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One of the major shortcomings of HAM was the colour fringing problem. With
the new chips, the problem has been virtually eliminated. Without the
fringing, even standard HAM pics look much more respectable.
Consider this: You've seen how hires 256 colour gif's can look on a PC.
Well, AGA allows you to use the old HAM (less the fringing) in any
resolution. Imagine how that would compare. Because of the smaller pixels,
the dithering is less noticable.
Outside of technical references, listen to the developers. Ben Williams of
Black Belt Systems says that HAM8's hires display is superior to HAM-E and
DCTV. Both of these are great products, so you can imagine how good HAM8
is. Average Amiga users will not notice a difference between HAM8 and
24bit.
Also, another thing to consider is that the main use for HAM8 is video.
Now we all know how NTSC is not displayed with the same clarity and
sharpness as an RGB display. If HAM8 were to have any artifacts, at the
high resolutions it can use, the artifacts would be blurred over by
conversion to an NTSC video display.
AGA has a chip-based 24 bit palette which is in its infancy and will be
fully utilized in AAA. CBM developed a HAM8 technique (kudos to HAM-E for
the inspiration) to take some advantage of the palette.
I encourage everyone who's interested in techy stuff to ask if Ben
Williams would be kind enough to ul a text explanation for anyone to dl
and study.
Vance