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.
In the 80s it was fairly common to consider C64, Amstrad 464 and ZX Spectrum 8 bit, while Amiga and Atari ST 16 bit. In Italy we even had two separate video game magazines: Zzap! for 8 bit and The Games Machine for 16 bit.
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!
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.
I recall the A500 series as being thought of as 16-bit in the UK -- the 32-bit marketing started with the A1200, and devices based on it, like the CD32 (hence the name).
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
15khz 320x200 with proper CRT scanlines (like in arcade games and home consoles and computers on a standard TV) is immensely more pleasing to the eye than the same resolution displayed on a PC monitor.
The glow of a crt warms my heart. There's a beauty to phosphor based images that nothing else replicates.
I tried playing my old games and software on modern TVs and monitors but somethig was "missing"; it didn't feel right.
Sure enough, the halo and color bleeds were leveraged by the great designers of the day. The sprites, fonts characters _require_ the "glow" to experience them as they were designed. It goes beyond simple nostalgia.
I finally broke down and bought a gorgeous Zenith Space Command TV, hacked it for various modern input sources (composite, s video, VGA and even HDMI.) It just brings the joy back that was missing.
You had VGA in 1987?! That was very rare. You must have been an early adopter. Amiga users in '92 and '93 had great color and many PC users were still on EGA.
You're comparing 1987 VGA to 1985 Amiga? Not a realistic comparison.
Technology advanced much more rapidly in those days. Similar to how hard drive capacity seemed to double every six months for a while, or how there's a new bleeding edge AI model every three months today.
Also, VGA had 256 colors. The Amiga had 4,096 simultaneously.
Only using the party trick HAM mode though. 32 (plus 32 for the half-bright bit plane) is the mode that most software uses.
Of course in 1987 a Macintosh II with a fully expanded "Toby" framebuffer could not only do 256 colours, it could do it in 640x480 mode where as a PS/2's VGA could only do 16 colours at that resolution. And an Amiga could only do flickervision at that res.
Of course with technology improving all the time, not having a updated chipset circa 1987 that at least had a progressive scan 640x480(ish) is one of those things that really killed the chances of Amiga as a serious computer. They only got that circa 1990, and "Super VGA" was already just about becoming a thing in the PC world (and Microsoft had kinda got round to making a version of Windows that didn't suck by then). I'm not sure if the mythical Ranger had a progressive mode, but it's it does show how Commodore inability to keep the custom chips updated in a timely mannner slowly sunk the system...
> Of course in 1987 a Macintosh II with a fully expanded "Toby" framebuffer could not only do 256 colours, it could do it in 640x480 mode where as a PS/2's VGA could only do 16 colours at that resolution.
If cost is no issue, the PS/2 also had the 8514/A card that could do 256 colours at 1024x768. And there was also the PGC from 1984 that could do 256 colours at 640x480.
Also, VGA had 256 colors. The Amiga had 4,096 simultaneously.
That's the highly special hold-and-modify mode (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify). I tried pretty hard to word my comment fairly, remembering the sometimes legendary tenacity of Amiga fans. (Which nowadays includes yours truly.)
Not at all! Use of the Copper to punch up visuals was de rigeur on the Amiga - Amiga games are immediately recognizable by their Copper-fueled sky gradients for instance. I actually think that if there's any really good explanation for why you like might find Amiga graphics more pleasing than VGA, the Copper is the thing.
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.
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.
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 :) )
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
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!
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.)
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.
In the 80s it was fairly common to consider C64, Amstrad 464 and ZX Spectrum 8 bit, while Amiga and Atari ST 16 bit. In Italy we even had two separate video game magazines: Zzap! for 8 bit and The Games Machine for 16 bit.
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!
Yeah, I second that 16 bit or 16/32 was far more commonly used than 32, due to the 16 bit bus.
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.
I recall the A500 series as being thought of as 16-bit in the UK -- the 32-bit marketing started with the A1200, and devices based on it, like the CD32 (hence the name).
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
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be
[3]: https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-ful...
[4]: https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter
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.
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
One amazing thing was that even after the Amiga became available, he continued simultaneously making great art on the C-64.
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).
Previously...
Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431514 - Nov 2023 (20 comments)
Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783531 - Aug 2018 (27 comments)
The Amiga Boing Ball Explained - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330689 - Aug 2016 (56 comments)
The Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10972849 - Jan 2016 (24 comments)
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...
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
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.
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.
It also saved memory with "odd" number of bits eg 3 bitplanes for 8 colors per pixel.
I don't think the Amiga has either parallel / per plane chip memory, or any need for backwards compatibility with CGA.
It was all about saving RAM on the Amiga.
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
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.
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).
I have that Sachs Lagoon image printed on my wall, it's gorgeous.
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.
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/
15khz 320x200 with proper CRT scanlines (like in arcade games and home consoles and computers on a standard TV) is immensely more pleasing to the eye than the same resolution displayed on a PC monitor.
The glow of a crt warms my heart. There's a beauty to phosphor based images that nothing else replicates.
I tried playing my old games and software on modern TVs and monitors but somethig was "missing"; it didn't feel right.
Sure enough, the halo and color bleeds were leveraged by the great designers of the day. The sprites, fonts characters _require_ the "glow" to experience them as they were designed. It goes beyond simple nostalgia.
I finally broke down and bought a gorgeous Zenith Space Command TV, hacked it for various modern input sources (composite, s video, VGA and even HDMI.) It just brings the joy back that was missing.
You had VGA in 1987?! That was very rare. You must have been an early adopter. Amiga users in '92 and '93 had great color and many PC users were still on EGA.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that. It was introduced in 1987.
You're comparing 1987 VGA to 1985 Amiga? Not a realistic comparison.
Technology advanced much more rapidly in those days. Similar to how hard drive capacity seemed to double every six months for a while, or how there's a new bleeding edge AI model every three months today.
Also, VGA had 256 colors. The Amiga had 4,096 simultaneously.
Only using the party trick HAM mode though. 32 (plus 32 for the half-bright bit plane) is the mode that most software uses.
Of course in 1987 a Macintosh II with a fully expanded "Toby" framebuffer could not only do 256 colours, it could do it in 640x480 mode where as a PS/2's VGA could only do 16 colours at that resolution. And an Amiga could only do flickervision at that res.
Of course with technology improving all the time, not having a updated chipset circa 1987 that at least had a progressive scan 640x480(ish) is one of those things that really killed the chances of Amiga as a serious computer. They only got that circa 1990, and "Super VGA" was already just about becoming a thing in the PC world (and Microsoft had kinda got round to making a version of Windows that didn't suck by then). I'm not sure if the mythical Ranger had a progressive mode, but it's it does show how Commodore inability to keep the custom chips updated in a timely mannner slowly sunk the system...
> Of course in 1987 a Macintosh II with a fully expanded "Toby" framebuffer could not only do 256 colours, it could do it in 640x480 mode where as a PS/2's VGA could only do 16 colours at that resolution.
If cost is no issue, the PS/2 also had the 8514/A card that could do 256 colours at 1024x768. And there was also the PGC from 1984 that could do 256 colours at 640x480.
Hardly a party trick. Programs that used HAM weren't uncommon. It was an advertised feature, and there were even painting programs.
I guess you weren't there.
HAM was useful for showing static graphics.
Also, VGA had 256 colors. The Amiga had 4,096 simultaneously.
That's the highly special hold-and-modify mode (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify). I tried pretty hard to word my comment fairly, remembering the sometimes legendary tenacity of Amiga fans. (Which nowadays includes yours truly.)
Or using the copper. Plenty of Amiga games played palette tricks despite not using HAM.
Sort of fair but also very specialized.
Not at all! Use of the Copper to punch up visuals was de rigeur on the Amiga - Amiga games are immediately recognizable by their Copper-fueled sky gradients for instance. I actually think that if there's any really good explanation for why you like might find Amiga graphics more pleasing than VGA, the Copper is the thing.
Amiga happened way before VGA was mainstream.
Amigas reached hobbyists in large numbers way earlier, yeah.
Always cool to see these kinds of retro computing resources pop up.
Oh, this is a glorious and nostalgic romp back through past memories. Thank you!
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
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.
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 :) )
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
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!
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.)