Hamulet test – Large HAM bobs – An impressive animation display for the Commodore Amiga

The Commodore Amiga scene always surprises me, if it’s not amazing demos running on stock A500’s, it’s games such as Castlevania, Abbey(s) of the Dead or even Wonderboy running at high frame rates that would put most Commodore classics to shame. But today’s news is something special indeed for this system of greatness, as remz has just wow’d the Amiga community with an impressive animation display of Large HAM bobs via his Hamulet test. For those of you who don’t know what HAM is “Hold-And-Modify, usually abbreviated as HAM, is a display mode of the Commodore Amiga computer. It uses a highly unusual technique to express the color of pixels, allowing many more colors to appear on screen than would otherwise be possible”.

Here’s what Remz has announced via the EAB forums which is linked below. “Hello coders, While still working on Hamulet, I was experimenting with the possibility of drawing HAM bobs and wondering if this has been attempted before: I captured a short video snippet at 50 fps to show a sort of proof-of-concept, running on Amiga 500 OCS (1MB chip) here. One of main concern of HAM bobs is the large amount of chip memory they require, but also how to manage fringing”. 

“You can see in my video that the fringing is barely noticeable. However, my ‘bobs’ are not moving: they are stationary. In this state, their usage in a game would be mostly for animated stationary objects, or other innovative ideas. Also, I’ve set one of the HAM index colors to show a copper gradient which scrolls at a lower speed to create a parallax effect. I do not know if this has been attempted on a HAM screen before. I wanted to try using the blitter to draw a sort of ‘parallax layer’ using a mask but the runtime cost seemed to be high compared to the potential gameplay benefit”.

For further information and developments here’s the Link :1) Source