Just curious Van, (and nicely avoiding working tonight!
Quote: " The ST was nice and fast at 3D because of the way it stored it's pixel data - I mean, 16 colours and a 320x200 resolution, means 2 bytes can hold 4 pixels and a whole screen is 32k - means it can fill with solid colour quite quickly because it might only have to modify a few bits."
My understanding is the ST uses planar (bit plane) screen modes, same as the Amiga.
Quote: " It was actually possible to split the screen in 2 layers using the pixel bitstream system. I have no idea how the Amiga handled it's colour tables, but with it's 32 colours, it probably had to do a little more maths. "
The Amiga also has dual playfield modes. As seen in Classic stuff like shadow of beast games, even my own. In more modern games you commonly see 3 playfields, via multiplexing hardware sprites.
The ocs chipset in the A500 machines actually supports 6 bitplanes in lowres. However, Only 32 colours are user definable from a 12 bit palette. ie( 4 bit R,G,B's = 4096 colours). Bit plane six (when) activated was used in half bright mode. So setting this bit would halve the brightness of this colour.
Interlaced Half bright was generally the mode of choice for guys like 'Facet'.
Quote: " I used to read multi-format magazines all the time, often there would be comparisons made between Amiga and ST games, I'm just going by comments made about games like Midwinter, Hunter, like the big games at the time."
Your probably right.. But it's not an view point I've heard before.. ever.
Quote: " 3DStudio started on the ST according to Rich, I remember a series of 3D tools and a few different raytracers - but I have no idea what it used to be known as."
That more a opportunity thing that a platform thing. The Amiga was also littered with ray tracing and gfx productivity software, I think mainly due it's HAM & Dynamic display modes. HAM gave a semi photo realistic image, by allowing all 4096 colours to be used at once in special mode. Useless for anything other than static images and only available in lowres & laced on OCS.
Quote: "The STE got a blitter which brought it more upto speed with the Amiga, but sadly it still had the limited pallete (although a better pallete this time) so could'nt really compete against it. It got a better sound chip too - ST sound sucked, STE sound was far better."
For me, MIDI sounds was always standout ST feature. People still use them in studios today. That's pretty amazing.
Quote: " As for OS's - well I used to program a lot of accesories for the ST, like silly stuff like claws that let you scratch the desktop with you mouse, or screensavers - coding these scarily easy because of the way GEM worked. Amiga's workbench never lit my fire - not that I spent a lot of time using it anyway, but it always seemed wrong to me."
Just been playing with an ST emulator running TOS v2.06. I actually don't mind it. I like how the windows can be dragged off the screen. Which is a nice touch. Something that WB show have always had. Haven't really seen it do anything as yet, but it's fun having a look.
Quote: " It was incredibly convenient to have that DOS floppy support, I don't think the Amiga had that as standard."
Yeah it did, but I can't recall at what level it came natively. I might have been OS1.2/OS1.3, prolly OS2.0.. Just a regular mountable device (only low density though)
Quote: " Anyhoo - there's no point in us having a 'My ST is better than your Amiga' discussion, let's just wait for Raven to come along and lay down the facts"
Ahh, your no fun
The Falcon was about the closest i came to jumping on the Atari bandwagon. That sounded like a nice piece of kit. A pity they had zero retail present here by that time.
