Quote:
Originally Posted by Foebane
The Atari ruled this industry initially, but the C64 took over and fixed palettes became dominant...
...until the Amiga line came out with the same basic palette principle as the Atari 8-Bits and offered up to 32 colours out of a palette of 4096 at higher resolutions
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Not entirely true. The C64 may have been 'dominant' in sales, but there was at least one popular 8 bit machine with programmable palette - the
Amstrad CPC, which could display up to 16 colors out of a 27 color palette. I had the CPC664, which was officially released only a few months before the A1000 but in practice was 2 years ahead of the Amiga. It was the first machine I had with a built-in floppy drive.
In some ways the CPC was more similar to the Amiga than most 8 bitters. It had a full function keyboard with cursor keys and numeric keypad, and stereo sound. Resolutions included 640x200, 320x200 and 160x200, but the CRTC could also be programmed to do non-standard sizes. Interrupts ran at 300Hz, so you could have a split screen with several different resolutions and colors with low CPU overhead. The color palette was loaded at the beginning of each frame just like the Copper does on the Amiga. It also had a proper OS with comprehensive documented system calls.
The CPC Plus range added sprites (16 per line, each 16x16 pixels with 15 colors - more than the Amiga!), a 4096 color palette, and loading the sound synthesizer chip via DMA, but these machines were less popular because by this time (1990) the Amiga had taken the lead.
The Amstrad's clean and reliable hardware design, built-in high performance (compared to the C64) 3" disk drive, high resolution display and RGB output made it much more attractive to me than the C64. Locomotive BASIC was a refreshing change from Microsoft variants, with its graphic functions and extendible commands that could be loaded from disk or added via 3rd party ROMs (up to 252 ROMs automatically logged on by the system).
I used my CPC664 to cross-assemble code for the
Sega SC3000 and custom-built commercial gambling machines, a role that typically required a PC. I also played a lot of games on it! When I got the A1000 in 1987 it wasn't hard to make the transition to programming the Amiga because I was familiar with some concepts such as programmable palettes and using system functions rather than poking the hardware.