First Game with 4096 Colors
Chrisi Kohl
a long time ago there was a space shooter, which was the first game
that used 4096 colors. Does anyone know the name of the game?
Chrisi
Peteroo
Well, a number of games used 4,096 colors at some point. I suspect you
mean one that used it throughout. That would be Bill Williams' Pioneer
Plague.
Peter
Angus Manwaring
aka "Explorer-Serf's Countdown to Viral Doomsday!!!" in the States. ;)
All the best,
Angus Manwaring. (for e-mail remove ANTISPEM)
I need your memories for the Amiga Games Database: A collection of Amiga
Game reviews by Amiga players http://www.angusm.demon.co.uk/AGDB/AGDB.html
John Burns
Are you sure about this? I think there could be a bit of ambiguity here. The OCS
machines had a palette of 4096 colours to choose from but a programme could only
use 256 max at any one time. Most games only used a max 16 or 32 colours at a
time whilst a few used 64. Off hand I can't think of any 128/256 colour games
until AGA became available and of course those machines had a pallete of
millions to choose from.
I believe that the colours were limited (IYSWIM) in a game due to memory
concerns - maybe one of the guys on here who know about such techie stuff would
be able to confirm this or give another reason.
jam...@hotmail.com
(HAM) mode. Although the OCS chips can only handle 6 bitplanes of
graphics data (giving 2^6 = 64 colours) at a time, in HAM mode a couple
of bits in each pixel can be used to adjust the colour relative to the
neighbouring pixel. The remaining bits are used to set a base colour.
This meant that you can have nice colour gradients going across each
line and possibly use all 4096 colours on screen at once. The snag is
that the colours of each pixel are not fully independent, so you get
fringing effects if adjacent pixels have very different colours. Check
out the digitised picture in the Beast I intro for an example.
Nevertheless it's a really nice trick and something that set the Amiga
apart for a long time. HAM could also be seen as a compression method,
since you describe the picture using only 6 bits per pixel rather than
the 12 that would be needed if you had 4096 independent colour
registers.
The fringing problem is the main reason why HAM was not used much in
games. If you digitised a photo, you could let the scanning program
worry about setting up the best combination of base colours and
modifying bits for each pixel so the fringing is minimised. It becomes
tricky if you have to recalculate everything dynamically in response to
a player's movements across the screen. One solution would be to use
static HAM backgrounds and sprites for everything moving. (But you
only have 8 narrow sprites with which to play...) The other problem is
that the OCS chips were in any case relatively sluggish when it came to
copying more than 3 bitplanes of image data. You need to update the
screen every 50th of a second to get the slick arcade feel. That's
why, apart from memory considerations, action games made do with 16 (or
even 8) colours for the backgrounds where possible. With copper lists,
dual playfields and sprites you could make it seem like a lot more.
Again, the Beast games are an excellent example.
Jukka Aho
> The OCS machines had a palette of 4096 colours to choose from
> but a programme could only use 256 max at any one time.
The OCS machines do not have a mode with 256 colors. The maximum number
of colors in normal, bitmapped, paletted modes (where you can choose
each color in the palette individually, without any restrictions) is 32.
That being said, the OCS machines _can_ display all 4096 colors
simultaneously in the special mode called "HAM" ("Hold-and-Modify"). As
another poster already correctly explained, the "HAM" mode has some
restrictions which make it unsuitable for action games, but it's good
for e.g. viewing JPEGs.
There is also a special 64-color mode called "Extra Half-Brite", or
"EHB", where only the first half of the palette is editable, and the
latter half is actually a copy (!) of the first half, but with all the
colors having only half of the original brightness.
> Most games only used a max 16 or 32 colours at a time whilst a
> few used 64. Off hand I can't think of any 128/256 colour games
> until AGA became available
That's simply because OCS machines did not have any video modes with 128
or 256 colors (other than HAM, which does not count since it's not a
normal mode.)
However, there is a special trick technique which can be used for
displaying more than just 32 or 64 colors on the screen simultaneously,
even if you didn't use HAM:
With the help of some creative Copper list programming, you can split
the screen into several horizontal segments, each of which can have,
say, an independent 16-color palette _on its own_. There is a program
called HAMLab which can create these types of images from a true color
originals (it will split the image into these segments, and quantize and
dither each segment separately, calculating a separate palette for each
of them.) This technique, not unlike HAM, is pretty unusable for games
as well, but can be used for displaying sharp hires still images with
lots of colors, creating the illusion of having a 256+ color _Hires_
mode on an OCS Amiga, which is pretty neat.
