Originally Posted by
Harrison
That is very interesting. Great detective work. Really shows just how good coders were in the 16/32bit era, and how much they could get out of the Amiga hardware. Also shows just how well designed the Amiga architecture was. I bet a lot of coders today couldn't do similar tricks because they now have hardware powerful enough to allow bad coding. Imagine if today's coders wrote code to the same level as they did then, hitting the hardware level directly.
BTW, have you looked at the Shadow of the Beast games? Would be interesting to find out how many colours their screens contain.
For other systems, as far as I remember:
The Megadrive had a more limited 512 colour palette to draw from, similar to that available to the ST, but was meant to be able to display a maximum of 64 total colours on screen (split into 16 colour palettes for each of the 3 planes and a sprite field). I don't know what this console had that compared to the Amiga's blitter or copper. Anyone know?
And the SNES had a much more complex video hardware, having a 15 bit colour palette to draw from, meaning 32,768 colours, so much more the OCS/ECS Amigas, but not as much as AGA. It also had available a lot of different screen modes, with them all giving scaling, resolution, number of layer (planes) and palette size options. Modes 3 and Mode 4 offered a 256 colour palette layer, and the most advanced, Mode 7 offered the ability to scale one layer of 128x128 tiles in a 3D plane, which could be interpreted as a 256 colour one-plane layer, or a 128 colour 2 plane later. And using tricks to change the matrix parameters for each scanline, perspective effects could be created.
BTW, did you know that AGA HAM8 was actually not meant to have a colour limit, but was only limited by resolution? So in theory a lot more than 262K colours were possible on the screen.