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During the development of the Amiga, one of the targets was a game console with 32KB of RAM. How was it supposed to work?

  • by blitting ahead of the beam with the Copper to avoid double buffering?
  • was dual playfield the expected default gfx mode (RAM & ROM was limited, more than 8 colors gfx assets was taxing)?
  • what kind of games were envisioned? games like Robotron 2084 without background and lots of moving parts?
  • was the ROM on the cartridge supposed to be directly accessible for the Blitter?
  • how big was the ROM supposed to be?
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    The Amiga chipset is the spiritual successor to the ANTIC and GTIA. These were used in both the Atari 5200 console and the Atari 8-bit micros. So the aim should be a more capable version of 5200.
    – wizofwor
    Sep 22 at 7:09
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    It seems the 32KB was beant to be mainly video memory. I can't find much inforamtion on this "original 32KB design (game console version)", as it is referenced in the document, but my guess is that it was to use rom cartridges (mayby with the option for ROM/RAM cartridges), so the internal RAM needed would mostly be for the video memory.
    – UncleBod
    Sep 22 at 9:48
  • I read: "As an example: the arcade game Galaxian would be easy" but you have to account for palette coupling between each pair of sprite (which makes Pacman impossible without blitting Pacman because of 5 different color configs for sprites). Also Galaxian uses a starfield which can be reproduced with sprites, but makes the copperlist impossible to create if you want to do hardware scrolling on each row. Not so trivial :)
    – Jean-François Fabre
    Sep 22 at 14:41

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