ECS/OCS Palette on AGA Computer

[Havie]

So I have realised that a non-AGA machine only has RGB values 0-15 and and AGA machine has 0-256.

Is there anyway on Personal Paint or Deluxe Paint to use the OCS/ECS palette?

Or should I just use DPaint 3?

[a/b]

If you don't mind taking care of the palette, you should be fine. Just set your color RGB components to $00, $11, ..., $ee, $ff instead of $00, $01, .., $fe, $ff (both nibbles must be the same) and you'll have OCS/ECS colors.

[roondar]

Also an option: DPaint IV came in both AGA and ECS versions, so you could try the ECS version of that.

[Coagulus]

You can force it by holding both mouse buttons on startup and selecting original or enhanced under display options. Dpaint and Ppaint will use the 4096 colours then.

[Cobe]

Ingenious! Why I never thought of that...

[Havie]

Thanks guys, very helpful. Out of all the things when programming the Amiga, I find palettes the most confusing!

[Predseda]

For this purpose I have both Dpaint4.03 and 4.6 AGA installed in my Amiga.

[arcanist]

Personal Paint has options REDBITS, GREENBITS, BLUEBITS in the Startup_1.set file which can be set to 4,4,4 for OCS mode.

[Master484]

Here is an OCS RGB conversion table that I myself use:

OCS values (0-15) on the left, and normal RGB (0-255) values on the right.

0 = 0
1 = 17
2 = 34
3 = 51
4 = 68
5 = 85
6 = 102
7 = 119
8 = 136
9 = 153
10 = 170
11 = 187
12 = 204
13 = 221
14 = 238
15 = 255

Just make sure that the RGB values of your palette are set to those, and you can use any paint program to make OCS graphics.

[Daedalus]

It may or may not be a help, but I wrote a palette editor a while back for helping with palette shuffling, arranging, merging etc. It has an option to round any palette to 12 bits, which will give you OCS/ECS values, and gives you some hints about pens (e.g. sprite pen banks). It called PaletteEd, needs AGA to run, and you can find it here and on Aminet.

[Havie]

Thanks - looks really helpful and I like your website, I have never been happy with the layout on mine.

I finally tore myself away from SF2 and went back to Invaders and added a new background choice but struggles with the colours until I used Master's conversion chart!

Also, on WinUAE (I may be wrong) but I couldn't get the the early boot menu up but just chose OCS instead of AGA and still booted into my workbench and had the limited palette colour choice.

So both methods work well.

Need to rework the RGB statements in my game to work on 0-15 instead of 0-255 and then all should be good.

I guess when using a non-AGA game on an AGA computer, the Amiga automatically corrects the colour values otherwise the games would be very dark! Never ever thought about this before...

[Daedalus]

Cool In software terms, internal RGB values are always 8-bit anyway with the 4 MSBs being used for the 4-bit colour registers, and IIRC the development docs recommend that you should save palettes as the same 4-bit value repeated for compatibility with future systems. This gives full compatibility in both directions, and even if the same 4 bits aren't repeated, you only get a small dip in intensity when loaded into 8-bit registers.

When coding in Blitz, there are separate commands for modifying OCS and AGA palette entries. RGB takes 0-15 values and AGARGB takes 0-255 values.

[Havie]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Cool In software terms, internal RGB values are always 8-bit anyway with the 4 MSBs being used for the 4-bit colour registers, and IIRC the development docs recommend that you should save palettes as the same 4-bit value repeated for compatibility with future systems. This gives full compatibility in both directions, and even if the same 4 bits aren't repeated, you only get a small dip in intensity when loaded into 8-bit registers.

When coding in Blitz, there are separate commands for modifying OCS and AGA palette entries. RGB takes 0-15 values and AGARGB takes 0-255 values.

Not in my game which might explain why my RGB colours were just not working!

[Havie]

All sorted and with a bit a reorganisation of the code - all is good!

Probably my favourite method is the Master484 table as this is simples for my simples brain!

