CompuServe Messages

Play games? Hardly – we manufacture software that directly manipulates images upon a HAM8 display. No, it's not easy. Yes, it would be a darned sight faster on a 24 bit display (and is… we drive the FC24 at MUCH higher rates, all else being the same such as cpu, etc). But it's completely inappropriate to discard the fact that it's there or to imply it's unusable, because in fact it's not. And as you point out, it's just fine for precomputed things, in fact its more than fine, it's _better_ than 24 bit, 2/3rds better in terms of storage and speed. We do Windows graphics software. From that perspective, I'll put a question to you: Have you actually _looked_ at the 16 bit color encodings for some of the PC boards? I'll save you the trouble – they're 8->16 bit, and considerably more difficult to directly compute than HAM8 is. Some boards just use flat 5:6:5 or 5:5:5 and those are easy, of course. But many of those "16-bit" boards use 8-bit encodings just like the Amiga does (well, not "just like.. it's not ham8, it's something else, but you get the idea). Some of the boards come with libraries (DLLs) and those are considerably easier to deal with – as would HAM8 be if CBM would provide a render library (as IMHO they should have long ago.. as we did when we produced the HAM-E). And I also wouldn't argue for a second that 24 bits should be standard. Been saying so for years. In fact, if you had CIS records going back that far, you'd find me saying way back when and getting poo-pooed. :^) My point was – and is – the Amiga hardware' snot lacking in the area of being able to display high color images. It does pretty darned good. –Ben …via AutoPilot