Amiga Graphics

There’s something about the Amiga era font and graphic style that I love and I always feel is unique to the Amiga but had trouble pinning it down to a particular developer or graphics artist. Ruff n Tumble is a good example, with like chunky futuristic font, the strong gradients all over everything and even the colours. It’s not common to all games though.

I made a DeluxePaint/Amiga LORA you can use with Stable Diffusion/FLUX a while back for the lulz[1]

I also used that LORA and some video models to try to make a little movie with the same style[2]

Here's a guide on how to generate LORAs too if you're interested[3]

Finally, there's a DeluxePaint clone someone released that is pretty cool to play around with[4]

[1]: https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be

[3]: https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-ful...

[4]: https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter

This is great stuff! As a side note, I wonder if anyone has created a HAM viewer that runs in the browser? I remember HAM flickering by necessity and being amazed by 4096 colors on-screen at once. There was a certain quality of HAM images on the Amiga that made them instantly identifiable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify

The Photon Paint eye image in CRT mode flickering is so accurate to how it felt at the time https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/PhotonPaint.crt.html

Somewhat related, new version of Amiga Vision collection just dropped. Very high quality product you can get for free if you are an Amiga fan. Can't get enough of included demos on my MiSTer setup.

So for anyone looking into old school graphics programming, bit planes are pretty confusing when you don't understand why they exist.

Two big reasons. First, it's about running memory chips in parallel to increase bandwidth. Image data was hard to get to the screen fast enough with hardware in that era.

Second it allowed for simple backwards compatibility. Programs were used to writing directly to video memory, and in an EGA card the start of the video memory was valid CGA data. The rest of the colour data was in a separate bit plane.

I missed out on the Amiga (introduced in 1985) at the time, being an early PC adopter. Went from CGA (1981) directly to VGA (1987).

In terms of colors the most popular VGA modes (320x200 or 320x240, 256 color palette, 18 bit color depth) are superior to the most popular Amiga graphics modes (320×200 or 320x256, 32 color palette, 12 bit color depth).

But somehow Amiga graphics is still often nicer.

Always cool to see these kinds of retro computing resources pop up.

Oh, this is a glorious and nostalgic romp back through past memories. Thank you!

Color cycling in the picture file format was so epic!

Fun memory: I was with my best friend at another friend's place and his father called him to do some chore. He had to quickly mow the small lawn or something like that. So we decided to prank him: I don't remember all the details but basically we launched Deluxe Paint and simulated an Amiga "guru meditation" using a font that wasn't even correct (I think because we were in 320x256 while the real guru meditation was using a mode with smaller pixels). Then in broken english we wrote something like this:

"Hardware failure. If you reboot or turn off your computer it is going to broke forever"

We then did a color cycling between red and black for one of the color and put the drawing software in "full screen".

When our friend came back, we played dumb and said we had no idea what happened but that apparently we really shouldn't turn the computer off. We managed to hold it for something like ten minutes while he though his computer was done for good but we were dying inside.

All three of us remember that prank to this day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

P.S: as a side note with the help of Claude Code CLI / Sonnet 4.6 I managed to recompile a 30+ years old game I wrote in DOS in the early 90s (and for which I still have the source files and assets but not the tooling) and I was using converter (which I wrote back then) to convert files between the .LBM format and a "tweaked" (320x200 / 4 planes) DOS mode I was using for the game (which allowed double-buffering without tearing). I don't remember the details but I take it that if we had .LBM picture files, me and the artist where using Deluxe Paint on the Amiga.

This brought back some memories. So nice to see art from an era where you really needed talent to be able to produce it. Such a nice contrast to the AI slop which takes no talent to produce!

I liked the Amiga. I would not really use it today, but I recall having played many games in the 1980s. Those kind of games are mostly dead now (save for a few Indie games perhaps). Today's games are usually always the same - 3D engine with some fancy audio and video and a dumbed down gameplay. (Not all games, mind you; for instance, I liked the idea behind Little Nightmares. I never played it myself, don't have the time, but I watched several clips on youtube and I found the gameplay different to the "canonical" games we now have, as perpetual repetition of a money-sell grab.)

[dead]