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Amiga Graphics Archive

amiga.lychesis.net

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Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#81

Post by drzaiusx11 »

WeZzyNL wrote: post #72
drzaiusx11 wrote: post #40

I couldn't afford the Amiga in its day, but I often drooled over it's imagery in magazines etc. I really need to pick up a mister fpga setup and see what I missed out on back then. Any recommendations for hardware for that? I can and do build my own hardware, but I think there's a bunch of options nowadays and likely some are better than others...

I guess the SuperStation One?[0] [0]: https://retroremake.co/pages/superstation%E1%B5%92%E2%81%BF%...

Says it's for preorder, so my guess is that's a recommendation without having one? Or are you working on this project?

Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#82

Post by hmstx »

Rob_Polding wrote: post #2

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!

In an interesting twist of fate, one of the master copyists featured prominently in the Scener section of that site has come back in the last few years to win graphics competitions again with both

- directly ripping newer, lesser known artists instead of the classic Vallejo/Sorayama from the 90s. https://ibb.co/GpDVf2r

- switching to midjourney from ~2023 to now, so the sources are near untraceable (this was also supposedly leaked).

It still takes some talent to do a good looking copy, but it's not the same talent - and very dishonest when such literal use of reference is not credited.

In fact it's been an issue in the 16bit demoscene with graphics (standalone and in demos) suddenly getting more plentiful, with subjects constructed and lit a lot better, etc. and people being called out for suspicious works (and usually getting away with it, "because the whole point was to support our insane image compression code with a ton of images" etc.)

Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#83

Post by reaperducer »

sgt wrote: post #35
lysace wrote: post #10

I missed out on the Amiga (introduced in 1985) at the time, being an early PC adopter. Went from CGA (1981) directly to VGA (1987). In terms of colors the most popular VGA modes (320x200 or 320x240, 256 color palette, 18 bit color depth) are superior to the most popular Amiga graphics modes (320×200 or 320x256, 32 color palette, 12 bit color depth). But somehow Amiga graphics is still often nicer .

You had VGA in 1987?! That was very rare. You must have been an early adopter. Amiga users in '92 and '93 had great color and many PC users were still on EGA.

You had VGA in 1987?! That was very rare. You must have been an early adopter. Amiga users in '92 and '93 had great color and many PC users were still on EGA.

I got my first VGA card in 1994. You're right, VGA wasn't common in 1987.

And based on the parent's comment history, he wasn't even alive in 1987; which is why he presents himself as an expert.

Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#84

Post by lysace »

reaperducer wrote: post #83
sgt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had VGA in 1987?! That was very rare. You must have been an early adopter. Amiga users in '92 and '93 had great color and many PC users were still on EGA.

You had VGA in 1987?! That was very rare. You must have been an early adopter. Amiga users in '92 and '93 had great color and many PC users were still on EGA. I got my first VGA card in 1994. You're right, VGA wasn't common in 1987. And based on the parent's comment history, he wasn't even alive in 1987; which is why he presents himself as an expert.

And based on the parent's comment history, he wasn't even alive in 1987

Damn, I wish I was that young!

Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#85

Post by LocalH »

teddyh wrote: post #63
kstrauser wrote: post #43

A super minor nitpick: it’s jarring to see the Amiga referred to as 16 bit. It wasn’t described that way at the time: it was universally (that I saw anyway) called a 32 bit machine, and reasonably. It had a flat 32 bit address space (although the 68000 itself didn’t support all those address lines because what kind of supercomputer would need 4GB of RAM?). All the registers and operations were 32 bit. Some of the int…

To someone who was around at the time, this sounds silly. Is the Commodore 64 then a 16-bit machine, because its address pointers are 16 bits? No, the Amiga and related 68000-based machines were generally considered to be 16-bit machines, and their predecessors were all considered to be 8-bit machines.

The 6510 operates internally as an 8-bit processor. The 68000 operates internally as a 32-bit processor for the most part - instructions are 32-bit aligned, registers are 32-bit.

We don't consider the original IBM 5150 PC to be an "8-bit" machine even though the situation is very similar to the 68000 - internal 16-bit operation, but 8-bit data bus.

The 68000 series has always been 32-bit, even if some implementations have used 16-bit connectivity to the rest of the board. Thus, the Amiga has also always been a 32-bit platform.

Would you consider early version of MacOS to be running on a "24-bit" platform, since the high byte of pointers was often used for non-addressing functionality? No, the 68k Mac has also always been a 32-bit platform, since day one, albeit one that wasn't always "32-bit clean". The Amiga never had this issue, however.

Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#86

Post by LocalH »

amiga386 wrote: post #66
kstrauser wrote: post #43

A super minor nitpick: it’s jarring to see the Amiga referred to as 16 bit. It wasn’t described that way at the time: it was universally (that I saw anyway) called a 32 bit machine, and reasonably. It had a flat 32 bit address space (although the 68000 itself didn’t support all those address lines because what kind of supercomputer would need 4GB of RAM?). All the registers and operations were 32 bit. Some of the int…

While the 68000's registers are 32-bit, the data bus is 16 bit, the A1000, A2000 and A500 that defined the range had 16-bit fetching chipsets, they literally had 24-bit address buses. None of this says "32-bit". It can't be overlooked. Many games crashed on the 32-bit clean A3000, A1200, A600, A4000 because programmers used the upper byte of addresses for their IQ or whatever. (Similar issues with ARM2 to ARM3 in Aco…

Is the IBM 5150 PC 8-bit or 16-bit?

Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#87

Post by LocalH »

fredoralive wrote: post #24
reaperducer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only using the party trick HAM mode though. 32 (plus 32 for the half-bright bit plane) is the mode that most software uses. Of course in 1987 a Macintosh II with a fully expanded "Toby" framebuffer could not only do 256 colours, it could do it in 640x480 mode where as a PS/2's VGA could only do 16 colours at that resolution. And an Amiga could only do flickervision at that res. Of course with technology improving all…

Don't forget "dynamic hires" and "sliced HAM", two software modes that were really only useful for static images.

Dynamic hires ran at 640x400x16 colors, but changed the palette on every single scanline, which could allow display of all 4096 colors in hires). Sliced HAM did the same thing, but in 320x400 HAM (the base palette was 16 colors and could be used directly without fringing, so changing those 16 colors every line would reduce fringing while still allowing more than 16 colors to appear on a scanline).

Nothing stopped people from using this dynamic palette technique with 32-color lores or 64-color EHB as well. But it was most commonly used in the two forms I mentioned.

By the time HAM8 came around in the AGA chipset, this wasn't really needed, as HAM8 fringing was much less noticeable, having a base palette of 64 colors. There's no reason you couldn't do sliced HAM8 however, although I'm not sure if you could change all 64 base colors for each scanline.

Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#88

Post by kjs3 »

amiga386 wrote: post #66
kstrauser wrote: post #43

A super minor nitpick: it’s jarring to see the Amiga referred to as 16 bit. It wasn’t described that way at the time: it was universally (that I saw anyway) called a 32 bit machine, and reasonably. It had a flat 32 bit address space (although the 68000 itself didn’t support all those address lines because what kind of supercomputer would need 4GB of RAM?). All the registers and operations were 32 bit. Some of the int…

While the 68000's registers are 32-bit, the data bus is 16 bit, the A1000, A2000 and A500 that defined the range had 16-bit fetching chipsets, they literally had 24-bit address buses. None of this says "32-bit". It can't be overlooked. Many games crashed on the 32-bit clean A3000, A1200, A600, A4000 because programmers used the upper byte of addresses for their IQ or whatever. (Similar issues with ARM2 to ARM3 in Aco…

This is the classic vintage computing pissing contest...it's been argued by geniuses and cretins and it's hubris to think you have the One True Answer.

The Z80 is a 4-bit processor (it's ALU is double pumped and 4-bits wide), right? So is the MasPar super (not 32-bits). Obviously, the 8088, mc68008 and ns32008 are 8-bits (size of data bus). And the i386SX is 16-bit. Oh, wait...the 8088 and 68008 are 20-bit processors (address bus width). Unless it's the PLCC version of the 68008, which is a 22-bit processors. IBM 360/20? 16-bit ALU, so there you go. Connection Machines? 1-bit (they're bit-serial) just like the Bendix a couple of generations earlier.

While the 68000's registers are 32-bit, the data bus is 16 bit, the A1000, A2000 and A500 that defined the range had 16-bit fetching chipsets, they literally had 24-bit address buses. None of this says "32-bit". It can't be overlooked.

Oh, please...you're the one overlooking things and marketing isn't a very good source for architectural definitions. It makes a shitload more sense to say "it's a 32-bit processor because the registers are 32bit" that it does to say "well...the 68000 and 68010 are 24-bit, the 68008 is 20 bits unless its a 68008FN where it's 22-bits, and the 68012 is 30-bits, and the everything else is 32-bits, even tho the fundamental unit of computation since the original spin is 32-bits".

There isn't one canonical answer.

Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#89

Post by kjs3 »

vidarh wrote: post #74
kstrauser wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Opteron had a 32 bit HyperTransport bus. Modern CPUs only implement 48 address lines. And yet we’d call all of those 64 bit systems. We wouldn’t call them 32 bit systems, and surely not 48 bit. The 68k’s ISA is 32 bit through and through, however the underlying implementation looks. It did since I bought my A1000, marketed as a 32 bit system, in 1985.

> marketed as a 32 bit system, in 1985. I'm sure there must have been some, but most of Commodore's early Amiga ads didn't mention the number of bits at all, and from looking through old magazines it doesn't seem most vendors did either.

So marketing is how we define ISA architectures. Hmmm...not how I learned it,

Re: Amiga Graphics Archive

#90

Post by kjs3 »

LocalH wrote: post #86
amiga386 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the 68000's registers are 32-bit, the data bus is 16 bit, the A1000, A2000 and A500 that defined the range had 16-bit fetching chipsets, they literally had 24-bit address buses. None of this says "32-bit". It can't be overlooked. Many games crashed on the 32-bit clean A3000, A1200, A600, A4000 because programmers used the upper byte of addresses for their IQ or whatever. (Similar issues with ARM2 to ARM3 in Aco…

Is the IBM 5150 PC 8-bit or 16-bit?

Or 20 bits (address bus width).
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