Fun with HAM

[Mequa]

Just for a bit of silly seasonal Amiga-related fun, here's a picture of ham converted into HAM.



The image on the left is 24-bit, the one on the right was converted to HAM-6 by Vidi Amiga software.
This mode was possible on the high-end Amiga 1000 in 1985 and the affordable Amiga 500 in 1987.
In contrast, VGA came out in 1987 for high-end PCs and was limited to 256 colours in low resolution.

Compare our HAM image on the left with a 256 colour VGA image.
Amiga had quite the edge (even if we improve the 256 colour dithering):



Funny how Commodore originally thought this was a useless feature and wanted it taken out.

P.S. The Wikipedia article accurately describes HAM as a form of hardware-based lossy compression.
CDXL video which utilised HAM used no other form of compression.
I suppose the spiritual heir to HAM today would be specialised GPU hardware for decompressing high-definition video, as found in many graphics cards and mobile devices.

[gulliver]

Yummy HAM indeed

[Jack Burton]

Have you ever tried PCHG HAM (lowres or lowres laced ) on an OCS or ECS machine ?
If not, try it, you would not believe your eyes !

[Amiga1992]

To be fair to VGA, it has a smaller palette, and in your example picture, the conversion is not very cool, dithering could have been worked a lot more. This depends on the image converter.

Ham was neat but it's pretty horrible with its colour fringeing, reminds me of Spectrum color clash bugs.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Akira

To be fair to VGA, it has a smaller palette

Er, no :

This provided a total of 64 different intensity levels for red, green and blue, resulting in 262,144 possible colors, any 256 of which could be assigned to the palette (and in turn out of those 256, any 16 of them could be displayed in CGA video modes).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VGA#The_VGA_color_palette

[Amiga1992]

right on, smear it in my face xD
Thanks TCD!

[TCD]

Hehe, Toni told me off about it here a while ago

[T_hairy_bootson]

Originally Posted by Mequa

Just for a bit of silly seasonal Amiga-related fun, here's a picture of ham converted into HAM.



The image on the left is 24-bit, the one on the right was converted to HAM-6 by Vidi Amiga software.
This mode was possible on the high-end Amiga 1000 in 1985 and the affordable Amiga 500 in 1987.
In contrast, VGA came out in 1987 for high-end PCs and was limited to 256 colours in low resolution.

Compare our HAM image on the left with a 256 colour VGA image.
Amiga had quite the edge (even if we improve the 256 colour dithering):



Funny how Commodore originally thought this was a useless feature and wanted it taken out.

P.S. The Wikipedia article accurately describes HAM as a form of hardware-based lossy compression.
CDXL video which utilised HAM used no other form of compression.
I suppose the spiritual heir to HAM today would be specialised GPU hardware for decompressing high-definition video, as found in many graphics cards and mobile devices.

EAB 2010 POST OF THE YEAR!

Yo dawg we heard you liked ham...

[Paul_s]

The VGA ham looks like it is radioactive

[bonkers]

HAM would have made so much sense if the Amiga would have been using HSV and not RGB as was initially intended. Its still a very very cool graphic mode though.

[ImmortalA1000]

The difference is we had to wait for a proper 256 colour mode for 7 more years and it would be 8x slower than VGA

HAM6 was good, but useless for games, unlike VGA which was no different to writing games in 32 colour mode on an A500/1000/2000.

Fantastic for still images, I spent months perfecting my Digi-view setup..MONTHS! lol