Games that pushed resolution to the limit?

[rsn8887]

Are there any games that actually run in 256 color mode on AGA?

Similarly, are there any games that actually use super hires, 1280 columns, on AGA?

[AmigaHope]

Tons of games used 256 colors, mostly ports of VGA games. Action games made native for AGA often used dual playfield instead for two 16-color playfields.

No game I can think of used super hires by default -- only ones that let you set the screenmode arbitrarily or that just ran on workbench. The one possible exception would be Pinball Brain Damage, which used superhires for the full-table/multiball view.

[NovaCoder]

There's only one game that runs in 1280 on AGA and in 256 colors

[ Show youtube player ]

I supported this mode for a joke but it does work (obviously it's too slow to use on real hardware)

[jotd]

Tons of games used 256 colors, mostly ports of VGA games.

examples? (except Cfou! EOB/EOB2 hacks)

it's true that they often just added one more playfield and no extra colors (Bubble & Squeak, Fire & Ice, Oscar). Too much work to recolor all sprites, probably.

And not sure that original AGA creations were using 256 colors. Takes a lot of memory, and it's slow to handle with all those bitplanes.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

There's only one game that runs in 1280 on AGA and in 256 colors

I supported this mode for a joke but it does work (obviously it's too slow to use on real hardware)

That's not really fair to the Amiga, as many early Pentium PCs with insanely high VESA graphics modes ran just as slowly. Heck, my 486 DX2/66 ran Quake very much like this, a slideshow.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Foebane

That's not really fair to the Amiga, as many early Pentium PCs with insanely high VESA graphics modes ran just as slowly. Heck, my 486 DX2/66 ran Quake very much like this, a slideshow.

486=/=Pentium. Quake was playable even on the early ones.

[chb]

Virtual Karting (1 and 2) is using super hires to simulate some sort of low-res chunky mode best suited for TV sets/composite video.

[Master484]

Are there any games that actually run in 256 color mode on AGA?

I think Slam Tilt at least uses 256 color mode.

But as others already mentioned, the higher color modes were rare, and often dual playfield was a better choice for action games.

Many AGA games that look "high color" are actually 16+16 dual playfield games, with an extra 16 colors for sprites, so they have 48 "natural" colors. And these colors are then boosted with Back Playfield copper color changes, which in the case of AGA can produce really smooth gradients, easily adding some 100+ colors to the screen. And this in practice gives you a game that's 150 colors with parallax. For example the screenshots of Overkill have over 200 colors, but in reality it's a 16+16 dual playfield game.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by jotd

examples? (except Cfou! EOB/EOB2 hacks)

Some point-n-click did use 256 colors for their aga version (simon the sorcerer, bloodnet...). Ishar trilogy in AGA version did, too.

[chb]

I guess almost all first person shooters on AGA used 256 color mode; those using copper chunky like AB3D probably* used it too, but the resulting screen mode is 4096 colors.


* it's possible to do copper chunky in 7 bitplanes + some bplcon4 mask, or even using only sprites + bplcon4 like in the Roots/Sanity demo, but I guess 8 planes was mostly used, as the DMA overhead on AGA is really low.

[Hannibal]

Banshee used 63 colors, with 2 semi-transparent layers (used for fog, and for transparent bullets/polygon lasers) and 15 colors for sprites (hud and bosses), so 205 used but technically 256 color mode.

[roondar]

Super Stardust runs the main game, (but not the tunnel sequences) in 256 colours.
Pretty sure T-Zero runs in 256 colours as well, but I can't check that right now.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by rsn8887

Similarly, are there any games that actually use super hires, 1280 columns, on AGA?

Not many i guess because the Amiga was more a games machine where the majority of people used them on their old 480i/p TV’s, so unlike on the PC devs weren’t inclined to offer high-res modes.

Plus the fact AGA games only made up a few percent of total Amiga games makes the possible results even lower.

But the ones i can find are:

Sim City 2000
Sim Life
Civilization
Colonization

Basically the games that run in an windows enviroment.

[S0ulA55a551n]

universe claimed to use 256 colours

[AmigaHope]

Basically anything made that targeted VGA but got an AGA Amiga version, some action games (e.g. Wing Commander CD32). Strategy games, Adventure games like Simon the Sorcerer, etc.

i.e. anything that had an engine that just rendered to an 8-bit framebuffer and written without any thought to hardware sprites or playfields (i.e. a straight up VGA -> AGA port).

Lores 8-bit on AGA is not slow at all assuming the fetch mode is set to 4X -- i.e. 8-bit lores on AGA is about as fast as 4-color 2-bit lores on OCS (at least as far as Denise/Lisa DMA access is concerned). Hires 8-bit is same speed as 16-color 4-bit Lores on OCS.

Now obviously chip RAM speed is slow compared to a VLB-equipped 486 VGA PC but that's a given. AGA chip RAM speed is absolutely competitive with an ISA VGA card though.

And repeating again since I think it got missed in wall of text, only Super Hires games (1280x512) game I can think of is:

Pinball Brain Damage

[Retro1234]

I think he means 256 colour mode not copper etc so maybe half a dozen games if that.

[Steve]

Originally Posted by S0ulA55a551n

universe claimed to use 256 colours

Yea and that was on an Amiga 500!

Apparently it used a special mode created by the developers which they codenamed SPAC?? According to Amiga Format Issue 55 (my very first issue of AF) on page 44:

http://amr.abime.net/issue_211_pages

It states that SPAC stands for 'Super Pre-Adjusted Colour' and was a utility created by programmer Gary Antcliffe to create the illusion of 256 colours in a 32 colour environment.

Fascinating stuff. Anyone know anything more about this SPAC utility?

[roondar]

Just for fun, I checked hol.abime.net.
It says there are about 500 AGA only games. Now obviously, a number of those will be doubles due to multi-lingual releases and separate releases for A1200/CD32.

No idea how many of those are 256 colour games, though. But looking at the total number I'd say there may well be more than I originally thought.

[Daedalus]

Games that require AGA don't necessarily use all 256 colours. There's more to AGA than just the 256 colour registers. As others have pointed out, 16+16 dual playfield + a further 16 for sprites is impossible on OCS/ECS, but used for a lot of AGA games. It's still using 8 bitplanes, but not for 256 colours. AGA is also required for larger sprites, subpixel smooth scrolling etc. And then there are games like Aladdin that use 64 colours. So, probably not that many that use 256 colours (and the superhigh resolution isn't really suited to games, with its either 1:4 ratio pixels, or 1:2 ratio pixels with interlace, as well as being relatively slow and essentially wasted unless you had a decent monitor...

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by roondar

No idea how many of those are 256 colour games, though. But looking at the total number I'd say there may well be more than I originally thought.

Probably not, depends if you were just remembering AGA disk games and not Amiga CD as well, then its around 160-180, i forget the exact number when i last checked.