AmigaOS3.2 and tiny tiny mousepointer

[Radertified]

Thanks for the video. It explains what you meant, but I'm personally not seeing any distortion or quality loss.

I'm sure it's just my eyes though

[AMIGASYSTEM]

In this video instead you can see the good quality of the Pointer, in this case I enlarged the Pointer "by hand" with the editor, the parameter "BIGSPRITE" was not necessary !!!


http://eab.abime.net/zone/TestPointerOK.avi

Radertified compare the two videos, the quality is clearly different!

[Rotareneg]

Congratulations, you've discovered that a large high resolution image looks better than a small low resolution image scaled to the same size.

[Thomas Richter]

The issue is unfortunately quite complex as multiple players care about the sprite.

First, P96: P96 offers three sprite sizes: Regular 16x16 sprite (tiny), a 32x32 hi-res sprite of the same resolution, but with a larger pixel dimension, and a "big sprite" which is an enlarged version of the 16x16 regular sprite. You can switch between 16x16 regular and 16x16 "big sprite" with the monitor tool types "BIGSPRITE", but the 32x32 sprite is never scaled.

From 3.2 on, you can select between the 32x32 and 16x16 version by the pointer preferences, the former is called the "hi-res" sprite because it is mapped onto the AGA hi-res sprite version.

In 3.1.4 and before, the "hi-res" sprite is only available on AGA systems, in 3.2. it is always available as intuition became "smarter".

Now things are getting tricky: Because the 32x32 version is mapped to the AGA version, and AGA has a per-monitor vertical sprite resolution, and a per-colormap horizontal sprite resolution shared amongst all sprites. Thus, if you request a 32x32 "hi-res" pointer under AGA, but some other "simple sprites" of ECS resolution are on the screen as well, the 32x32 sprite cannot be rendered in AGA resolution and a "kludge" in graphics kicks in which scales the 32x32 pointer down to a 16x16 variant (using a particularly tricky data-path to intuition). Since only a quarter of the pixels are then available, the sprite then looks of poor quality. This goes away as soon as the AGA-sprite pointer has the viewport (actually the colormap of the vp) for its own use.

Thus, what you may observe here is exactly this downscaling effect. It is not UAEs responsibility, but caused by graphics trying to get an AGA pointer with ECS simple sprites on the same screen, which is not possible.

The problem unfortunately inherits through graphics into RTG, but it only because clear recently with 3.2 what is going on. Hardware restrictions + graphics + the intuition pointer class.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

@Thomas Richter
Thanks for clarifying and confirming the problem


@Rotareneg
it's true I have discovered hot water, but beware the Pointer created by me "always remains the same" even if you change from low to high resolution in the editor, once saved nothing will change, the pointer remains of equal size