it's really a very advanced version of a bit-blitter, which is why the Amiga was so great |
Amiga? I like you Crumas ;)
Did you ever program the Amiga? Amiga is the reason I'm a software engineer and it was on a A1000 I learned to code. I learned on it when I was 14/15 years old. I still remember my first game (never finished, of course). It was a R-Type-kind side-scrolling shooter.
The Amiga architecture was the best. A Motorola 68000 CPU with 3 co-processors all with female names: Agnus, Denise and Paula. It was a pretty frustrating experience to start programming in 68k assembler but it was totally worth it.
Do you remember Denises's hardware sprites? They were limited to 8 sprites 16 pixels wide or 4 sprites 32 pixels wide (if we tied 2 together). But for me, the most amazing hardware piece of the Amiga was the Copper (both Blitter and Copper were part of the Agnus co-processor). I still remember using the copper to change my resolution from 320x200 to 640x400 mid screen. Also the Copper could reassign hardware sprites slots to new sprites as soon as the previous sprites got processed, completely change the color palette (within Amiga's amazing 4096 colors) and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Man the Amiga was the shit...
