would have been considered mainstream... 1989 maybe? Mac LC was 1990, so probably before that. VGA and Mac color were better for most practical things. Square pixels and far fewer resolution/flicker/color tradeoffs.
  - mrandish 7mo ago
    > Amiga 1000 was released in mid-1985, although I think few units were shipped before 1986. It was announced on July 26th, 1985 at Lincoln Center with Andy Warhol painting Blondie (Debby Harry) live on-stage (a demo which was re-created at the Computer History Museum this past Summer as part of the Amiga 040th celebration). But you're right it wasn't commonly available until the late Fall. I managed to get mine at the end of November.

jbjbjbjb 7mo ago

There’s something about the Amiga era font and graphic style that I love and I always feel is unique to the Amiga but had trouble pinning it down to a particular developer or graphics artist. Ruff n Tumble is a good example, with like chunky futuristic font, the strong gradients all over everything and even the colours. It’s not common to all games though.

reaperducer 7mo ago
pinning it down to a particular developer or graphics artist Jim Sachs was one of the early masters. The Wikipedia article about him does not do him justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Sachs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Sachs One amazing thing was that even after the Amiga became available, he continued simultaneously making great art on the C-64.
- mrandish 7mo ago
  I met Jim at users groups and trade shows and had to the opportunity to hang out with him several times. Not only an incredible artist but extremely humble and just a very nice human.
  - reaperducer 7mo ago
    The July, 1988 issue of Run Magazine has profiles of then-leading-edge computer artists using Commodore gear.
shevy-java 7mo ago
Yeah, I agree. I also had C64 and DOS, and while both had tons of games, the Amiga was a bit different. In a way the Amiga was kind of a stronger predecessor to e. g. Xbox or similar variants (there were also TV console games, of course, and I played them too, so these may be called more appropriately the forefront-runner towards Xbox and other consoles, but I feel that the Amiga was kind of positioned in two places here, whereas DOS was more on the application-side, business-side, than games side, even though there were also many good DOS games. Master of Orion 1 is one of my all-time favourites; Master of Orion 2 extended many things, but the gameplay also got slower and I did not like that. I loved the fast play style that was possible, also in other games, civilization 1, simcity 1 and so forth).

takahitoyoneda 7mo ago

[dead]

shevy-java 7mo ago

I liked the Amiga. I would not really use it today, but I recall having played many games in the 1980s. Those kind of games are mostly dead now (save for a few Indie games perhaps). Today's games are usually always the same - 3D engine with some fancy audio and video and a dumbed down gameplay. (Not all games, mind you; for instance, I liked the idea behind Little Nightmares. I never played it myself, don't have the time, but I watched several clips on youtube and I found the gameplay different to the "canonical" games we now have, as perpetual repetition of a money-sell grab.)

pwillia7 7mo ago

I made a DeluxePaint/Amiga LORA you can use with Stable Diffusion/FLUX a while back for the lulz[1] I also used that LORA and some video models to try to make a little movie with the same style[2] Here's a guide on how to generate LORAs too if you're interested[3] Finally, there's a DeluxePaint clone someone released that is pretty cool to play around with[4] [1]: https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be [3]: https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-full-guide/ https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-ful... [4]: https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter

realityloop 7mo ago
FFS ruining it for ppl that are old enough as well. I really wanted to try this out :/ Access Restricted for Australian Visitors As of March 16, 2026, Civitai is no longer accessible to users in Australia. This is due to Australia's Age-Restricted Material Codes, registered under the Online Safety Act and enforced by the eSafety Commissioner. These codes require platforms that host user-generated content — including AI-generated imagery — to implement age verification measures such as facial age estimation, digital identity wallets, or photo identification checks before allowing access to age-restricted material. Simple self-declaration of age is no longer considered sufficient. Non-compliance carries civil penalties of up to AUD $49.5 million per breach.
- BrissyCoder 7mo ago
  Thank you eSafety Commissioner!
- pwillia7 7mo ago
  police state australia https://wormhole.app/E4zA1z#Q3aQLs6wRmlLkeghIYyZEQ https://wormhole.app/E4zA1z#Q3aQLs6wRmlLkeghIYyZEQ

ulfbert_inc 7mo ago

Somewhat related, new version of Amiga Vision collection just dropped. Very high quality product you can get for free if you are an Amiga fan. Can't get enough of included demos on my MiSTer setup.

