That Picture and the one of the (DeluxePaint) Pharao were THE prime examples you showed off to your friends when you wanted to demonstrate the supremacy of the Amiga when it came to graphics power! :)
@yak2be Thanks. When I was a teenager and the Amiga was new, I remember being very impressed with the quality of images a person could get on the Amiga. Photo-realistic images on a PC at that time was revolutionary, and looking back it's amazing to think that the HAM feature was almost not included. It was a very interesting graphics mode and one of the things that helped make the Amiga special.
There are a couple of HAM games, Pioneer plague and Knights of the Krystallion. A few adventure games as well (which were better suited). Just a couple of programmers knew how to do it. The Amigas lack of chunky pixels means that HAM and EHB were quite slow, as well as taking up a lot of RAM and disk space.
It's amazing now that the Amiga has been airbrushed out of history. It came out a year after the Macintosh and was a FAR more capable machine. It really was the greatest machine of the 80s.
I don't think the HAM mode itself was too demanding (it didn't slow the system down much). The primary reason HAM wasn't popular for animation was the fringing artifacts that would occur as an object moved across the screen. I did some experimentation with HAM animation back in those days and it worked as long as each frame was a completely new HAM image. That began to chew up memory rather fast and might be another reason HAM wasn't used more much more than still images.
Loved my Amiga from back in the days but hated how the colors would bleed when using certain paint programs mainly with Digi Paint but not so much with Deluxe Paint.
Even british/eurocentric websites paste it out of history- and it was massive over here. Two many young journalists who weren't there copying their north american colleagues.
Looks like DigiPaint's source code was recycled for ToasterPaint in the NewTek Video Toaster. It used HAM on the RGB monitor, but could render out to full 24-bit color in the Toaster's frame stores.
I remember waiting for what seemed like a half hour listening to the swish-swish of the disk while the 1541 would chew away at Raid over Moscow. It seems almost incomprehensible how transferring a maximum of 64K from disk to RAM could take so long. Ten years later I was downloading entire disk images over a 28.8 modem in mere seconds! Yes, the Amiga was a lot faster than the C64, but there were other machines which would load faster.
I am always pissed at how the Amiga has been removed from the history books. The Mac was 9 inches of Black and White, (yes both colors.....). at around $3,000-$3500. The PC was a joke, (CGA 4 color and a beeper for sound. The Atari ST was a good computer, but with 256 colors, mono sound, single tasking and no hardware acceleration.. it was not a capable as the Amiga. (Though it still kicked the crap out of the Mac and IBM!). Read the Book, "On the Edge the rise and spectacular fall of Commodore"
I'm a PC user (always have been) however I still agree with you the Amiga doesn't seem to get the credit it deserves, it blew the PC out of the water for many many years, it was only until the 486DX2's came out that the PC started to take the lead. I rememer having an old 286 with EGA graphics and was so envious of the Amigas better graphics and sound. The Amiga was really important to us PC users at the time because we used it as a bench mark for our PC's. In my eyes the Amiga was a decade ahead of it's time.
I had the impression the Amiga was more popular in Europe compared to the US which was more into business PCs and Macs at the time. A lot of modern documentaries are more from a US perspective than a European one.
Very interesting. I think the reason for the HAM Mode was the limited memory bandwith. If the amiga has only CHIP-MEMORY (512 KByte) the the HAM Graphic mode slow down the Computer. But I don't know any game using the HAM graphic Mode. As i saw the first AMIGA 1000 in a shop showing images i was stunning.
I think it was originally announced at $595, but the list price ended up being higher. Although most mail-order houses sold it for less than the list price.
The only crap thing I remember about my Amiga days was that the mouse gradually degraded in performance. The rubber balls would get clogged with fluff and (yuck) old skin, and the button sensors would gradually get worse and miss presses. I used to add sticky tape onto the plastic button structs so they pressed a little harder on the actuators underneath. But I kept having to buy new mice.
Oh yes... I remember that image. It was a full-colour picture recorded on an IBM PC with an image capture card and down-sampled from it's original 24bit colour depth to Amiga HAM mode.
ancalimonungol Tragically this is among the reasons the Amiga is historically overrated. On release the Amiga could display 4096 colours in the awkward HAM mode, it was not a true free form 4096 colour screen resolution. Five bit planes, 32 colours, was the most useful screen depth. 24 bit adaptors with genlocks and PAL video capture were available for the PC in 1984. Before the Amiga was released.
