Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

Half-brite was not in the Amiga 1000 and early Amiga 500 and 2000. The later “ECS” chipset has included “halfbrite”. Most games did not take advantage.

View on HN

Do you know of any games that used halfbrite? I can’t think of a single game that did.

I think there were like three games that used HAM mode, if you filter out “displaying a scan of the box art while the rest of the game loads”. Knights of the Crystallon, Pioneer Plague, and maybe Mindscape?

At least Pinball Dreams did and googling suggests Cannon Fodder. I suppose a few more must be in there.

Edit: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/196/4616

Also The Settlers

Black Crypt - http://hol.abime.net/126 Links - http://hol.abime.net/892 Universe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe_%281994_video_game%29

Also interesting is the game 'Universe', which boasted achieving 256 colours on ECS (edit: a comment on the StackOverflow page linked below says it works on OCS as well). Some quick Googling before asking you guys about it as I was planning to turned up this:

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/44/how-to...

The Amiga was such an interesting machine. It's too bad I never got into assembly programming back then.

I know of one game that actually used HAM (specifically HAM6, the original OCS version) during gameplay and it seemed to run very fast as well - it was a PD game called Zdzisław Bohater Galaktyki 3D and it's, well, not very serious [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV5UPk8ZQZw

It seems all sequences are prerendered, it’s all animation.

Yes indeed, but typically displaying a fullscreen HAM image takes up several seconds [0] of very visible scanline progress. This is pretty much instantaneous and runs on even the base 68000 models, as long as they fulfill the memory requirement (which is admittedly rather hefty - 2MB chip and 8MB fast).

[0] example: https://youtu.be/Y9qzUbT_5Dk?t=95 timestamp and later on as well

That’s just Deluxe Paint being slow. A HAM image is no slower than an EHB image, it’s the same amount of bytes.

Fusion was another one that used half brite

http://amiga.lychesis.net/knowledge/EHB.html

Lionheart? Very impressive pixel art, too.

Yeah, and pretty impressive performance wise as well.

Psygnosis' Shadow of the Beast used halfbrite, and was heavy on the copper effects too. Gameplay kinda sucked, but it was a hell of a demo against an ST or PC. When it was released no one had seen anything like it. :)

Edit: I suspected many Psygnosis titles used EHB, so I did a quick search, and discovered that the surreal barn-owl based defender clone -- Agony (Shades of Jeff Minter?) indeed used EHB, then got easily sidetracked as someone has made a UE4 based PC clone of it.

https://gamejolt.com/games/agony-unofficial-remake-demo/1601...

Codetapper has a nice breakdown of how it did things

https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...

I still vividly remember Agony beautiful soundtrack. The game itself was very pretty but gameplay was nothing exceptional.

I remember my friends and I spent far more time showing it off to people than actually playing it properly.

Which fits, as people involved basically later described the original Shadow of the Beast pretty much as a graphics showcase with "no thought whatsoever" going into more than showing more parallax scrolling and more monsters in.

It's hard to show it to people now and have them understand just how jaw-dropping it looked to people at the time, both to Amiga users, but especially to PC users where most people still did not have graphics cards capable of lots of colours and smooth scrolling with even a single parallax layer, much less the dozen or so in Shadow of the Beast...

I also just realised the intro I remembered showing friends is the intro for Shadow of the Beast II, a game I never bothered playing - but where "everyone" had seen the couple of minutes of animation of the intro, at a time when having a long animated intro like that was in itself a big deal.

Also the smoothness - locked at 50 frames per second, it was mesmerising.

I came from the MSX computers, which usually had blocky character per character scrolling, or slower animations. The PC games were usually even crappier then that. And the Amiga stereo sound, was also incredible if you happened to play a game on a stereo TV set. Most games didn't even bother to mix the sound properly (to slow CPU and/or too few channels, 2 for left, 2 for right) but that the sound had some kind of "depth" not present in mono speakers, also added to the subconscious feeling that this is different.

(3D games - Wolfenstein & Doom - instantly switched the tables, it was obvious that the parrot was not merely pining but actually dead.)

Most Amiga games with parallax used dual playfields mode. AFAIK, you couldn't combine that with EHB.

Shadow of The Beast used dual playfield graphics, not EHB. Agony too, for gameplay. Title screen etc could be EHB.

https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea...

It was only early NTSC (only) A1000s that didn't include EHB -- it was OCS, not an ECS feature. Far as I recall all revision A500s and A2000s had EHB. All PAL A1000s had it.

Quite a few games used it for drop shadows and such. Well, the ones that weren't ST identical, which was far too many.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Chip_Set

Reply on news.ycombinator.com