Hitting the Books: Amiga and the birth of 256-color gaming
With modern consoles offering gamers graphics so photorealistic that they blur the line between CGI and reality, it's easy forget just how cartoonishly blocky they were in the 8-bit era. In his new book,, legendary game designer and programmer Warren Davis recalls his halcyon days imagining and designing some of the biggest hits to ever grace an arcade. In the excerpt below, Davis explains how the industry made its technological leap from 8- to 12-bit graphics.
Let’s talk about color resolution for a second. Come on, you know you want to. No worries if you don’t, though, you can skip these next few paragraphs if you like. Color resolution is the number of colors a computer system is capable of displaying. And it’s all tied in to memory. For example, our video game system could display 16 colors. But artists weren’t locked into 16 specific colors. The hardware used a “palette.
The Amiga’s digitizer was crude. Very crude. It came with a piece of hardware that plugged into the Amiga on one end, and to the video output of a black-and-white surveillance camera on the other. The camera needed to be mounted on a tripod so it didn’t move. You pointed it at something , and put a color wheel between the camera and the subject. The color wheel was a circular piece of plastic divided into quarters with different tints: red, green, blue, and clear.
But I needed an algorithm to figure out how to pick the best 256 colors out of the thousands that might be present in a digitized image. Since there was no internet back then, I went to libraries and began combing through academic journals and technical magazines, searching for research done in this area. Eventually, I found some! There were numerous papers written on the subject, each outlining a different approach, some easier to understand than others.
Looking at the 34010’s specs, however, revealed that the speed of its graphics functions, while well-suited for light graphics work such as spreadsheets and word processors, was certainly not fast enough for pushing pixels the way we needed. So Mark Loffredo went back to the drawing board to design a VLSI blitter chip for the new system.
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