appstorelottery 7mo ago

This is great stuff! As a side note, I wonder if anyone has created a HAM viewer that runs in the browser? I remember HAM flickering by necessity and being amazed by 4096 colors on-screen at once. There was a certain quality of HAM images on the Amiga that made them instantly identifiable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify

vidarh 7mo ago
HAM doesn't flicker. The issue with HAM is that you're limited in terms of abrupt colour changes. It's straightforward to convert HAM to PNG etc. It would have sometimes been used together with interlaced mode to double the number of lines and that did flicker.
FireBeyond 7mo ago
Flickering? I don't recall flickering, but I do recall that EHB (extra half brite) to get to 64 colors might have had fringing issues, but that's about it. Interlacing might have flickered too, depending on your monitor. (Most monitors Commodore made would flicker in interlace mode, but I believe there were some higher end ones that did not).
timbit42 7mo ago
I remember HAM being stable until you moved the mouse and then it would flicker until you stopped moving the mouse because the scan line interrupts would be interrupted by the mouse, throwing the sensitive scan line timing off.
bitwize 7mo ago
You were probably seeing an interlaced video mode, which flickered HAM or no HAM. The signature of HAM was there would be odd color barf at the edges of objects if the colors changed too quickly going left to right because of the hold-and-modify encoding. You saw that a lot with ToasterPaint but when it rendered to the video output it was fine (and even in 24bit color).

whywhywhywhy 7mo ago

The Photon Paint eye image in CRT mode flickering is so accurate to how it felt at the time https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/PhotonPaint.crt.html https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/PhotonPaint.crt.html

tomhow 7mo ago

Previously... Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431514 - Nov 2023 (20 comments) Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783531 - Aug 2018 (27 comments) The Amiga Boing Ball Explained - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330689 - Aug 2016 (56 comments) The Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10972849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10972849 - Jan 2016 (24 comments)

drzaiusx11 7mo ago

I couldn't afford the Amiga in its day, but I often drooled over it's imagery in magazines etc. I really need to pick up a mister fpga setup and see what I missed out on back then. Any recommendations for hardware for that? I can and do build my own hardware, but I think there's a bunch of options nowadays and likely some are better than others...

WeZzyNL 7mo ago
I guess the SuperStation One?[0] [0]: https://retroremake.co/pages/superstation%E1%B5%92%E2%81%BF%E1%B5%89 https://retroremake.co/pages/superstation%E1%B5%92%E2%81%BF%...
- drzaiusx11 7mo ago
  Says it's for preorder, so my guess is that's a recommendation without having one? Or are you working on this project?

kstrauser 7mo ago

A super minor nitpick: it’s jarring to see the Amiga referred to as 16 bit. It wasn’t described that way at the time: it was universally (that I saw anyway) called a 32 bit machine, and reasonably. It had a flat 32 bit address space (although the 68000 itself didn’t support all those address lines because what kind of supercomputer would need 4GB of RAM?). All the registers and operations were 32 bit. Some of the internal operations were implemented in 16 bits, but that was invisible to programmers. Newer models with definitively 32 bit CPUs like the 68060 were nearly 100% backward compatible with older models at the CPU instruction level, even if newer OSes weren’t backward compatible at the API level. In fact, the only program not forward compatible at the instruction level that I remember offhand was Microsoft’s AmigaBASIC. It used the top bits of pointers to store data because the 68000 would ignore them when accessing RAM due to that lack of address lines. I just don’t see a way to justifiably call the Amiga a 16 bit machine. Although the A1000 had some 16 bit hardware paths, a maxed out A3000 definitely wasn’t 16 bit, and they were nearly completely compatible with each other minus newer features. Amiga was full-on 32 bit machine. It’s weird to hear it called anything else.

