Good explanation why half-brite is too slow for game engines?

[alain.treesong]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Pinball Dreams is EHB, but for that game, its not particularly stressed out.

Uses hardware sprites for the ball, the table is complete in memory, and the scrolling up and down is done by changing bitplane pointers.

Lots of the animations are simply colour changes, so this is an area where EHB really shines.

No wonder then it wasn't converted to Megadrive, whilst that machine can display 64 colours, its only has a palette of 512 versus the 4096 of the Amiga, so it wouldn't have been as well shaded on Megadrive.

So I looked with Winuae. Pinball dreams is effectively in EHB. The sprites are used for the balls and only for that as I can see. The both "flippers" are managed by the blitter.

Of course all of the table is in memory but I suppose there are many objects managed by the blitter to handle the display priorities between the ball and some elements like the bumpers. Moreover without speaking of the problem of the physic of the ball, there is well animated score panel (yet better in pinball fantasies). So it is not probably so easy to keep the 50 fps and probably required a good coding skill at the time.

[jotd]

upper score panel may not use EHB but only 8 or 16 colors.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by alain.treesong

So I looked with Winuae. Pinball dreams is effectively in EHB. The sprites are used for the balls and only for that as I can see. The both "flippers" are managed by the blitter.

Of course all of the table is in memory but I suppose there are many objects managed by the blitter to handle the display priorities between the ball and some elements like the bumpers. Moreover without speaking of the problem of the physic of the ball, there is well animated score panel (yet better in pinball fantasies). So it is not probably so easy to keep the 50 fps and probably required a good coding skill at the time.

Sorry, but Pinball Dreams is easily keeping within 50fps, hence why there is never any slowdowns.

The score panel is not EHB its changed by the copper, it's a simple display that isnt stressing the Amiga one bit, other than flippers and masking the ball when it gets obscured by parts of the table, the blitter really isnt doing a whole lot, there are not a lot of things it needs to blit.

It's why it can be EHB, because technically, as in workload, the hardware is easily able to keep up.

Even the ball physics cant be stressing the CPU out that much (though admittedly it's the most complex part of the game), the lowly CPU in the SNES was able to cope without problems in that area.

Pinball Dreams is a perfect example of EHB being used to great effect because it isnt so demanding

[alain.treesong]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Sorry, but Pinball Dreams is easily keeping within 50fps, hence why there is never any slowdowns.

The score panel is not EHB its changed by the copper, it's a simple display that isnt stressing the Amiga one bit, other than flippers and masking the ball when it gets obscured by parts of the table, the blitter really isnt doing a whole lot, there are not a lot of things it needs to blit.

It's why it can be EHB, because technically, as in workload, the hardware is easily able to keep up.

Even the ball physics cant be stressing the CPU out that much (though admittedly it's the most complex part of the game), the lowly CPU in the SNES was able to cope without problems in that area.

Pinball Dreams is a perfect example of EHB being used to great effect because it isnt so demanding

Obviously the scoreboard is not in 64 colors. There is a redefinition of the registers by the copper of course. What I wanted to say is that there's a lot of management of things in the game and so it's not just a sprite running around in a screen of about 500 pixels high.
Generally speaking, even if it's not "Shadow of the Beast 3" or "Stardust", many of the Amiga's particularities have been well exploited in this game. So in the end for the Amiga it is indeed a textbook case of the use of the EHB mode.But it's still well done and probably not that trivial.
Of course the Amiga can do more extraordinary as a global technical rendering (but rarely as a global result)