Wow.  I spent many an hour drawing images in that paint program that 
allowed you to use HAM.  I can't remember what it was called now, but I 
still have some of those whopping 320x240 images on floppies.

HAM was an amazing kludge, and it got you the graphics of a high end 
machine for under $1000.  How times have changed.

By the way, the Juggler was what convinced me to get an Amiga instead of 
a PC (although I did buy a 386 about 2 years later) and I got a lot of 
mileage out of my A500.  I seem to remember hearing that the Juggler was 
originally rendered on a VAX.

David Buck wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
>> David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
>>> This effectively became the showcase picture of DKBTrace in the very
>>> early days.
>>
>> I can imagine.  Back then, there were no 3D accelerator cards, no 
>> Playstation.
>> Just simple 2D bitmaps on screen...
>>
>>
> 
> On the Amiga, the highest graphics format I could display this in 
> properly was 320x400.  The mode was called HAM (Hold and modify) and I 
> had to write a special program to produce it.  The format used 6 bits 
> per pixel.  Of the 6 bits, 2 bits told you what to do with the other 4.
> 
> 00 - interpret the other 4 bits as the index of one of 16 color 
> registers of 12 bits each
> 01 - take repeat the previous color replacing the red value with the 
> lower 4 bits
> 10 - take repeat the previous color replacing the green value with the 
> lower 4 bits
> 11 - take repeat the previous color replacing the blue value with the 
> lower 4 bits
> 
> Late in the history of DKBTrace, I agreed to let an Amiga hardware 
> peripheral company use the images for advertising in return for one of 
> their higher-end graphics cards that got closer to 24 bits of color but 
> still used the hold and modify technique.
> 
> David Buck

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