The 4×4 copperchunky rotozoom Amiga competition is coming along nicely!
Back in 2016, Photon/Scoopex released Grade My Waterbear, a true-color rotozoomer intro, along with a bold claim:
This is the first and only maximum size, minimum bandwidth truecolor 4x4 OCS chunky mode. No-one will beat those specs, so.
If you’re unfamiliar with Amiga tech-tech, this is about doing image effects with the help of the Copper, the display coprocessor that can do things like “wait for screen position x,y and change the background color”. This way you can get around palette limitations (usually 32 colors at a time) and use all 4,096 colors of the Amiga – albeit in fat 4×4 pixels.
Of course, there are hundreds of variations of this technique, all with different technical aspects and limitations. That’s not important here, the main thing is: Photon’s oldschool bragging worked nicely, triggering countless efforts to one-up the effect under very specific constraints – even years after the fact. “Only 50 columns? Pathetic! I can do 52!” :)
The intros even come with helpful little scales nowadays!
Up until today, we’ve got all these gems related to the original 2016 production. And I’m pretty sure we haven’t seen the end of it. Isn’t that delightful?
Update: It goes on already! Days after this post, Batman Group came out with another rotozoomer (added below). Now the cropped image size I chose for the screenshots isn’t enough to display all the columns anymore, hehe… :)
| Production | Who and when |
|---|---|
 |
Scoopex |
 |
Damones This seems to merely have coincided with Photon’s release, but what a gorgeous HAM rotozoomer nevertheless! |
 |
Damones |
 |
Loonies & Struts |
 |
Batman Group |
 |
Loonies & TTE |
 |
Lemon. |
 |
Batman Group & Capsule |
Anyhoo… The point of this post is not to announce that I will be taking part in this as well. Cycle-exact CPU writes? Emulator-breaking hardware abuse? Hell, no! :) With regards to rotozooming, I’m happy with my own little bootblock from 2016.
But: Speaking of emulator breaking (i. e. using tricks so advanced that they’re not properly emulated yet) – I was a little worried when I read that “…And One Up The Sleeve” requires the latest WinUAE release to render correctly. “Sigh, time to finally update Coppenheimer as well,” I thought.
But no! Turns out the rather dated vAmiga core used in Coppenheimer already emulated Hannibal’s tricks perfectly. So, in addition to compiling some pretty screenshots and links for any Amiga-inclined blog readers, I would like to praise Dirk W. Hoffmann for the stellar emulation effort with vAmiga, and also mithrendal for the vAmigaWeb project!
One day a Coppenheimer update will come… I’m sure of it. :) I would really like to provide links to those intros with a running emulator instead of blurry YouTube recordings (but that’s more of a question of ROM copyright and web safety concerns).
