Discussion
Amiga Graphics Archive
Rob_Polding: 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!
wmil: 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.
TacticalCoder: 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_MeditationP.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.
urbandw311er: Oh, this is a glorious and nostalgic romp back through past memories. Thank you!
flohofwoe: It also saved memory with "odd" number of bits eg 3 bitplanes for 8 colors per pixel.
sph: You might enjoy this GDC talk by Mark Ferrari, where he goes over his pixel art technique, as well as how he did color cycling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
adaptit: Always cool to see these kinds of retro computing resources pop up.
fredoralive: I don't think the Amiga has either parallel / per plane chip memory, or any need for backwards compatibility with CGA.
lysace: I missed out on the Amiga thing at the time, being an early PC adopter. Went from CGA directly to VGA.The most popular VGA mode (320x200, 256 color palette, 18 bit color depth) is mostly technically better than the most popular Amiga mode (320×200 or 320x256, 32 color palette, 12 bit color depth).But somehow Amiga graphics is still often nicer.
jbjbjbjb: 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.
binaryturtle: 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 :) )
gxd: 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/
reaperducer: 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.
lysace: Also, VGA had 256 colors. The Amiga had 4,096 simultaneously.I know about the hold-and-modify mode (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify). I tried pretty hard to word my comment fairly.
