09 November 2007, 14:24 | #1 |
cheeky scoundrel
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Spijkenisse/Netherlands
Age: 42
Posts: 6,908
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technical question about amigas
When I was playing with my Amiga I was only 7-14 years old, so I didn't know anything about programming or the technical details of an Amiga at that time (I knew the difference between fast and chip ram, that was about it). While reading through all the threads in this forum I often come across the mentioning of the "copper trick" to get more than 16 colors on the screen.
Can someone explain to me how this works? I have the idea that the copper is a piece of hardware, is it like programming it manually to make it do things it wasn't designed to do or something? |
09 November 2007, 14:36 | #2 | |
Registered User
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: montreal / canada
Age: 47
Posts: 722
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Quote:
from wikipedia : [edit] Copper The copper is another sub-component of Agnus; The name is short for "co-processor". The copper is a programmable finite state machine that executes a programmed instruction stream, synchronized with the video hardware. When it is turned on, the copper has three states; either reading an instruction, executing it, or waiting for a specific video beam position. The copper runs a program called the copper list in parallel with the main CPU. The copper runs in sync with the video beam, and it can be used to perform various operations which require video synchronization. Most commonly it is used to control video output, but it can write to any of the chipset registers and thus can be used to set audio registers or interrupt the CPU. The copper list has three kinds of instructions, each one being a pair of two bytes, four bytes in total:
[edit] Uses of the copper
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