Anaformia abalatus dispositium. Amiga is historically underrated :) And I couldn't understand the reason. Do you mean because noone ever saw a PC image capture card was one of the reasons Amiga was better? ... Even if there were such cards for PC, I guess they weren't available to common consumers at an affordable price. By the time Amiga was created, the best PC's used CGA graphics. Even when I got myself an A1200, all of my friends were impressed when I showed them 18bit pictures because they simply were not able to display more than 256 colour pictures on their vga PC's (VGA was usually much better at displaying 256 colour graphics than an A1200 without a graphics card though). The first time they saw life-like pictures was on my Amiga.
ancalimonungol As ever, this is much a matter of opinion. Amiga had a combination of features which gave small budget home users some productivity features They hadn't seen before. It is true to say advertising had a huge impact because few professional graphics applications and even fewer graphics adaptors were commonly advertised in consumer magazines. The old CGA argument is a myth largely disseminated by Amiga disciples who love to eulogise the Amiga and discredit everything else around it. It is quite frankly a religious myth. In fact it's what in logic is called a straw man argument, the deployment of an anaemic counter example combined with the insistence that this example is de facto the only valid one. I don't have shallow pockets, so cost is a personal, non-objective matter. The argument goes something like this: "My Fiat 500 is far more powerful than your Porsche". "It isn't". "Yes it is, your Porsche only does 19 MPH. Look it up and see proof. Open your eyes". "No. That is A Porsche. The Porsche Elefant Tank. I don't drive a tank. My Porsche is a 911". "Ah! But it doesn't count". "Because?". "Because it's far more expensive than a Fiat 500. I can't afford one". "Well what has that got to do with it?" "Well, unless it's affordable for the average motorist it doesn't count". "But that's ridiculous, you started the discussion with an outright claim your car is more powerful, when it was pointed out that it isn't, you just changed the subject. It's like running your own motoring competition, only opening it to Fiat class vehicles, pointing out a Fiat wins and then using that result as proof the Fiat is better because it's never won by a Porsche. You're pulling the wool over your own eyes. I can afford to own and drive a Porsche and I prefer a driving experience with fewer compromises made to cost. Yes the car, the cost of parts and maintenance and the cost of optional extras is absolutely prohibitive to the average motorist, but I don't care because for me it is affordable". "So, you admit it's expensive to own an exotic car?". "Well yes I do". "See, that proves the Fiat 500 is more powerful and also that you're stupid because you didn't buy one". It's just an annoying, interminable discussion, right up there with talking to a Christian about how there's no good reason to think the Bible is true throughout, only to hear them say "Ah, but how can you say you know better than God?".
Anaformia abalatus dispositium. Well, when Amiga 1000 was released the best standard graphics available on PC was 16 color EGA that was released in October 1984. EGA can do 16 colors out of a palette of 64, and OCS Amiga chipset could do 32 colors out of 4096, not to mention a lot of other graphical effects.
yes yes fringing pixel is just 1 color just paint right color and it will ok, but in first place why it not just green on all pixel brush is LOL. i not get it.4096 color mean 4096 palette. or is it still use just 16 color palette and you have 16.5 million colors to choose lol. simply as it you jabe 4096 colors just draw. why fringing LOL
This is not a 24 bit color system. The original Amiga chipset is limited to a 16 color palette, of the 4096 total colors the system is capable of generating. If you paint with just those 16 colors, you get no fringing. However, if you paint with any colors NOT in that base 16, the machine has to do some on the fly trickery, which results in the fringes. Here is a more technical explanation: The system uses 6 bits per pixel - 4 for data and 2 for control. If the control bits are 00, they do nothing. In that case, the 4 data bits are used to set a pixel to one of the 16 color registers and the system behaves as any other with a 4 bit indexed display. However, the other three possible control bit settings (01, 10, 11) tell the system to - rather than coloring a pixel from the 16 color palette - to color a pixel based on the color of the previous pixel on the scan line by HOLDing two of the RGB values and MODIFYing the 3rd. For example, if the previous pixel is R15 G15 B15, the new pixel could be colored by retaining the R and G values of the previous pixel, and assigning a new B value, for a new color of R15 G15 B00, or it could retain the R and B values and modify the G, giving a new color of R15 G00 B15. One limitation of this system is that it can take several steps to get from - say - white to black PIXEL1 - R15, G15, B15 PIXEL2 - R00, G15, B15 PIXEL3 - R00, G00, B15 PIXEL4 - R00, G00, B00 In this example, the system executes a HOLD and MODIFY operation in order to alter the R value of pixel1 to color pixel2, alter the G value of pixel2 to color pixel3, and alter the B value of pixel3 to color pixel4. The result is that you get a CYAN and BLUE pixel in between the WHITE and BLACK. The unwanted colors of pixels 2 and 3 are the "fringes" that can appear when using HAM mode. In this case, you could completely eliminate the fringes by ensuring that WHITE and BLACK are in the base 16 color palette. However, any image which utilizes the full 4096 colors is going to have areas where some HAM transitions are necessary.
