I just don’t see a way to justifiably call the Amiga a 16 bit machine. Although the A1000 had some 16 bit hardware paths, a maxed out A3000 definitely wasn’t 16 bit, and they were nearly completely compatible with each other minus newer features.
Amiga was full-on 32 bit machine. It’s weird to hear it called anything else.
I also used that LORA and some video models to try to make a little movie with the same style[2]
Here's a guide on how to generate LORAs too if you're interested[3]
Finally, there's a DeluxePaint clone someone released that is pretty cool to play around with[4]
[1]: https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be
[3]: https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-ful...
Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38431514 - Nov 2023 (20 comments)
Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17783531 - Aug 2018 (27 comments)
The Amiga Boing Ball Explained - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330689 - Aug 2016 (56 comments)
The Amiga Graphics Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10972849 - Jan 2016 (24 comments)
You can see and experience old things, but it's impossible to recreate the context in which they were originally experienced. You can't erase your experience of 40 years of technical progress which makes this sort of thing feel merely quaint in comparison.
Two big reasons. First, it's about running memory chips in parallel to increase bandwidth. Image data was hard to get to the screen fast enough with hardware in that era.
Second it allowed for simple backwards compatibility. Programs were used to writing directly to video memory, and in an EGA card the start of the video memory was valid CGA data. The rest of the colour data was in a separate bit plane.
In terms of colors the most popular VGA modes (320x200 or 320x240, 256 color palette, 18 bit color depth) are superior to the most popular Amiga graphics modes (320×200 or 320x256, 32 color palette, 12 bit color depth).
But somehow Amiga graphics is still often nicer.
Fun memory: I was with my best friend at another friend's place and his father called him to do some chore. He had to quickly mow the small lawn or something like that. So we decided to prank him: I don't remember all the details but basically we launched Deluxe Paint and simulated an Amiga "guru meditation" using a font that wasn't even correct (I think because we were in 320x256 while the real guru meditation was using a mode with smaller pixels). Then in broken english we wrote something like this:
"Hardware failure. If you reboot or turn off your computer it is going to broke forever"
We then did a color cycling between red and black for one of the color and put the drawing software in "full screen".
When our friend came back, we played dumb and said we had no idea what happened but that apparently we really shouldn't turn the computer off. We managed to hold it for something like ten minutes while he though his computer was done for good but we were dying inside.
All three of us remember that prank to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
P.S: as a side note with the help of Claude Code CLI / Sonnet 4.6 I managed to recompile a 30+ years old game I wrote in DOS in the early 90s (and for which I still have the source files and assets but not the tooling) and I was using converter (which I wrote back then) to convert files between the .LBM format and a "tweaked" (320x200 / 4 planes) DOS mode I was using for the game (which allowed double-buffering without tearing). I don't remember the details but I take it that if we had .LBM picture files, me and the artist where using Deluxe Paint on the Amiga.
I think a key aspect of the magic is that the technical constraints force art to be representational instead of photo realistic. There just weren't enough pixels or colors, so artists had to make intentional choices about where to focus their limited pixels and palette to imply the detail they couldn't fully draw and that made their images evocative in ways photo-realism usually isn't. Earlier digital graphics with 4 to 16 colors and resolutions around 160 x 120 to were generally 'moving icons' as seen in arcade games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Galaga and most late-70s and early 80s home computers (Apple II, Atari 400/800, C64, etc). Of course, this wasn't just due to pixel and palette limitations but also the 8-bit CPUs at sub-4 MHz clock speeds and limited memory (usually 8k to 32k game size).
It wasn't until around the mid-80s when arcade and personal computer hardware with 16-bit CPUs at 8 Mhz+ and 256K memory hit that magic middle-ground we see as unique to that era of computer and arcade graphics. By the mid-90s it was already starting to vanish as palettes grew beyond 256 colors and resolutions exceeded 15Khz analog video (roughly 240 lines high). A great example of the peak visuals possible from the painstaking care and artistic virtuosity of this era can be seen in the incredible hand-drawn sprites of "Street Fighter II": https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_sheets/index.html.
The other reason I think so many of us see the art style of this era as uniquely special is it ended suddenly with a huge leap to deep color palettes, higher resolutions and 3D rendered graphics. This happened due to the unique nature of analog 15Khz video and the desire to avoid interlace flicker, causing resolutions for most consumer-priced computers and game consoles to max out in the mid-80s at less than 240 vertical lines. Since artists generally want to work in roughly square pixels, this limits horizontal resolution to around 320. So, for nearly a decade the benefits of using the existing televisions consumers already had, limited the visual output of home computers and game consoles to 240 lines. It even froze the evolution of most arcade machines due to the cost savings of using CRTs made for TVs. Even one of the last 2D arcade hardware platforms, Capcom's 1996 CPS III, was limited to 384 x 224 resolution. After this unprecedented 'hold' of nearly ten years on the march of pixel progress, the next increment most consumers saw was a huge and seemingly sudden leap - a doubling of vertical and horizontal resolutions and a jump from 4 and 8-bit palettes (16 to 256 colors) straight to 16-bit palettes (65,535 colors). And this happened at almost the same moment the rush to 3D rendered graphics killed any interest in hand-drawn pixels. In just a few years, virtually all the computer and game pixels consumers saw changed dramatically in both scope and style, creating a clear divide between hand-drawn 2D pixel art at analog resolutions and everything that came after.