Hamulet test - Large HAM bobs - An impressive animation display for the Commodore Amiga

The Commodore Amiga scene always surprises me, if it's not amazing demos running on stock A500's, it's games such as Castlevania, Abbey(s) of the Dead or even Wonderboy running at high frame rates that would put most Commodore classics to shame. But today's news is something special indeed for this system of greatness, as remz has just wow'd the Amiga community with an impressive animation display of Large HAM bobs via his Hamulet test. For those of you who don't know what HAM is "Hold-And-Modify, usually abbreviated as HAM, is a display mode of the Commodore Amiga computer. It uses a highly unusual technique to express the color of pixels, allowing many more colors to appear on screen than would otherwise be possible".

Here's what Remz has announced via the EAB forums which is linked below. "Hello coders, While still working on Hamulet, I was experimenting with the possibility of drawing HAM bobs and wondering if this has been attempted before: I captured a short video snippet at 50 fps to show a sort of proof-of-concept, running on Amiga 500 OCS (1MB chip) here. One of main concern of HAM bobs is the large amount of chip memory they require, but also how to manage fringing". 

"You can see in my video that the fringing is barely noticeable. However, my 'bobs' are not moving: they are stationary. In this state, their usage in a game would be mostly for animated stationary objects, or other innovative ideas. Also, I've set one of the HAM index colors to show a copper gradient which scrolls at a lower speed to create a parallax effect. I do not know if this has been attempted on a HAM screen before. I wanted to try using the blitter to draw a sort of 'parallax layer' using a mask but the runtime cost seemed to be high compared to the potential gameplay benefit".

For further information and developments here's the Link :1) Source

19 comments:

  1. Impressive stuff!

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  2. would it make a difference for animated bobs id you used 2MB of mem on ecs?

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  3. Wow! Amazing stuff. I love the Amiga.

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  4. That's how Amiga games should have been in the 90ies. A good choice of colors, just like in those Bitmap Brother games.

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    1. What you mean by "good choices" ? There are literraly 4096 onscreen colors and the use of random sprites from other games, what we have here is a technical achievement...

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    2. You can still make ugly combinations. This looks great.

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  5. Looks awesome!

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  6. Si esto hubiera salido en la época madre de dios sin duda el mejor ordenador del mundo

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  7. oh my god !!!!

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  8. Mamma mia che grafica da urlo , bellissima e colorata ...non vedo l'ora che il progetto si concluda con bel videgioco !!!

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  9. the graphic quality is among the best ever seen on Amiga. Why don't you try using Ham6 on an AGA machine with its 2MB Chip ram?

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    1. I add... you should have less memory restrictions while having more computational power under the hood

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  10. very impressive!

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  11. The fringing is surprisingly not objectionable - I had to make myself focus on it. Visually, this is stunning. I don't think there's a practical way to do better given available performance vs how HAM works. Any "solution" is bound to be too computationally expensive and would still be a compromise. Great work!

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  12. That's what we want to see for modern and emulated machines! Stop doing A500 unexpanded games... need to unleash all Amiga power in 2024.

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    1. Yes and save the monochrome games for the Zx Spectrum.

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  13. I this was achieved before maybe the ami ga would have had the best coin op conversions, and the Amiga wouldn't be dead. All we need is to put Remz in a time machine! 😉

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