Screenshot: A 4,096-Color Eye of Jealousy

Images like this one, printed flippantly on the backs of software boxes, provoked impotent scorn in at least one little boy who went home to curse his EGA-constricted PC clone.

[via Wikipedia]

1. [strider_mt2k]

   A while back someone did a photo retrospective of video card and other peripheral boxes showing people with mouth agape as if the performance was making them scream aloud.

   There is all KINDS of crazy random art on boxes of computer…stuff.

2. [JT Montreal]

   Wot? You show this picture, and not so much as a mention, or link to a wikipedia article, of the computer that the picture actually was created on? Shame.

   Let me do it for you:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga (oh, look what’s halfway down the page!)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hold-and-Modify
   (there it is again…)

3. [kidfunctional]

   Ahh, Photon Paint – makes me want to dig out my ST and have another little look at Quantum Paint, or maybe go REALLY old school with neochrome or Degas!

4. [therevengor]

   I still remember the xmas that I got my VGA card.

5. [dero]

   One of my favourite moments when I was in school was my high school “computing” teacher insisting that computers could not (and would never) have more than 16 colours. Our computer suite contained only EGA PCs and black-and-white Macs.

   Despite me bringing in lovely shots of Tutankhamen masks in Amiga magazines, he could not be convinced…

   (Oh, and I was more a Deluxe Paint man, myself)

6. [Stakker]

   Heh… painting in HAM was truly horrible with all the color “bleeding” going on For photos it was nice though, especially in interlaced resolution.

   But real men don’t need more than 32 colors

7. [Clay]

   Oh, HAM, what a fantastic flood of vaguely annoying, yet nostalgia-flavored memories that brings back.

   DeluxePaint could even do animation in that wacky mode. It was somewhat akin to putting wheels on a bathtub.

8. [El Stinko]

   Ahhh, HAM mode. So much promise, so little practical use. As an animator, I cut a jugular to get my A500 with Dpaint IV. Animation! On a computer! in color!

   But HAM mode only served one real purpose: to make PC and Mac people feel inferior. Once you showed off a few images with all those pretty colors you couldn’t do much else in HAM mode. It was too damn slow.

   I did make pretty good use of EHB mode though. A little slow for animation, but I made some cool comics with it (or at least I thought they were cool at the time…). Those were the days.

9. [Lotusmonger]

   The artist here, Louis Markoya, was a protege of Dalí.

   Would Dalí have used an Amiga?

10. [royaltrux]

    “Would Dalí have used an Amiga?”

    Perhaps not a really fitting comparison, but Andy Warhol used an Amiga:

    http://www.boingboing.net/2004/02/04/andy-warhol-and-the-.html

    I miss my A2000HD…that machine was way ahead of it’s time. (but pretty old when I finally retired it in ’97)

11. [jahknow]

    I miss them too. Video Toaster was another fun app.

12. [ausPPC]

    I also had an A2000HD back in the day… It booted from power-on in 11 seconds and re-booted (from a reset) in 10. I did quite a bit of programming on it and whenever things got a bit screwy (I was a novice assembler programmer so things got a bit screwy pretty frequently) I’d just reset and I’d be back into whatever I was doing in less than 15 seconds.

    Have a look at my profile if you want to check out the next-gen PPC Amiga-likes I’ve got.

13. [jimkirk]

    Mmmmmm…..HAM……

    I’ve still got an Amiga 2000 and 4000T, been trying to resurrect them. I’ve mostly got Macs now, but the Amiga, even with old, slow processors, gave a zippier experience than any other computer I’ve had. So far ahead of its time.

    For anyone who hasn’t seen it and wants some sad nostalgia, see The Deathbed Vigil. A video by Dave Haynie on the last days of the Commodore Amiga. http://www.frogpondmedia.com/dbv/index.html

14. [jhhl]

    HAM Mode was pretty slow – so some people just wrote complicated copper lists to swap in the colors needed for each line (Sham mode and dozens of others).
    I also had the HAM-E box which broke all the time. The technology eventually was co opted by the newer chipsets. HAM-E was turned on by a special stream of colors in the top line which then could load 250 or so colors out of a full 24 bit palette. Super Kludgy!

    The stereo sampled audio was a big jump from the rather limited sound chips of the day. Audio and video cycles were interleaved with the CPU’s, so there was no drain on computing while multimedia was going on (as opposed to the Mac)

    Only Amiga Made it possible!

15. [Anonymous]

    to this day i have not seen anything as easy to use as DPaint4 for basic cell animation.