wk_end 7mo ago
This is a classic dispute when it comes to the 68000. I'm inclined to agree with your perspective, actually, but my impression is that it's highly contested. Commodore and Atari marketed their 68K machines as 16/32-bit, which is I guess technically the most correct. And other 68000-based machines, like the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, were marketed as 16-bit - it even says it right on top of the unit!
- vidarh 7mo ago
  Yeah, I second that 16 bit or 16/32 was far more commonly used than 32, due to the 16 bit bus.
  - kstrauser 7mo ago
    The bus always seemed like the oddest part to zero in on. By analogy, an Opteron in 2003 was a 64 bit CPU with a 32 bit HyperTransport bus, but no one called an Opteron system 32 bit. The width of a particular internal implementation detail is a strange duck IMO.

01100011 7mo ago

I'm getting older and forgetting a lot, but I hope I never forget the feeling of seeing this as a kid in 1989. You can see and experience old things, but it's impossible to recreate the context in which they were originally experienced. You can't erase your experience of 40 years of technical progress which makes this sort of thing feel merely quaint in comparison.

btbuildem 7mo ago
Those memories are crisp and vivid

btbuildem 7mo ago

Aghh so many classic games are missing from here!

mrandish 7mo ago

There's just something uniquely special about hand-drawn pixel art at resolutions around 320 x 200 with 16 to 256 colors - especially when viewed on analog CRT screens with their scanlines and phosphor glow which blend colors and soften the hard pixel edges some people today think as "retro" (which isn't at all how this art actually looked in the 80s to the artists or their audiences). I think a key aspect of the magic is that the technical constraints force art to be representational instead of photo realistic. There just weren't enough pixels or colors, so artists had to make intentional choices about where to focus their limited pixels and palette to imply the detail they couldn't fully draw and that made their images evocative in ways photo-realism usually isn't. Earlier digital graphics with 4 to 16 colors and resolutions around 160 x 120 to were generally 'moving icons' as seen in arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Galaga and most late-70s and early 80s home computers (Apple II, Atari 400/800, C64, etc). Of course, this wasn't just due to pixel and palette limitations but also the 8-bit CPUs at sub-4 MHz clock speeds and limited memory (usually 8k to 32k game size). It wasn't until around the mid-80s when arcade and personal computer hardware with 16-bit CPUs at 8 Mhz+ and 256K memory hit that magic middle-ground we see as unique to that era of computer and arcade graphics. By the mid-90s it was already starting to vanish as palettes grew beyond 256 colors and resolutions exceeded 15Khz analog video (roughly 240 lines high). A great example of the peak visuals possible from the painstaking care and artistic virtuosity of this era can be seen in the incredible hand-drawn sprites of "Street Fighter II": https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_sheets/index.html https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_sheets/index.html. The other reason I think so many of us see the art style of this era as uniquely special is it ended suddenly with a huge leap to deep color palettes, higher resolutions and 3D rendered graphics. This happened due to the unique nature of analog 15Khz video and the desire to avoid interlace flicker, causing resolutions for most consumer-priced computers and game consoles to max out in the mid-80s at less than 240 vertical lines. Since artists generally want to work in roughly square pixels, this limits horizontal resolution to around 320. So, for nearly a decade the benefits of using the existing televisions consumers already had, limited the visual output of home computers and game consoles to 240 lines. It even froze the evolution of most arcade machines due to the cost savings of using CRTs made for TVs. Even one of the last 2D arcade hardware platforms, Capcom's 1996 CPS III, was limited to 384 x 224 resolution. After this unprecedented 'hold' of nearly ten years on the march of pixel progress, the next increment most consumers saw was a huge and seemingly sudden leap - a doubling of vertical and horizontal resolutions and a jump from 4 and 8-bit palettes (16 to 256 colors) straight to 16-bit palettes (65,535 colors). And this happened at almost the same moment the rush to 3D rendered graphics killed any interest in hand-drawn pixels. In just a few years, virtually all the computer and game pixels consumers saw changed dramatically in both scope and style, creating a clear divide between hand-drawn 2D pixel art at analog resolutions and everything that came after.

diabllicseagull 7mo ago

I came across this archive not long ago. Avril Harrison has some insane artwork!