Loved writing 68k on the Amiga using ASMone, studied a lot of demoscene work (had no choice, had to hack into many Amiga demos to even run on my NTSC-only Amiga 1000), coming to understand how the Amiga's custom chipset worked and writing little demos that made pretty pictures that friends showed around.
One of the most beautiful things about the Amiga is that Copper. It was more responsible than even the Blitter for the smoothness of Amiga's visuals. The dragging entire screens of different resolutions was entirely in the Copper, which was a sort of dedicated graphics processor that only knew like 4 instructions (if I remember right).
Importantly, entirely independent of the CPU, it could wait for a precise point as the CRT beam swipes by and stuff values into Amiga's chipset registers, like display pointers, screen modes, color values, trigger Blitter operations. It meant you could build a whole queue of tasks that run independent of the CPU and deterministically locked to screen timing, and still have tons of CPU cycles left over to make fun stuff happen.
Oh yes, the copper. I remember the cycling „copper bars“ from a lot of intros/demos (including my own). You could set any new color every few pixels - incredible at the time.
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Loved writing 68k on the Amiga using ASMone, studied a lot of demoscene work (had no choice, had to hack into many Amiga demos to even run on my NTSC-only Amiga 1000), coming to understand how the Amiga's custom chipset worked and writing little demos that made pretty pictures that friends showed around.
One of the most beautiful things about the Amiga is that Copper. It was more responsible than even the Blitter for the smoothness of Amiga's visuals. The dragging entire screens of different resolutions was entirely in the Copper, which was a sort of dedicated graphics processor that only knew like 4 instructions (if I remember right).
Importantly, entirely independent of the CPU, it could wait for a precise point as the CRT beam swipes by and stuff values into Amiga's chipset registers, like display pointers, screen modes, color values, trigger Blitter operations. It meant you could build a whole queue of tasks that run independent of the CPU and deterministically locked to screen timing, and still have tons of CPU cycles left over to make fun stuff happen.
Oh yes, the copper. I remember the cycling „copper bars“ from a lot of intros/demos (including my own). You could set any new color every few pixels - incredible at the time.