NEW USER
Welcome, Rick.
I'll let those more knowledgeable deal with your graphics questions and touch
on the audio briefly.
The Amiga has four audio channels, two tied to each of a pair of line level
stereo RCA jacks. All four channels are driven by custom, dedicated hardware,
which means you can define a waveform or complete sound, say "play this", and
turn your attention to something else. Or, if you're doing something special,
you can drive the outputs directly with the CPU.
There are several "modes" for the audio outputs. In the most-often used mode,
you have available four channels of discrete audio summed into two outputs.
Each channel is eight bits modified by an additional six bits of amplitude
control; this results in a best-case s/n ratio of approximately 48 db and a
dynamic range of about 84 db.
It is also possible to stack the channels and use one of each pair to amplitude
or frequency modulate the other, resulting in two output channels of complex
sound.
A third mode allows the channels to be "concatenated", resulting in two
channels of approximately 14 bit audio (with, I believe, an additional 6 bits
of amplitude control, but this last bit is off the top).
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