skipper@motaus.sps.mot.com (Skipper Smith) (04/10/91)
In article <17980@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> dlou@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Dennis Lou) writes: >In article <1044@cbmger.UUCP> peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) writes: >>In article <3075@tpki.toppoint.de> kris@tpki.toppoint.de (Kristian Koehntopp) writes: >>>I had a talk with a friend (He is an A3000 owner) on Amiga and its future. >>>Being more the suit type than me, he said "What is going to hurt future Amiga >>>sales more than a lack of 1280 * 1024 in true color is the lack of 320 * 200 >>>in 256 colors." The availability of this video graphics mode makes it easy >>>to port VGA games to the amiga without having the entire graphics repainted >>>by an artist. >> >>That shouldn't be a big problem. There exists decent software to transform >>256-color pictures to HAM on the Amiga with no viewable loss of quality at >>first sight. Ok, though HAMs are not best suited as background for action >>games with BOBs, hmm. But also converting a 256-color picture to 32-color >>lores doesn't give a sooo bad picture, you can easily edit it a little in >>dpaint and get a nice background. Remember, we talk of 320 pixel resolution >>here, that's not such a painful thing. > >Just thought I'd remind you that HAM mode programming is MUCH >different that 256 color VGA programming. The 'Hold' of "Hold And Modify" >has 16 colors based on a 4-bit bitplane. In 256 color VGA, you >have a 1 byte per pixel mapping on a single plane. I'd like to hear >how you do 256 color animation on the Amiga like you can on the IBM >(I don't think it's possible). > >256 color SVGA (i.e. 640x480x256, 800x600x256, and 1024x768x256) is >a different story altogether, using 8 bitplanes, bank-switching, >single, dual, and overlapping memory windows, etc... But not many >game programmers use those modes. > >-- >Dennis Lou | >dlou@ucsd.edu | "But Yossarian, what if everyone thought that way?" >[backbone]!ucsd!dlou | "Then I'd be crazy to think any other way!" I generally don't see anybody doing 256 color animations on an Amiga, they try to use as many of the 4096 as is reasonable- If you are going to use HAM, you use it and don't hold back. I continue to be impressed at the quality and speed of HAM animations done on the Amiga compared to what I have seen at trade shows on 486's with SVGA cards. Maybe it is just that the people choosing the animations to run on the PCs have no taste or understanding of what defines a bad/good animation, but I have yet to see one that qualifies to me as good. I have also seen many poor animations on the Amiga, however when Dr. Gandalf is a member of the user group you happen to be president of, you don't have to spend too much time looking at poor animations. This is even moreso now that he has a Toaster and a recordable laser disk!!! -- Skipper Smith | skipper@motaus.sps.mot.com Motorola Technical Training | 8945 Guilford Rd Ste 145 All opinions are my own, not my employers | Columbia, MD 21046