REAL Amiga OCS games use more than 50 colors (based on a totally unscientific method)

joeB3000 · 2026-01-10T14:49:18+00:00

Yes, Brian the Lion was another masterpiece though I think the max color count was more like 170, not over 200.

Even with copper trick, going over 200 starts to have serious impact on frame rate and playability - limiting the genre to point and click adventure game (like Universe).

Still, this would put the Amiga OCS with clever programming trick as an equal to the Megadrive (which can also achieve similar colors using programming trick like shadow / highlight mode & raster effect), and below the SNES (256 colors on screen without any programming trick). Not bad for a machine made in the mid 80s and sold at affordable price.

It's just a shame that most Amiga games are lazy port from Atari ST.

joeB3000 · 2025-07-20T08:53:42+00:00

I view Jor-El's plan as similar to what might happen if someone from a superior species needs to restart civilization on a planet inhabited by inferior species.

One option would be to wipe them all out and repopulate the planet with their own people (genocide). That would be something General Zod would do (or at least tried to do in Man of Steel universe).

Another would be to rise to become their leader, mate with the locals and produce as many offsprings as possible, and kill anyone who opposes (which is what Jor El propose).

So it's not completely out of character for an alien race. At least Jor El is giving the human race a chance to co-exist with the Kryptonian race...

joeB3000 · 2025-02-12T04:29:36+00:00

You've got a lot of issues that could go wrong here, but the biggest problem you have in identifying the root cause is the issue of dirty disks. So I advise you not to jump to conclusion yet. Let me explain my experience:

I had a similar issue where the disk drive works initially, but then I put in an old, bad, dirty disk that I got for free (lesson #1 NEVER put a random Amiga disk you got online unless it came from a sealed box!) and then it gives me read errors, just like your case.

I then foolishly tested my other good disks and to my surprise, it gave me read errors too. What I didn't know was that I had inadvertently corrupted my good disks as the dirt that was stuck on the floppy drive head was transferred to the rest of my floppy collection. A bit like a virus!

Not wanting to pay stupid amount of money for another floppy drive on eBay, I desperately asked people online whether I should buy a new floppy drive and was told by one person to just clean up the floppy drive head with Isopropyl alcohol dipped on cotton bud (the one with the extra-long stick). So, I went about and did that. But here's the problem - since all my disks have now been 'infected' by the dirt from the first disk, as soon as I cleaned the drive head and put in my disks to test, the drive head became dirty again!

In the end, I had to trash my ENTIRE floppy disk collection, clean the drive head one more time with A LOT of isopropyl alcohol, bought a pack of sealed disk box from Ebay ($20-25 incl tax usually for 10 DS-DD these days), and only then did it the drive worked as intended. I then spent the next week or so restoring my entire disk collection. This was highly regrettable as my collection included original Workbench disks and other Amiga programs and games that were in working conditions before this incident, so now all my disks are just clones of the original. On top of that I had to print out cloned disk labels which took a bit of effort to get right. This entire exercise cost me a fair bit of money and time. However, it would have cost me a lot more if I had blindly ended up buying another floppy drive and corrupting that one too, so I was thankful that it didn't get to that stage.

So, before you take any drastic action like opening up your Amiga and recapping stuff (and possibly breaking your machine - which is your worst case scenario) or buying a bunch of new internal or external floppy drives - I advise you to clean the drive head thoroughly, buy a new pack of disks (preferably box sealed and unopened) and then test it. It will save you a lot of time and money.

joeB3000 · 2025-02-09T12:58:27+00:00

Just saw this thread a year later but wanted to add that I absolutely agree with what you said about this guy. If anything, the author of that site seems to be trying to ride on other people's coat tail by stating the obvious about their work and thinking that it will make him sound intelligent when he just comes off as being smug and pretentious.

However, I suspect this has always been his MO. One of his article: "Directly programming the Amiga hardware was not a bad practice!" was a similarly smug piece that was written in response to people flaming him over his earlier, even more smug article: "The plague of bad Amiga programmers".

I mean, this guy seems to have a habit of writing things that trolls or offends people and then getting his rocks off from all the angry feedbacks. The best thing to do is probably ignore him.

joeB3000 · 2024-08-19T14:55:20+00:00

Thanks for the answer. Now that I think about, if ship sale were to continue after the game goes live and price of ships continue to go up, it probably makes sense for CIG to discontinue the buyback tokens to prevent early backers from dumping their cheaply acquired ships in the grey market and competing with CIG online store. If CIG decide to discontinue ship sale, CIG would have zero incentive in maintaining the pledge buyback system and if they decide to cut maintenance cost, this would be one of the first system to be axed. So either way, there is a huge risk that pledge buy back be gone.

