ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer) (09/18/88)
--- Jay Miner, the designer of the Amiga chipset, was the speaker at September BADGE, held on the 17th. He took questions from the audience and told many fascinating stories about the Amiga's past and present. A wonderful man! Anyway, having heard the rumor that he was against putting the HAM mode on the chips, I asked him how the HAM mode came about. Well, it turns out that in the original design, the color registers held HSV values instead of RGB values. Thus, while in the HAM mode, you could take a pixel, and alter one of the three parameters, hue, saturation, or value, to get the next pixel. And, that makes a lot of sense! Well, more so that taking a pixel and altering it's R, G, or B component... When the color register design changed from storing HSV values to RGB values, Jay wanted to take the HAM stuff out, but it remained anyway, and thus we got the not-so-highly-intuitive HAM mode. Of course, good thing we did. Jay himself also admitted that he was fascinated and amazed by all the HAM stuff out there; he never thought it'd be used... Ali Ozer, aozer@NeXT.com NeXT Developer Support
mike@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Mike Smithwick) (09/25/88)
["I'm not a programmer, but I play one on TV"] In article <3996@polya.Stanford.EDU> aozer@NeXT.com (Ali T. Ozer) writes: >--- >Jay Miner, the designer of the Amiga chipset, was the speaker at >September BADGE, held on the 17th. He took questions from the audience >and told many fascinating stories about the Amiga's past and present. >A wonderful man! > [oops, giant-mutant line eaters from Mars got the rest of Ali's posting!] Ali, Ali, Ali, you forgot the best part!! Jay was explaining about the origins of HAM mode. He said that he asked the chip-layout guy to remove the HAM registers. The guy said "but it'll leave a blank spot on the chip!". Ego, we have HAM. Who sez chip design isn't an "art"?? : -- *** mike (starship janitor) smithwick *** "he's braindead Jim. . ." [disclaimer : nope, I don't work for NASA, I take full blame for my ideas]