| From: | Jim Peters |
| Date: | 13 Oct 2000 at 08:52:16 |
| Subject: | Re: AMIOPEN: Hardware |
On Fri, Oct 13, 2000 at 12:11:57AM -0500, Shawn wrote:
> No I didn't the facts remain the chips are there the AMIGA is true 24bit hence when
> we make a 24bit pic the pc nor the mac and not even an SGI can see it and it looks
> terrible.The AMIGA shows all 24bits the rest show 8bits .
> SO they can LIE and we can't tell the truth
> No they said this is 128bit color and so on. They advertise it like that.
24 bit colour means 8 bits each for red, green and blue.
Even if your chip can output 24 bit colour, it may be limited in other
ways. For instance, roughly speaking, there are typically 3 modes
used on a PC: 8 bit, 16-bit or 24-bit.
In 8-bit, a palette of 256 24-bit colours is used. This gives the
typical crap display - images have to be dithered and so on.
In 16-bit, 5 bits is used for red, 6 for green and 5 for blue. This
gives less overall possible colours, but everything is much smoother.
You can have 65536 different colours on your screen at the same time.
In 24-bit mode, each pixel can independently have any of the 2^24 (16
million) colours that are available.
So, the AGA amiga can output 24-bit colour, but only through a limited
palette, which puts it way behind modern PC cards which output true
24-bit colour for each pixel. You can have 16 million different
colours on the screen if you want. The only reason the Amiga couldn't
do this is because the technology simply wasn't feasible at that time,
at that price. The Amiga may have been well ahead of it's time, but a
lot has happened in chip development since then.
Jim