One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we’ll tell you, and one can drag them, we’ll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don’t get what’s so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers.
↫ Carl Svensson
A deeply technical look at not just how the Amiga managed to achieve this stunning functionality way back in the ’80s on machines with 7MHz and less RAM than a keyfob, but also how this functionality can be useful. I’ve always found the concept of screens on the Amiga quite interesting, and Svensson’s article does a great job at demystifying the whole concept.
Of course, expect a lot of lovely Amiga OS screenshots.
I used this capability when making a paint program, My toolbar was a hires strip across the bottom and the rest of the screen was what ever res the user selected, So the toolbar was the same no matter what, This means no thinking about it scaling etc, The palette selector window was on the drawing screen so it matched the depth of the screen being painted on.
If you are running multiple full screen programs with a single monitor it was brilliant being able to switch them and look behind them.
Clever.
I never really got what the Amiga was doing until I was watching YouTube videos on SNES graphics tricks and they discussed how games would change graphics modes during HBLANK, and I thought “I’ll bet the Amiga is doing this.”
It’s cool tricks like this that made the Amiga so advanced early in its life, and also ultimately doomed it. Doom is often credited as the game that killed the Amiga, but the writing was on the wall when Wolfenstein 3D was released. Bitplanes were just too cumbersome to work with once computers were fast enough to use chunky graphics exclusively
Drumhellar,
I had the same thoughts about those graphics modes. Bit planes were one way to get more out of segments, but programming them was always tedious. Long ago I did create a graphics library where I experimented with SVGA and “mode x”…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X
Especially VESA VGA made everything else obsolete. It took some time for everyone to upgrade, but once it was common place there was just no reason to go back to early graphics mode hacking.
Screens on the Amiga were so advanced it seemed like alien technology. Amiga screens were so different from VGA or color Mac.