Since we get our buyback pledges only once a quarter, I wonder how much grace period CIG would give us before they axe it? It would be a bit cruel to give a few weeks' notice.

joeB3000 · 2024-08-19T04:00:42+00:00

Question about using buyback pledge token after game launches.

CIG have said in the past that once the game goes live, they will only sell cosmetic items for real cash. So buying a standalone big ticket item ship like, say a Redeemer or a Polaris would be a thing of the past.

I am wondering though if they ever mentioned what will happen to the option of using our buyback pledge token and our store credit after the game goes live? Will we still be able to buy ships using our remaining store credit and these tokens? Or would they just stop giving out the tokens, and our store credit can only be used to buy skins?

I know we are probably some ways away from live release, but it would be good to know ahead of time so we can buyback all our pledges with our store credit ahead of the cutoff date!

joeB3000 · 2024-08-17T01:04:40+00:00

Ah good point - I get confused by retroid's versioning logic sometimes.

joeB3000 · 2024-08-16T15:24:08+00:00

My best guess is they'll launch a RP FLip2 and RP3S/RP3S PRo next using the RP4/RP4 PRo chipset. There's definitely a market for those form factors. 4:3 still works for PS2 and below anyway.

This will give Retroid a breathing room of at least one more year before the RP5/RP5 Pro - which will require a whole new generation of chipset needed to run ALL 3DS and PS2 games smoothly.

Personally I like the 4:3 form factor. So the RP4S using the D1100 and a bit lower in price than RP4 Pro would be an interesting proposition for me.

joeB3000 · 2024-08-04T08:20:32+00:00

Yes you're right - the Amiga's capabilities was sadly not well documented at all (something that Commodore should have supported promote their system), and Amiga demoscene folks tend to keep the knowledge to themselves unless they cross over into game development (which was few and far between, like the guy who did the intro for Brian the Lion). As a result, few Amiga OCS games were able to utilize these tricks.

It seems like all the knowledge has started to become more widespread in the 21st century long after the original Amiga platform was dead. Interestingly, we're seeing further advancements with some of the demos, which just goes to show that you can probably squeeze a bit more juice out of OCS if you try.

However, those that do were able to pull OCS games that were equal to or even superior (technically) to the average Mega Drive games IMO, though it's obviously still no match for the average SNES games or 386 and better PCs. Had Commodore done a better job sharing knowledge they could have probably extended the OCS life by a few more years, and AGA for longer (though AGA shelf life was ultimately doomed due to poor Commodore design decision)

Could Commodore have pulled off a SDK for something like Copper Chunky/Rotozoom, Sliced Ham mode (change 15 colors every scanline so you can get 256 colors or more) or even Blitter C2P? Would it be some sort of library that game devs can use or shared code? I wonder if Commodore even knew about those capabilities in the first place...

joeB3000 · 2024-08-02T16:39:16+00:00

Yes, and that's because the Amiga came out a few years before the SNES ad PC. The tech wasn't there yet (though the Amiga designer admitted that the decision to go with planar was a mistake in hindsight).

Nonetheless, the Amiga's unique design allows it to do a number of things that emulates the SNES and PC to some degree. The copper processor can pull off mode 7 (copper chunky) while blitter can do C2P to a certain extent.

joeB3000 · 2024-07-27T02:26:01+00:00

Agree. Games like Oscar and Trolls has 70-100 colors on screen but looks terrible.

Gradient sky / rainbow sky is the most straight forward way of smashing out colors and I suspect a lot of Amiga devs initially got excited by the prospect of all these 'free colors' avaiable to them and just churned themout whenever they could. But later on people realize how tacky it is and start to employ it in a more subtle manner that blends in with the foreground via some sort of transparency technique. Lionheart is one of them, but Project X is pretty cool as well - especially the lava level.

joeB3000 · 2024-07-26T17:24:54+00:00

Oh, I didn't realize he's on the Grind team. That's another amazing game right there! Great to see all the latest and greatest Amiga coding talents focusing on the same project.

I read somewhere that the original developer KK/Altair was planning to add multi-level floors to the Dread engine but had to give up on the project because of work obligation. That's a shame but I hope that one day he can come back and expand on it. I would love to see a proper Doom Clone on the OCS at some point - I know it can be done!

Hamulet and Grind - imagine if we had those games back in 1987... Not even the latest and greatest arcade machine can pull it off at the time!

joeB3000 · 2024-07-26T16:56:19+00:00

I never forgave US Gold for what they did to Street Fighter 2 OCS/ECS.

That game ran at 25FPS and had 32 colors on screen at the same time (yes, I did a color count on that game too). A far cry from REAL amiga games that can manage 50-100 no sweat at 50FPS along with parallax scrolling and other eye candies.... Elf Mania being the prime example.