[Havie]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

It may or may not be a help, but I wrote a palette editor a while back for helping with palette shuffling, arranging, merging etc. It has an option to round any palette to 12 bits, which will give you OCS/ECS values, and gives you some hints about pens (e.g. sprite pen banks). It called PaletteEd, needs AGA to run, and you can find it here and on Aminet.

So I converted some SF2 sprites (must not do, must not do) and they looked pretty good. Problem is that the black is mapped to colour 0 (I used PPaint) - is there anyway to avoid this or can I use you program to get round this? Just thinking of future projects - would take a long time to recolour all the black to a different non-transparent index by hand?

[Daedalus]

Remapping like that is best done in PPaint I'd say. Usually, colour 0 is set to a colour far away from every other colour in use, so something like full magenta (255-0-255). Then another pen is used for black. If the black from the characters is already lost to the background then it'll have to be redone, but if it's still there and separate from the background, these are the steps I would do to move it:

- Set colour 0 to magenta
- Set another pen of your choosing to black (ideally one not already in use)
- Choose Colour->Remap from the PPaint menus. Your blacks (including the background) will be restored
- Floodfill the background to colour 0 again.

[Havie]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Remapping like that is best done in PPaint I'd say. Usually, colour 0 is set to a colour far away from every other colour in use, so something like full magenta (255-0-255). Then another pen is used for black. If the black from the characters is already lost to the background then it'll have to be redone, but if it's still there and separate from the background, these are the steps I would do to move it:

- Set colour 0 to magenta
- Set another pen of your choosing to black (ideally one not already in use)
- Choose Colour->Remap from the PPaint menus. Your blacks (including the background) will be restored
- Floodfill the background to colour 0 again.

Thanks - will have a play now that Space Invaders is done(ish).

[Photon]

Originally Posted by Predseda

For this purpose I have both Dpaint4.03 and 4.6 AGA installed in my Amiga.

Cool, I'd love to try DPaint 4.03! Can someone put it in the Zone to try out?

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Photon

Cool, I'd love to try DPaint 4.03! Can someone put it in the Zone to try out?

There's a few versions on the "Amiga File Server:

... /Collection/BBS/Alfred_Amiga_Console_BBS/Tools1/DPAINT46.LHA
... /~Uploads/FanAmiga/Sonstiges/MyAmigaDownloads/sea7/my Dumps/DPaintIV.zip
... /~Uploads/Tirinoarim/Tirinoarim_1/UTILS/DPAINT46.DMS
... /~Uploads/Tirinoarim/Tirinoarim_1/UTILS/DPAINTV4.DMS
... /~Uploads/happymondays/Collections/Mike_Crusaders_Collection/dpaint4.5-aga.disk3.adf
... /~Uploads/happymondays/Collections/Unknown Amiga Archive/Apps/graphics/imageprocess/DPaint.V4.5-QTX
... /~Uploads/happymondays/Collections/Unknown Amiga Archive/Apps/graphics/imageprocess/DPaint.V4.5-QTX/dpaint.4.6-aga-disk1.zip
... /~Uploads/happymondays/Collections/Unknown Amiga Archive/Apps/graphics/imageprocess/DPaint.V4.5-QTX/dpaint.4.6-aga-disk2.zip
... /~Uploads/happymondays/Collections/Unknown Amiga Archive/Apps/graphics/imageprocess/DPaint.V4.5-QTX/readme.txt
... /~Uploads/rygar/SSC/1249 - DPaint v4.5 (1-1).DM
... /~Uploads/rygar/SSC/1581 E DPaint v4.6 (1-3).DMS
... /~Uploads/rygar/SSC/1582 E DPaint v4.6 (2-3).DMS
... /~Uploads/rygar/SSC/1583 E DPaint v4.6 (3-3).DMS

[Photon]

No go I'm afraid, DPAINTV4.DMS actually contains DPAINT V Extras (i.e. filename means DPaint 5, disk 4) and DPaintIV.zip has v4.0, not 4.03.

I should probably just find my boxed DPaint 4 and check which version it is :P It's just that 4.03 seems like some hotfix released after.