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The same article reaches Lobsters, a developer-focused news aggregator, attracting 22 points and 10 comments.
datagubbe Author
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> In order to show just how snappy this screen handling is, I've prepared a short movie clip. It's filmed off a flatscreen monitor connected to an Amiga 600, which is a 7 MHz (that's 0.007 GHz) machine based around essentially the same hardware as the original Amiga 1000 in 1985. Here it's playing some music while also running a text editor and…
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I break out this diagram every time Amiga graphics hardware comes up:https://amigadev.grimore.org/Hardware_Manual_guide/node02d4....The Amiga had a great trick. Both the CPU and the display/audio hardware share the same RAM (called Chip RAM), so they have to arbitrate for access to it, through a chip called Agnus, which prioritises who gets to…
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Amiga Screens: A Primer L: https://www. datagubbe.se/amscr/ C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9841309 posted on 2026.09.25 at 03:31:12 (c=0, p=6)
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I was very impressed by the video! Too bad it's impossible to convey to anyone who didn't live through it just how impressive it is… The A500 came with 512 kB RAM, expandable to between 9 and 138 MB (!) depending on upgrades.
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I wish there was a way to recapture the feeling of magic produced by using the Amiga. From usability to programmability, everything seemed exciting, new, and with unlimited possibility.It really was like going from a black-and-white world to seeing full color.I always said that if 1% of the effort (and money) put into overcoming the PC…
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Yes, changing a single pixel was rather painful, but that was rarely done. The original Amiga had 8 hardware sprites (8 colors I think by default) that could be placed anywhere on screen. The limitation was 8 sprites per single scan line, so once a sprite was finished drawing, it could be reused elsewhere (lower) on the screen for another sprite…
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How do different resolutions (pixel sizes) work? I get that everything memory related (including color mode and depth) could be switched on a raster line.In theory it should be possible to change the frequency of the video signal mid screen as well, but I have a hard time to imagine switching repeatedly every frame wouldn't have driven the…
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Yeah, somewhere along that time. SVGA didn't come out much later either. AGA came out in 1992, but I think at that time the PCs were already speeding past the Amiga. (In my opinion, although Windows 95 was much more advanced than Workbench and overtook the Amiga in productivity too, I really don't consider Windows 95 *so* distant from the Amigas…
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> This is why the default Workbench screen is 4-colour hires. It's hires to look nice and professional like an IBM, and not like a kid's toy like the Atari ST's default lowres GEM interfaceThe Atari ST had a professional resolution of 640x400 monochrome with a 70hz refresh rate. The Amiga had a 640x200 resolution non-interlaced, or a 640x400…
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I think the thing would be showing what 1985 IBM PCs were like alongside. I'm not sure when PCs overtook Amigas, but certainly in 1985 the Amiga was amazing compared to everything else.
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Was all this engineered and then implemented, or did they play it by ear? Seems very complex for the time. Now with Pis and ESP32s one can just cobble up together whatever Frankenstein with off the shelf parts, but this seems very elegant with bespoke chips, sans 68000. This is way way way over my head, but intellectually intriguing.
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Ah, you had to make me look it up 8-P [1]. At the hardware level, you do have to repeat the operations for each bitplane, but it's not that hard (the 68000 is there to script the hardware as it were). Once you set up the width, the height, the left and right masks (because you can shift the data up to 15 bits) and the operation (dest = src1 AND…
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Maybe its me, but i believe the primary or secondary reason for screen is different screens had different resolutions and color depths, both of which dont really exist these days on any major OS.
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RAM was too slow to update all pixels in real time. So being able to update one bit of 8 pixels at a time was useful, especially for tiled graphics. For example, you could draw onto only one of the bitplanes to change most significant bit of the palette indices, shifting the colors to make effect similar to semi-transparency (actual…
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For everyone wondering why there are so many dollar values in the diagram: $ meant hex in the vernacular of the day.(Could mean string too, but that'd a different story)
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> Each bitplane is stored separately in memory, and in order to change the colour index of a pixel, a bit must be toggled in each plane. Thus, a one-bitplane screen gives two colour indices, two bitplanes gives four and so on, up to five bitplanes and 32 colours on the original Amiga hardware (or 8 bpl and 256 colours on AGA). Storing the state of…
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I had an Amiga 500, then a 3000. You could really feel the slow performance with 8 and 16 color Workbench screens on the 500.
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Yes, although this cuts both ways. "Dread" and "Grind" are Doom clones that work on vanilla A500s- when at the time those kinds of graphics were not thought to be possible at all. I'm always amazed by the people who take old systems and figure how to do things that no one figured in decades.
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I don’t know much about Amiga, but from this article I recognize the Atari 8 bit / ANTIC DLI heritage at play!
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Given enough time and clever programmers even the original PC could do impressive stuff, but I can't image anything available at the time was very impressive. If you haven't seen the "8088 MPH" demo, it's a must watch :
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The Amiga is before my time, but I'm getting TempleOS vibes a bit, graphics-wise.
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Did the blitter abstract away the bitplanes, or did you have to repeat your operations for each bitplane?
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It did seem like magic, yeah. I was so blown away by the Amiga, but we had a PC (and later a Mac), sadly.
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