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 Featured articles | The Amiga's graphics capabilities!
Back in the 1986, many programs have been developed over the last few years for casual use on home computers. But the new 68000 Motorola CPU-based machines, such as the Atari ST and (especially) the Commodore Amiga, offered graphics capabilities previously seen only on mainframe computers. The little computers are starting to catch up with the big ones. The evolution of microcomputer graphics in 1986 has just began... | | |
In 1985, the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga hit the market, offering similar ease of use and superior graphics capabilities, including color. And since they cost less, both machines have opened up the computer graphics field to even more software developers and consumers back then.
But it was the Amiga that really hit the spot as it was a powerful graphics machine, capable of producing almost TV-quality pictures with a unique for its era color palette (4096 colors available).
Graphics programs were among the first software packages introduced for the Commodore Amiga, and with good reason. Several sophisticated 2D/3D graphics, animation and digitizer software (such as the all-mighty Deluxe Paint series, Photon Paint, Scala Multimedia, Sculpt 3D, Brilliance and many more), offered very sophisticated and powerful drawing capabilities. Most of them could easily mix any combination of the Amiga's 4096 colors. Traditional 2D animation was an easy and fast feature too, which was so powerful that game's graphics were developed directly from those paint programs (i.e. game graphics such as the famous Monkey Island from LucasArts was entirely designed with Deluxe Paint).
Below there are only a few outstanding examples of the Amiga's (early OCS/ECS chipsets) graphics capabilities, which are still remembered by many of us ...
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Boing Ball Demo (1984)
It was created for a computer show to demonstrate the capabilities of the prototype Amiga (codename 'Lorraine'). The 1984 Boing Ball demo was one of the very first demos shown on the Amiga. It was specifically designed to take advantage of the Amiga's custom graphics, achieving a level of speed and smoothness not previously seen on an affordable computer.
Artist: Robert J. Mical, Dale Luck, 1984
Dimension: 320 x 200
Colors: 32 (2 color cycling ranges)
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Overscan HAM animation (1987)
Overscan HAM animation with "Sculpt 3-D" software, the first 3D modelling program for the Amiga.
Artist: Byte-by-Byte Corp., Ken Offer, 1987
Dimension: 352 x 440
Colors: 4096 HAM-6
Frames: 14
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Full Contact fighting-game intro (1991)
The title screen of the famous Full Contact fighting-game intro for the Amiga computers. The figure is a single bitplane animation overlayed in the Extra-Halfbrite (EHB) display mode to creat this shadow silhouette effect. The scene resembles part of the block-buster movie "The Kickboxer" starring Jean Claude Van Dam!
Artist: Team 17, Rico Holmes, 1991
Dimension: 320 x 256
Colors: 64 EHB
Frames: 256
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Title Screen - Defender of The Crown (1986)
The title screen of the famous game "Defender of the Crown", released in 1986 by Cinemaware.
Artist: Cinemaware, Jim Sachs, 1986
Dimension: 320 x 200
Colors: 32 (1 color cycling range)
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Walker Demo v1.0 (1988)
This is the 2 megabyte version of the amazing Walker Demo. It shows an incredibly detailed and well animated StarWars movie-like robot walking by the side of a Amiga 2000, looking round and shooting complete with sound FX (no sound available here). This demo by Brian Williams of Imaginetics features stop motion and hand drawn effects. It was created with Digiview, Deluxe Paint, Futuresound, Audiomaster and animated with the Director software.
Artist: Imaginetics Inc., 1988
Dimension: 320 x 200
Colors: 32 (4 palettes)
Frames: 149
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Waterfall demo (1988)
This is an animated demo screen made using the Photon Video Cel Animator 1.0 software. A beautiful scenery with an animated waterfall.
Artist: Bruce Heller, Tom Miller, MicroIllusions, 1988
Dimension: 352 x 480
Colors: 4096 HAM-6
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King Tut - Deluxe Paint II Demo Image (1986)
The King Tut drawing by Avril Harrison was so amazing at the time that became the box-art of the Deluxe Paint series painting software!
Artist: Electronic Arts, Avril Harrison, 1986
Dimension: 320 x 200
Colors: 32
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Venus - Deluxe Paint Demo Image (1985)
It resembles the famous "The Birth of Venus: Detail of Venus" painting by Sandro Botticelli using Deluxe Paint painting software.
Artist: Electronic Arts, Avril Harrison, 1985
Dimension: 320 x 200
Colors: 32
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Cover.pic from Photon Paint 2.0 Art disk (1989)
Photon Paint was a Hold-And-Modify (HAM) based powerful bitmap graphics editor for the Commodore Amiga computers. The Cover.pic from Photon Paint 2.0 Art disk was a 352 x 480 (interlaced) image using 2259 colors on screen (out of 4096)!
Artist: Louis Markoya, MicroIllusions
Dimension: 352 x 480
Colors: 4096 HAM-6
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