Back in the days i used to load my c64 games from tapes but than i took a floppy to the port. And he is really yelling about the amiga floppy loading times?After my 1541 II the Amigas floppydrive was like WOW?WTF? Like a HD with 10Tb and SSD speed. A harddrive in the early nineties was way to expensive for most of the users so they had to use floppy disks.Take the bus if you can't afford the car. After getting my 600Mb WD-Caviar HDD the floppy seemed - well lets say a bit slower to me,too.
Faster than a c64? yes,hands free! but 3,5" drives had all quiet the same speed if it was the mac,atari,amiga or pc. But a C64 with Action Replay or Final Cartridge and the implemented fastloder or even jiffyDOS is - well, whole another story. ;-)
Incorrect. 3.5 inch lloppy drive read and write speed varied immensely between platforms. It depends on the disk controller used, the format used on the disk and the OS. Hardware and software hacks seem to exist for most platforms, be it fdd or tape drives.
So in short : HAM is a gadget, unless you watch the image from far ! How great ! I'm happy I never bought an Amiga in the 80s and chose an Archimedes by Acorn : that was a real computer. The Amiga is a good game console with a keyboard, it has great sound, but although it was intersting when it was launched (85), none of its features are outstanding. And the power switch is on the power supply, that's hilarious. How could you use that seriously without a hard drive unless you're a masochist ?
HAM was never used to paint with (except one company called Newtek that pretty much used it as a preview for their 24 bit actual frame)... It had lots of uses for displaying pictures though. Acorn at that time could not touch the AmigaOS (and what we now call kernel), it was just awesome and beautiful for it's time. Superb multitasking without an MMU and pretty dense code. That is why NASA used it for some years... Acorn was a numbercruncher for sure (as I remember it) but it did not have the OS or the software to back it up as the Amiga did... I remember fondly when I programmed a game (my computer at that time had 1,5-2 Mb RAM) with a great IDE, at the same time doing sprite work in Deluxe Paint, doing SFX and music in MED Soundstudio while ray tracing backgrounds (and some BOBS) at the same time just flipping screens with Amiga+M... Task priority was just set so the Ray Tracing was done with a lower priority then the rest of the open programs... so when ever I thought and maybe just typed stuff... all of the CPU was used to raytrace... that was the golden days.... It took MS about 15 years later to achieve something almost similar (but still was not close)... The only thing closely similar but a little later (for me atleast) was OS/2 (4?) WARP from IBM with MS contributions though at the start... Amiga got the "game" console slap wrongly from the beginning... It was it's incredible OS and it chipset design that was the real Amiga experience... Atari ST for example was marketed as a "sound" computer but it was lacking in the sound department actually and the only thing that made it a "sound" computer was a different RS-232 port marked MIDI :-) you could build yourself for 1-2$ the exact same "port" from the Amiga RS-232 port easily.... but anyway... And then the price? get what you pay for thing? Amiga hands down...
I think you are grossly misinformed. Firstly, you mean a hardware "hack" not "gadget"? That's somewhat true, but then it was designed by Jay Miner for a specific reason, although that reason became obsolete later on. It was too costly to remove the HAM circuitry by that stage. But it gave the Amiga capabilities that were almost unique in the home computer market. Hard disks were available for Amigas. It's combination of hardware and OS were definitely groundbreaking at the time. Secondly, the only truly great innovation of the Archimedes is the ARM chip itself. Roger (now Sophie) Wilson is a genius for designing such a powerful, energy efficient chip. But the Archimedes' Risc OS was (and still is) cooperative multi tasking, not preemptive like the Amiga's. In fact the Risc OS was about to be replaced when they decided to withdraw from the personal computer business, scrapping the planned Phoebe project. On the original Archimedes, it's graphics and sound were not especially good and outside of the UK (mainly educational market) they didn't sell well. Which is a great shame, because they definitely deserved better. But ARM lives on, its place in history assured. 🙂
