Copper Chunky example + source

[roondar]

Ever since starting my Amiga development adventures, I've been wanting to create a Copper Chunky screen. Some time ago, I thought it might be nice to turn that into one of my video's & articles. And with that, the next episode in my Amiga Tech series was created.

Naturally, I've included the full source code and a download of the program itself on my website. I had a lot of fun experimenting with this one. Note that my example uses the startup code by Photon of Scoopex and requires at least 1MB of RAM (of which 512KB Chip RAM).

The article/source can be found here:
http://powerprograms.nl/amiga/copper-chunky.html

Here's the YouTube video:
[ Show youtube player ]

Note that emulating this using an AGA configuration requires the 'Subpixel Display Emulation' setting to be activated.

[ross]

Excellent and complete article!

[StingRay]

Good stuff indeed, great effort!

[mcgeezer]

Indeed fabulous stuff!

[roondar]

Thanks all. Experimenting with the Copper is always fun

[saimon69]

Was this done on AGA? (no, wasn't) What about a 3d floor effect?

Listening to the tutorial you say will need a LUT for every degree of rotation, but i think that you take a limited amount, like 16 or 32 you can still have a decent approximation depending on what you want to do

[roondar]

Originally Posted by saimon69

Was this done on AGA? (no, wasn't) What about a 3d floor effect?

Haven't thought about that type of effect yet. Who knows though, I'm always looking for inspiration for these videos

Listening to the tutorial you say will need a LUT for every degree of rotation, but i think that you take a limited amount, like 16 or 32 you can still have a decent approximation depending on what you want to do

The problem I ran into was simply one of raster time. I don't really have the time to make any decisions during the inner loop of the drawing phase. I suppose you can make it work by making multiple different routines that do mirroring for you and picking and choosing which one to select. However, I did try something like that originally with the rotation and it ended up not being so easy because the calculation changed as well.

It may be worth trying something different here for a 'real' release/demo, but for an introduction/example I think this is good enough

[arcanist]

Nice! I played with copper chunky a while back but didn't get beyond 8 pixel resolution.

[LaBodilsen]

Looks sweet.

With this you could easily do per line zooming, with different zoom values for every X or Y line, to make a wobble/wave like effect.

Guess the tables could also make a ring-ripple effect from center.

[khph_re]

Beautifully explained. Behind the smoke and mirrors of Demo effects. Loved it!

[Antiriad_UK]

Awesome. I need to go through this in detail because on first glance I'm like "wtf how what"

[roondar]

Originally Posted by LaBodilsen

Looks sweet.

With this you could easily do per line zooming, with different zoom values for every X or Y line, to make a wobble/wave like effect.

Guess the tables could also make a ring-ripple effect from center.

Yup, all those should be doable. In fact, clever use of table entries can make effects that last much longer and are much more varied than the ones I've shown

Originally Posted by khph_re

Beautifully explained. Behind the smoke and mirrors of Demo effects. Loved it!

Originally Posted by Antiriad_UK

Awesome. I need to go through this in detail because on first glance I'm like "wtf how what"

Thanks, it was a lot of fun to do as well

[no9]

As always great finding Roondar, and also explained smoothly!

[Tigerskunk]

Always something new to learn from Amiga coding guru Roony.

[WayneK]

Really good explanation of everything, thanks!
I always thought that rotozoomers precalced 90 degrees of rotation and just used 4 pre-rotated versions of the source image (pre-rotated during startup/init) to avoid having so many tables? But that is possibly a false economy depending on the source image size :P

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by WayneK

Really good explanation of everything, thanks!
I always thought that rotozoomers precalced 90 degrees of rotation and just used 4 pre-rotated versions of the source image (pre-rotated during startup/init) to avoid having so many tables? But that is possibly a false economy depending on the source image size :P

For efficiency, most rotozoomers will precalculate the code for generating a line worth of copper data using unrolled moves:

eg.

move.w XX(a0),YY(a1)
move.w XX(a0),YY(a1)
move.w XX(a0),YY(a1)
move.w XX(a0),YY(a1)
......
......
......
......
rts


with XX being the text source offset, and YY being the copper list address offset

[roondar]

To be clear, this is my take on the rotozoomer - it's certainly possible other or better ways exist. It seemed to be the best option to me at the time. I did try to make use of the symmetry in rotation by only creating 90 degrees of pre-calculated table, but I couldn't make it work in time for this to be released so I gave up (it was either too slow or just didn't draw the correct images).

I'm interested in knowing how that code-precalculation is supposed to work though, any info on what exactly is being done?

[modrobert]

roondar,

Thanks for the lesson, learned something again, and subscribed.

I had no idea these chunky tricks were done in precalculated copper tables, although was aware of the cosinus/sinus tables for integer speed.

[jotd]

roondar I like the video, and also the humility you put in that video.

Why can't we change 1 color per 1 pixel line damnit ?

I wonder what was used in the "Brian the lion" title screen with Brian letters wobbling all over.

Isn't it possible to "pipeline" the changes and create 1 pixel color with enough colors? say 8 colors? (possibly what I'm saying is stoopid)

[redblade]

Great tutorial, Also thumbs up for mentioning dr dobbs, I love looking at the articles in that and byte magazine, so much code from the golden days

Good on you for giving love to Amanita Muscaria, I haven't eaten those in years, I prefer psilocybin