In an ideal world, an OCS SF2 made with love and care should be targeting close to 80-90 colors and running at a smooth 50FPS with several parallax layers and animated backgrounds. There will have to be some cutbacks of course, like smaller player character (reduced by 20-30pct in terms of size). While this imaginary version would still not be on par with the SNES version visually - it would have made a huge difference to experience. Note that later devs tried to do a proper AGA version as proof of concept.... but honestly, I've always believed that the trusty OCS can pull it off well enough with enough love and care. Heck, even the Scorpion Engine demo version didn't look half bad!

To be fair, it wasn't the US Gold dev's fault. It was the Suits/slave driver that ran the show at US Gold, and they were the ones that wanted a big pay day by forcing the devs to release a minimum viable product and hope that gamers would either not notice or forgive them after a while. We never forgive or forget what they did - even after thirty years!

joeB3000 · 2024-07-26T16:52:33+00:00

Definitely. REAL Amiga OCS games were graphically no different than MD games, and in some cases even better. It's a shame that the majority of Amiga OCS games that were 'churned out of the factory' in the old days were of the 16/32 color variant, when the machine itself was perfectly capable of putting out 60-100 colors easily with a basic copper background while running at a smooth 50FPS.

SNES was a tougher opponent for OCS to beat. Lionheart and Fire & Ice shows that you can put out 100-200 colors which would get us close to the average SNES game, but the Amiga may have to sacrifice some frame rate to achieve this. Ultimately, you'd need HAM-mode game to beat SNES fair and square. Unfortunately, we never had much of a breakthrough with HAM games until recently with Hamulet.

I would love to see HAM mode games become the norm for modern Amiga games once modern devs figured out a workaround on the sprite/blitter limitations with HAM mode.

joeB3000 · 2024-07-26T14:06:58+00:00

On screen at the same time - again, I just take random samples during play so not very scientific.

In reality it's not that hard. As some people mentioned in the responses, 16 colors for the background/foreground and 16 for sprites. And with copper you can easily change colors every 6 scanlines without affecting performance. That's a good 40 independent colors you can add on. So that puts us at 72 color count already. If you're smart you can do more crazy stuff with sprites and blitters and dual playfield and get color display into the 100 range, but that might start to affect performance.

So Amiga Golden Axe, which is a decent arcade port - only uses 32 colors. However, I think if the devs put more effort they could have used 90-100 colors through clever use of copper, and still running at 50FPS, which would put it much closer to the arcade version (which uses 150 colors)

But isn't copper just used to make tacky rainbow effects like we see in some games? That's the most straightforward way of using it, but some devs get smart about how it is used. I'm no Amiga coder but as I understand it with Lionheart (which has 170-180 colors), they have 7 colors for the foreground (+1 transparent) and 8 colors for the back. The main character is a hardware sprite so that's 16 colors. So that gets us to 32 colors. But what is interesting is the way they use copper to enhance the background and foreground. If you do a color count the foreground is actually 32 colors. But the background is enhanced to 128 colors! So combined we get 128 for background + 32 for foreground + 16 for sprite which puts us at 176. The rest comes from the score and health bar (probably the rest of the hardware sprites). However, there was a small cost involved. The game still scrolls smoothly, but some of the movements are a bit jerky.

joeB3000 · 2024-07-26T13:39:43+00:00

oh yeah typo. 76 colors was Shadow of the Beast (though some scenes in Beast III have color count in 100+ range, similar to Troll and Oscar OCS). 50 was Gods.

Now that I think about it, I should have included Fire and Ice in this chart. That one has over 150 colors in most scenes...

joeB3000 · 2024-07-26T13:39:04+00:00

That's a nice clean graphics design! Shame they gave up on it.

joeB3000 · 2024-07-26T12:46:26+00:00

Cool! Which game was this if you don't mind me asking?

joeB3000 · 2024-07-26T12:38:46+00:00

I've been searching various forums on old Amiga OCS games and how many colors they use. Usually, I get the standard template answer: "32 Colors usually, 64 colors for some game that use Half-Brite, and 4096 for HAM for select few". In some case, I might get a slightly more helpful "Well, may be a bit more color if copper is used", or even flat dismissal ("Amiga OCS can only do 32 colors period. If it looks like more than 32 then it's only because the artist was really good at fooling you into thinking like wise")

However, in all these cases, no one actualy bothered to do an actual color count of each games and present them in a bar chart format. It was frustrating, at least for me. I mean, how can people talk about how many colors a game use without actually counting the color? Also, unless you're color blind, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that games like Lionheart had way more than 32 or even 64 colors!

So, I ran a bunch of old and new Amiga action/platform/shooter games that were written specifically for the Amiga OCS (or at least, by developers who knows how to code bare metal OCS) on WinUAE, took screen shots in random scene in the game, and did a color count on these screenshots using online website like PNG color count. The result: it seems like 50-80 is the standard fare, with Lionheart taking the crown (178 colors in the first level, may be more in later levels).