The IFF files of this type are usually known as "PCHG" images (short for
"Palette CHanGe", I would think!) and there is also a HAM version of the
same technique called "SHAM" (SuperHAM, if I'm not mistaken.)
> I believe that the colours were limited (IYSWIM) in a game due to
> memory concerns - maybe one of the guys on here who know about such
> techie stuff would be able to confirm this or give another reason.
The color usage was usually limited in games because there wasn't enough
juice in the Blitter to move around all the data smoothly if there were
too many bitplanes in use.
--
znark
Jukka Aho
> The snag is that the colours of each pixel [in the HAM
> mode] are not fully independent, so you get fringing
> effects if adjacent pixels have very different colours.
Arbitrarily chosen colors cannot be used independently of each other on
the same line, but even in the HAM mode, there is still an ordinary 16
color palette which you can define freely, and from which you can freely
pick colors and use them anywhere on the screen as you like, without the
fringing effects.
--
znark
John Burns
> John Burns wrote:
>
> > The OCS machines had a palette of 4096 colours to choose from
> > but a programme could only use 256 max at any one time.
>
> The OCS machines do not have a mode with 256 colors. The maximum number of
> colors in normal, bitmapped, paletted modes (where you can choose each
> color in the palette individually, without any restrictions) is 32.
[snip]
Cheers, message read and understood. :) Actually I realised the mistake I'd made
about saying 256/OCS after I'd sent the message but I'm glad you picked it up
since I couldn't have explained the way you had.
John Burns
> Every Amiga can display all 4096 colours at once in Hold And Modify (HAM)
> mode. Although the OCS chips can only handle 6 bitplanes of graphics data
[snip]
HeHe, thanks. I knew someone would have the proper description. This makes the
original post a bit clearer then - "What was the first HAM mode game". Peter
has already answered that with "Pioneer Plague".
Chrisi Kohl
Hm,
it think it was a little bit like uridium. I have to look more
screenshots.
Thanks!
Chrisi
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Angus Manwaring
>> On 06-Jun-05 07:27:43, Peteroo said
>>> Chrisi Kohl wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> a long time ago there was a space shooter, which was the first game
>>>> that used 4096 colors. Does anyone know the name of the game?
>>>>
>>>> Chrisi
>>
>>> Well, a number of games used 4,096 colors at some point. I suspect you
>>> mean one that used it throughout. That would be Bill Williams' Pioneer
>>> Plague.
>>
>> aka "Explorer-Serf's Countdown to Viral Doomsday!!!" in the States. ;)
>>
>Hm,
>it think it was a little bit like uridium. I have to look more
>screenshots.
>Thanks!
I could be wrong, but I don't think it was much like Uridium. But I never
owned it, I just tried it out for a few minutes and it didn't really grab
my attention - but that could be me not knowing what was going on.
Hidehiko Ogata
> I could be wrong, but I don't think it was much like Uridium. But I never
> owned it, I just tried it out for a few minutes and it didn't really grab
> my attention - but that could be me not knowing what was going on.
It was more like a programmable version of Battlestorm, with a wacky
wormhole sequence thrown in.
Does anyone know if it (PP) has an ending at all? I tried real hard
to eliminate all virus, but they just kept popping up.
--
// }{idehiko ()gata "I hope I didn't hurt you too much
\X/ Amiga since '86 when I killed you..." - Elmer Fudd
bekkoame is a classic Japanese candybar.
Scott Kurtz
Peteroo <petern...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1118042863....@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Andreas Eibach
<jam...@hotmail.com> schrieb:
> Every Amiga can display all 4096 colours at once in Hold And Modify
> (HAM) mode. Although the OCS chips can only handle 6 bitplanes of
> graphics data (giving 2^6 = 64 colours) at a time, in HAM mode a
couple
> of bits in each pixel can be used to adjust the colour relative to the
> neighbouring pixel.
It might take me a lifetime to dig this out again, but I clearly
remember there was a game manual on an original disk which answered a
FAQ "Does this game work on A1000s?" with "no, it does not"
Apparently, the first-ever - the initial chipset (ICS) - from the early
A1000s appears to _not_ have been able to display HAM correctly (yet).
According to the manual, though, which may as well be wrong here.
-Andreas
Andreas Eibach
"Andreas Eibach" <aei...@despammed.com> schrieb:
confusing this with EHB. Oops.
-a
Hidehiko Ogata
> [last minute addendum:] or my memory plays tricks on me again and I'm
> confusing this with EHB. Oops.
I do recall slipping in an EHB Denise into my A1000 and being quite
elated about it (anyone remember Jim Sachs' test picture? :)