“If you are hoping to go into the industry you’ll find you will be restricted to 16-colour palettes most of the time,” Bullfrog’s artist Paul McLaughlin told Amiga Format readers in November 1992. The Amiga had a palette of 4,096 colours, but a game screen could use only a few of them at once. The look that people remember from Amiga games and pictures, the smooth ramps of shading, the metal that seemed to shine, the skies that faded smoothly from one colour to another, came from artists making 16 or 32 colours do the work of hundreds, mostly by hand, mostly in one program: Deluxe Paint.
Fast facts
- Palette: 4,096 colours, of which a low-resolution screen shows up to 32 (64 in Extra Half-Brite) and a high-resolution screen up to 16.
- HAM: all 4,096 at once, with fringes at sharp edges; used mostly for still pictures.
- Main tool: Deluxe Paint, from November 1985; HAM painting needed other programs, such as Photon Paint and DigiPaint, until Deluxe Paint IV in 1991.
- Techniques: ramps of shades, hand-placed dithering, anti-aliasing, colour cycling, and copper gradients.
- Other sources: video digitisers, which turned photographs into Amiga pictures.
The hardware behind it
The Amiga’s colour chip, Denise, keeps 32 colour registers, and each can hold any of 4,096 colours. A low-resolution screen can use all 32, a high-resolution one 16. The Atari ST, its rival, showed 16 colours from 512, and the Commodore 64 had 16 fixed colours rationed by 8×8 cells. On the Amiga the artist chose every colour, which is why Amiga palettes were built rather than accepted.
Two six-bitplane modes went further. Extra Half-Brite adds a darker copy of each of the 32 colours, useful for shadows. Hold-and-modify, or HAM, can put all 4,096 colours on screen at once, but each pixel can change only one component of its left-hand neighbour’s colour, so sharp edges smear. Fringing and the cost in memory and processor time kept HAM mostly to still pictures.
The other tricks needed no extra colours. The copper, a coprocessor that rewrites chip registers as the screen is drawn, could change the background colour on every line, so a sky could fade through far more shades than the palette held. By 1994 The One could say that “almost every Amiga game uses the Copper list to graduate the colour of the ground and sky”. Colour cycling, which Deluxe Paint offered from its first version, rotated a range of palette entries so that water seemed to flow and lights to chase, while the picture itself stayed still.
Deluxe Paint
Electronic Arts released Dan Silva’s Deluxe Paint in November 1985, a few months after the Amiga itself, and it became the program almost every Amiga artist used. It let an artist cut out any part of a picture as a brush and stretch, bend, flip or recolour it, and it could spread a range of shades evenly between two colours. Versions II and III added perspective, stencils, anti-aliasing and animation. For HAM, artists had to leave it: in 1990 Amiga Format’s guide recommended Photon Paint 2 and DigiPaint 3 for that mode, until HAM arrived in Deluxe Paint IV in 1991.
Defender of the Crown (1986), the game many people bought to show what an Amiga could do, was drawn in Deluxe Paint by a team led by Jim Sachs, mostly in the 320×200, 32-colour mode.
How the artists worked
In November 1992 Amiga Format asked artists from Bullfrog, Domark and Psygnosis how they used Deluxe Paint. Their answers describe the look from the inside.
McLaughlin sketched on paper first, to see whether a picture would work “using the palette you are restricted to”, which for game graphics was 16 colours. For intro screens, when there was memory to spare, he used up to 32, built from “four or five basic colours with up to four additional shades of each”. He liked dark pictures with strong highlights: “By leaving a lot of the picture black, and using dark shades graduating into highlights, you can produce some very vivid images which are very atmospheric. This way you can also get away with a low-colour palette.”
The Domark artists warned against the program’s automatic tools. The spray can gave “a computery effect”, and “it is often better to dither and shade things by hand, especially if there are areas of high contrast”. Their other rule was to “always use anti-aliasing”, adding in-between shades along edges “to compensate for the low resolution of the screen”, and they noted that one extra shade of each colour was enough to do it. Psygnosis’s Jeff Bramfitt found that Deluxe Paint’s gradient fill had “only a random dithering option, no ordered method”, so he smoothed his gradients “pixel by pixel”. Psygnosis built game backgrounds from reusable blocks, picked up as brushes and flipped or rotated to fit.
Studios became known for their looks. At the Bitmap Brothers, the artists Dan Malone and Mark Coleman drew much of the polished, metallic style of their games. Team17’s Amiga games, from Alien Breed to Superfrog, sold on their looks. Psygnosis put Roger Dean’s paintings on its boxes, and Reflections’ Shadow of the Beast (1989) filled the screen with 13 layers of parallax scenery.
Pictures through a lens
Not every Amiga picture was drawn. Video digitisers such as NewTek’s Digi-View turned a camera’s picture into an Amiga screen, and Amiga Format’s 1990 guide, Get the Most Out of Your Amiga, explained how to get good results. It recommended a black-and-white camera, because “black and white cameras tend to have a higher resolution than their colour counterparts and they’re a good deal cheaper”; three or four fluorescent lamps, “as these simulate daylight convincingly”; and a tripod or copy stand, since any movement left “wavy lines or an out-of-focus look”.
The guide’s advice shows the same palette thinking as the artists’. “When using 32 colours or less, it is a good idea to raise the sharpness level as this increases dithering and smooths out colour bands”, while lowering it removed “the ‘confetti’ or haze from 4096-colour pictures”. And: “If you are digitising a picture into 32 colours or less, try to have a plain background behind the subject. A single-colour background will not detract from the main object, and it gives the illusion that more colours are available in the area of interest.”
Sources
- Amiga Format issue 40, November 1992, “How to DPaint” by Andrew Nuttall, Asam Ahmad and Brian Larkman: p. 32 (Paul McLaughlin of Bullfrog), p. 39 (Domark), p. 41 (Jeff Bramfitt and Mike Waterworth of Psygnosis).
- Amiga Format, Get the Most Out of Your Amiga (1990): p. 24 (paint packages: Deluxe Paint III, Photon Paint 2 and DigiPaint 3 for HAM), p. 32 (“Digitisers: Getting the Best Results”) and p. 55 (NewTek’s Digi-View).
- Amiga Hardware Reference Manual, 3rd edition (Commodore-Amiga, Addison-Wesley, 1991): colour registers, hold-and-modify and Extra Half-Brite, as cited in the Denise entry.
- Atari ST Internals (Abacus Software, 1986), p. 57: 16 colours on screen from 512, as cited in the Atari ST entry.
- The One issue 66, March 1994: work-in-progress feature on Guardian (copper gradients in “almost every Amiga game”).
- ACE issue 22, July 1989, p. 84: Deluxe Paint first released in November 1985.
- The Deluxe Paint entry and its sources: brushes, Spread, colour cycling, versions and HAM in Deluxe Paint IV.
- The Defender of the Crown entry and its sources: Jim Sachs’s team, Deluxe Paint and the 32-colour mode.
- The Bitmap Brothers, Team17, Roger Dean and Shadow of the Beast entries and their sources.
- The Dithering entry and its sources: the Commodore 64’s colour cells.