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 internal operations were implemented in 16 bits, but that was invisible to programmers. Newer models with definitively 32 bit CPUs like the 68060 were nearly 100% backward compatible with older models at the CPU instruction level, even if newer OSes weren’t backward compatible at the API level. In fact, the only program not forward compatible at the instruction level that I remember offhand was Microsoft’s AmigaBASIC. It used the top bits of pointers to store data because the 68000 would ignore them when accessing RAM due to that lack of address lines.
I just don’t see a way to justifiably call the Amiga a 16 bit machine. Although the A1000 had some 16 bit hardware paths, a maxed out A3000 definitely wasn’t 16 bit, and they were nearly completely compatible with each other minus newer features.
Amiga was full-on 32 bit machine. It’s weird to hear it called anything else.
show comments
pwillia7
I made a DeluxePaint/Amiga LORA you can use with Stable Diffusion/FLUX a while back for the lulz[1]
I also used that LORA and some video models to try to make a little movie with the same style[2]
Here's a guide on how to generate LORAs too if you're interested[3]
Finally, there's a DeluxePaint clone someone released that is pretty cool to play around with[4]
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.
show comments
01100011
I'm getting older and forgetting a lot, but I hope I never forget the feeling of seeing this as a kid in 1989.
You can see and experience old things, but it's impossible to recreate the context in which they were originally experienced. You can't erase your experience of 40 years of technical progress which makes this sort of thing feel merely quaint in comparison.
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...
show comments
appstorelottery
This is great stuff! As a side note, I wonder if anyone has created a HAM viewer that runs in the browser? I remember HAM flickering by necessity and being amazed by 4096 colors on-screen at once. There was a certain quality of HAM images on the Amiga that made them instantly identifiable.
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.
show comments
ulfbert_inc
Somewhat related, new version of Amiga Vision collection just dropped. Very high quality product you can get for free if you are an Amiga fan. Can't get enough of included demos on my MiSTer setup.
krige
I have that Sachs Lagoon image printed on my wall, it's gorgeous.
mrandish
There's just something uniquely special about hand-drawn pixel art at resolutions around 320 x 200 with 16 to 256 colors - especially when viewed on analog CRT screens with their scanlines and phosphor glow which blend colors and soften the hard pixel edges some people today think as "retro" (which isn't at all how this art actually looked in the 80s to the artists or their audiences).
I think a key aspect of the magic is that the technical constraints force art to be representational instead of photo realistic. There just weren't enough pixels or colors, so artists had to make intentional choices about where to focus their limited pixels and palette to imply the detail they couldn't fully draw and that made their images evocative in ways photo-realism usually isn't. Earlier digital graphics with 4 to 16 colors and resolutions around 160 x 120 to were generally 'moving icons' as seen in arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Galaga and most late-70s and early 80s home computers (Apple II, Atari 400/800, C64, etc). Of course, this wasn't just due to pixel and palette limitations but also the 8-bit CPUs at sub-4 MHz clock speeds and limited memory (usually 8k to 32k game size).
It wasn't until around the mid-80s when arcade and personal computer hardware with 16-bit CPUs at 8 Mhz+ and 256K memory hit that magic middle-ground we see as unique to that era of computer and arcade graphics. By the mid-90s it was already starting to vanish as palettes grew beyond 256 colors and resolutions exceeded 15Khz analog video (roughly 240 lines high). A great example of the peak visuals possible from the painstaking care and artistic virtuosity of this era can be seen in the incredible hand-drawn sprites of "Street Fighter II": https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_sheets/index.html.
The other reason I think so many of us see the art style of this era as uniquely special is it ended suddenly with a huge leap to deep color palettes, higher resolutions and 3D rendered graphics. This happened due to the unique nature of analog 15Khz video and the desire to avoid interlace flicker, causing resolutions for most consumer-priced computers and game consoles to max out in the mid-80s at less than 240 vertical lines. Since artists generally want to work in roughly square pixels, this limits horizontal resolution to around 320. So, for nearly a decade the benefits of using the existing televisions consumers already had, limited the visual output of home computers and game consoles to 240 lines. It even froze the evolution of most arcade machines due to the cost savings of using CRTs made for TVs. Even one of the last 2D arcade hardware platforms, Capcom's 1996 CPS III, was limited to 384 x 224 resolution. After this unprecedented 'hold' of nearly ten years on the march of pixel progress, the next increment most consumers saw was a huge and seemingly sudden leap - a doubling of vertical and horizontal resolutions and a jump from 4 and 8-bit palettes (16 to 256 colors) straight to 16-bit palettes (65,535 colors). And this happened at almost the same moment the rush to 3D rendered graphics killed any interest in hand-drawn pixels. In just a few years, virtually all the computer and game pixels consumers saw changed dramatically in both scope and style, creating a clear divide between hand-drawn 2D pixel art at analog resolutions and everything that came after.
btbuildem
Aghh so many classic games are missing from here!
urbandw311er
Oh, this is a glorious and nostalgic romp back through past memories. Thank you!
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!
adaptit
Always cool to see these kinds of retro computing resources pop up.
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.
P.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.
show comments
lysace
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.
show comments
shevy-java
I liked the Amiga. I would not really use it today, but
I recall having played many games in the 1980s. Those kind
of games are mostly dead now (save for a few Indie games
perhaps). Today's games are usually always the same - 3D
engine with some fancy audio and video and a dumbed down
gameplay. (Not all games, mind you; for instance, I liked
the idea behind Little Nightmares. I never played it myself,
don't have the time, but I watched several clips on youtube
and I found the gameplay different to the "canonical" games
we now have, as perpetual repetition of a money-sell grab.)
