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0 pointsdansalvato2y ago0 comments

Amiga has its strengths, but I find that the SNES outperforms it in video games, because the SNES graphics chips were designed for video games first and foremost.

One major reason is sprites: Amiga can display 8 4-color sprites, or 4 16-color sprites, and the colors are shared with the bitplanes.

SNES can display 128 16-color sprites, and the sprites get 8 palettes all to themselves.

This leads to much more colorful-looking visuals on SNES. Since Amiga is all bitplanes, enabling more colors and higher resolution results in a massive performance hit. Most game entities would need to be blit on top of the background, and then the background "restored" every frame that entity moves. SNES' native support for multiple tile layers and good sprites means that the CPU can do a lot less work to achieve a lot more.

Amiga can do some very cool stuff that SNES can't, especially with the blitter, but SNES is much more practical and powerful for video games.

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vardump2y ago

"One major reason is sprites: Amiga can display 8 4-color sprites, or 4 16-color sprites, and the colors are shared with the bitplanes."

Per scanline. However, you can multiplex them with copper to your hearts content.

"SNES can display 128 16-color sprites, and the sprites get 8 palettes all to themselves."

32 per scanline, but then almost all of those sprites would need to be 8x8. Just 17 of 16 pixels wide sprites.

Findecanor2y ago

Amiga sprites were also unlimited in height.

BTW. On AGA (Amiga 1200, 4000 and CD32) each sprite could be 32 or 64 pixels wide but I don't think that feature was used much by games.

nikau2y ago

> because the SNES graphics chips were designed for video games first and foremost.

So was the Amigas chipset - it was originally designed as a games console and pivoted to a home computer when the games console market tanked in the early 80s.

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