Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott
The Amiga's linear bitmap layout is simpler and more logical.
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Well... it is the logical consequence of depending on a bit-based blitter. Thus, no matter the color depth, the blitter can always be used in the same way, but potentially requires multiple runs - once for each bitplane. With the ST design (also shared by some INMOS chips) a potential blitter would need to adjust to the organization of the memory. Consider how a line-drawer in the "interleaved"( (ST) design would look like compared to the "planar" (Amiga) design - a lot of additional complexity.
Disadvantage of the Amiga design: You (typically) also need to fire the blitter multiple times, thus performance isn't ideal.
Super-VGA never cared about planar blitting later on, just chunky or hi/true color, so in a sense the planar Amiga model died out as being to limited, and all what remained was a "interleaved" model where units were entire bytes, and bit-addressing was disregarded.