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 internal operations were implemented in 16 bits, but that was invisible to programmers. Newer models with definitively 32 bit CPUs like the 68060 were nearly 100% backward compatible with older models at the CPU instruction level, even if newer OSes weren’t backward compatible at the API level. In fact, the only program not forward compatible at the instruction level that I remember offhand was Microsoft’s AmigaBASIC. It used the top bits of pointers to store data because the 68000 would ignore them when accessing RAM due to that lack of address lines.
I just don’t see a way to justifiably call the Amiga a 16 bit machine. Although the A1000 had some 16 bit hardware paths, a maxed out A3000 definitely wasn’t 16 bit, and they were nearly completely compatible with each other minus newer features.
Amiga was full-on 32 bit machine. It’s weird to hear it called anything else.
I made a DeluxePaint/Amiga LORA you can use with Stable Diffusion/FLUX a while back for the lulz[1]
I also used that LORA and some video models to try to make a little movie with the same style[2]
Here's a guide on how to generate LORAs too if you're interested[3]
Finally, there's a DeluxePaint clone someone released that is pretty cool to play around with[4]
[1]: https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be
[3]: https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-ful...
[4]: https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter
Previously...
Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431514 - Nov 2023 (20 comments)
Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783531 - Aug 2018 (27 comments)
The Amiga Boing Ball Explained - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330689 - Aug 2016 (56 comments)
The Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10972849 - Jan 2016 (24 comments)
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.
I'm getting older and forgetting a lot, but I hope I never forget the feeling of seeing this as a kid in 1989.
You can see and experience old things, but it's impossible to recreate the context in which they were originally experienced. You can't erase your experience of 40 years of technical progress which makes this sort of thing feel merely quaint in comparison.
The Photon Paint eye image in CRT mode flickering is so accurate to how it felt at the time https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/PhotonPaint.crt.html
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...
This is great stuff! As a side note, I wonder if anyone has created a HAM viewer that runs in the browser? I remember HAM flickering by necessity and being amazed by 4096 colors on-screen at once. There was a certain quality of HAM images on the Amiga that made them instantly identifiable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify
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.
Somewhat related, new version of Amiga Vision collection just dropped. Very high quality product you can get for free if you are an Amiga fan. Can't get enough of included demos on my MiSTer setup.
I have that Sachs Lagoon image printed on my wall, it's gorgeous.
There's just something uniquely special about hand-drawn pixel art at resolutions around 320 x 200 with 16 to 256 colors - especially when viewed on analog CRT screens with their scanlines and phosphor glow which blend colors and soften the hard pixel edges some people today think as "retro" (which isn't at all how this art actually looked in the 80s to the artists or their audiences).
I think a key aspect of the magic is that the technical constraints force art to be representational instead of photo realistic. There just weren't enough pixels or colors, so artists had to make intentional choices about where to focus their limited pixels and palette to imply the detail they couldn't fully draw and that made their images evocative in ways photo-realism usually isn't. Earlier digital graphics with 4 to 16 colors and resolutions around 160 x 120 to were generally 'moving icons' as seen in arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Galaga and most late-70s and early 80s home computers (Apple II, Atari 400/800, C64, etc). Of course, this wasn't just due to pixel and palette limitations but also the 8-bit CPUs at sub-4 MHz clock speeds and limited memory (usually 8k to 32k game size).
It wasn't until around the mid-80s when arcade and personal computer hardware with 16-bit CPUs at 8 Mhz+ and 256K memory hit that magic middle-ground we see as unique to that era of computer and arcade graphics. By the mid-90s it was already starting to vanish as palettes grew beyond 256 colors and resolutions exceeded 15Khz analog video (roughly 240 lines high). A great example of the peak visuals possible from the painstaking care and artistic virtuosity of this era can be seen in the incredible hand-drawn sprites of "Street Fighter II": https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_sheets/index.html.
The other reason I think so many of us see the art style of this era as uniquely special is it ended suddenly with a huge leap to deep color palettes, higher resolutions and 3D rendered graphics. This happened due to the unique nature of analog 15Khz video and the desire to avoid interlace flicker, causing resolutions for most consumer-priced computers and game consoles to max out in the mid-80s at less than 240 vertical lines. Since artists generally want to work in roughly square pixels, this limits horizontal resolution to around 320. So, for nearly a decade the benefits of using the existing televisions consumers already had, limited the visual output of home computers and game consoles to 240 lines. It even froze the evolution of most arcade machines due to the cost savings of using CRTs made for TVs. Even one of the last 2D arcade hardware platforms, Capcom's 1996 CPS III, was limited to 384 x 224 resolution. After this unprecedented 'hold' of nearly ten years on the march of pixel progress, the next increment most consumers saw was a huge and seemingly sudden leap - a doubling of vertical and horizontal resolutions and a jump from 4 and 8-bit palettes (16 to 256 colors) straight to 16-bit palettes (65,535 colors). And this happened at almost the same moment the rush to 3D rendered graphics killed any interest in hand-drawn pixels. In just a few years, virtually all the computer and game pixels consumers saw changed dramatically in both scope and style, creating a clear divide between hand-drawn 2D pixel art at analog resolutions and everything that came after.
Aghh so many classic games are missing from here!
Oh, this is a glorious and nostalgic romp back through past memories. Thank you!
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!
Always cool to see these kinds of retro computing resources pop up.
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_Meditation
P.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.
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.
I liked the Amiga. I would not really use it today, but I recall having played many games in the 1980s. Those kind of games are mostly dead now (save for a few Indie games perhaps). Today's games are usually always the same - 3D engine with some fancy audio and video and a dumbed down gameplay. (Not all games, mind you; for instance, I liked the idea behind Little Nightmares. I never played it myself, don't have the time, but I watched several clips on youtube and I found the gameplay different to the "canonical" games we now have, as perpetual repetition of a money-sell grab.)