The playing area is so small because at this time, the Amiga graphics hardware was embarrassingly slow (due to Commodore ineptitude and unwillingness to sink any significant money into R&D), and the clunky requirement to do a chunky-to-planar conversion on pixels before display. Main CPUs were typically not that awesome either; once we got into the Pentium era Intel started whooping up on Motorola 68k CPUs quite badly.
HAM8 was interesting; apparantly, if you picked your base palette carefully and sacrificed a few pixel columns on the left-hand side of the screen you could achieve a true or basically true 252 or whatever thousand color (full AGA palette) display at any pixel, using only 8 bits per pixel. I never owned an AGA-equipped Amiga so I never got to check any of that stuff out. Pretty stupid of me, I loved the general design of the A1200. It was a nice, compact computer with decent enough oomph considering the lightweight nature of the Kickstart OS, especially if you slotted in a turbo board.
HAM8 was interesting; apparantly, if you picked your base palette carefully and sacrificed a few pixel columns on the left-hand side of the screen you could achieve a true or basically true 252 or whatever thousand color (full AGA palette) display at any pixel, using only 8 bits per pixel. I never owned an AGA-equipped Amiga so I never got to check any of that stuff out. Pretty stupid of me, I loved the general design of the A1200. It was a nice, compact computer with decent enough oomph considering the lightweight nature of the Kickstart OS, especially if you slotted in a turbo board.