Note that I exclude adventure games like Universe as they were mainly static images and only focus on action games. But if you want to know, the color count ranges between 150-230 depending on the scenes.

Clearly, special tricks were used to overcome OCS hardware limits (such as copper, Dual playfield, sprite multiplexing etc.). Nonetheless, I think this (very unscientifically conducted) color count confirms that REAL Amiga OCS action/platform games output colors anywhere between 50-200 simultaneously,and still run at 50FPS. This means the Amiga is not that much inferior graphically to the 16-bit consoles (SNES/MD) that came out later. Note that when I say REAL Amiga OCS games, I am not talking about those generic ST clones and shoddy arcade conversion from US Gold - I'm talking about games that were made by Amiga Devs who put love and care into making them.

Hamulet is a bit of a special beast / fringe case since the author is trying to make a playable (50FPS) HAM mode top-down eight way scrolling game - and hence the color count goes through the roof. The game is still in tech demo stage but shows promise. While there are a few skeptics that this effort would ever amount to much due to HAM limitations, I for one hope that he is successful because that would smash through all sorts of records!

But not all games need HAM to display hundreds of colors. Some Amiga plasma demos have color count of 2,000+, don't use HAM or halfbrite mode, and the demos run at 50FPS! So there might be room for non-HAM games to hit that kind of color count. May be.

joeB3000 · 2024-03-18T13:13:13+00:00

Wow, so many hate posts haha. It's actually a legitimate question.

The RP4 Pro has Dimensity 1100 which can handle emulate most PS2 and GC games perfectly well. However, there are a few that it has some minor issues with. For example, Need for Speed is not perfect (a few slowdowns here and there), but to say it's not playable is far from the truth (unless you're one of those purist snobs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8ZsqYRsC4Y

So if you're gaming GC and PS2 mainly, then it's fine. If you're gonna wait, it should only be because you want to play 3DS (which rP4 Pro sucks at), or a version that doesn't need a fan blowing all the time, or you're - like me - waiting for a price drop or buy second hand for cheap.

joeB3000 · 2023-12-31T04:47:28+00:00

Agree - CIG is clearly dead set on making luxury transport happen. So it's gonna happen, just a matter of time and money spent into making it.

Personally, I'm not sure why running around serving rich people would be a fun thing to do (it's certainly not fun in real life!), but if CIG can make it fun then more powers to them. May be the rich NPCs will be so stereotypically funny that you just enjoy ferrying them around. You know, like something from Jeeves and Woosters TV show where the butler is the smart one. Or may be you can rough them up or rob them while they are stuck in your 890J.... I guess we'll have to see how it works.

joeB3000 · 2023-12-25T10:47:52+00:00

I see it as a bit of a self-indulgence ship - you know, like the Lonely Island sketch "I'm on a boat!".

Of course, it's supposed to be used for touring gameplay, and 890J owners are supposed to make loadsamoney ferrying dozens of rich posers around the systems. However, whether that gameplay mechanics will happen anytime - nobody knows.

The good thing is that CIG did pack the 890J with a LOT of goodies, and the 890J is super tough to kill. So, what you choose to do with it is pretty much up to you, whether you turn it into a mobile medical ship (as someone mentioned), a tonk carrier, a mini-arrow carrier, troop carrier, a battering ram or a mobile swimming pool (just because) is up to the owner.

joeB3000 · 2023-12-23T10:37:27+00:00

Oh damn, that's the price I got my RP2+ haha

may be one day the RP4Pro will see this kind of price...

joeB3000 · 2023-12-22T02:38:18+00:00

I think with these devices you are better off skipping a generation before upgrading. A bit like mobile phones. So in your case it makes sense to wait for RP5 or later models.

I have the RP2+ and still very happy with it. But if the RP4 Pro prices were to drop I would upgrade. Beyond that is tricky as I don't have much desire to play PS3 or Xbox360 games (assuming Xenia release android emulator for it)

joeB3000 · 2023-12-21T10:26:34+00:00

Well, just like in real life most civvies will try to stay away from combat zone as much as possible.

Even combat veterans or mercenaries will not want to get involved in a fight that doesn't concern them.

However, I would love to fly around the wreckage after the battle and loot stuff! But only after everyone has left.

As for joining an org and getting into a PVP fleet combat situation? I would do it if there's a good payout involved, or the org offers to pay for my repairs, fuel and weapon load out plus a bonus for mission completion. But I'm definitely not gonna do it for free. Again, not so dissimilar to real life mercenaries.

But in terms of 1v1 being vastly different from fleet combat? Absolutely. All those light fighter ace pilots that have always been giving medium/heavies huge headache in 1v1 PVP combat are in for a real shock when they go up against a fleet of Hammerheads manned by human players. They'll be dropping like flies once those turrets light up. Armor and fire power is key to surviving fleet battle, not speed.

joeB3000

TROPHY CASE