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What is the Amiga Graphics Archive?
The Amiga Graphics Archive is a long-running curated gallery of pixel art and graphics created with or for the Commodore Amiga home computer. Its focus is preservation and presentation: high-quality and rare images, organized into collections rather than dumped into a single feed. The site's own description frames the Amiga's custom chips as the reason its graphics stood apart from other personal computers of the mid-1980s, and the archive exists to document what artists produced on that hardware.
Its collections are grouped by subject and context, which makes browsing purposeful:
- Applications and Games — graphics tied to specific software titles.
- Artists and Sceners — work organized by creator, useful if you already know whose style you want to follow.
- Logos — company and publisher marks, including animated examples.
- Publications — magazine and book scans, such as material from the Das Grosse Amiga Jahrbuch 1987.
- Specials — themed groupings, plus articles on topics like display technology, extra half-bright mode, and screen modes.
The archive has run for years and posts dated updates, so it behaves more like a slowly growing catalog than a news site. A typical visitor is a retro-computing enthusiast, a pixel artist studying period techniques, or someone researching a specific game, publisher or artist. If you are looking for technical explanation rather than images, the articles section is the better entry point; if you want to identify where a familiar image came from, start with Logos, Games or Publications.
For a practical next step, pick one anchor — an artist you remember, or a company whose logos you want to see — and browse that collection first, then follow the cross-links into Applications or Games. The archive's own update notes show the curatorial method: images are restored and re-added when better sources surface, so a collection can deepen over time rather than being fixed at launch.
How can I find graphics by a specific Amiga artist or game company?
Use the site's own category menus rather than a general search box. The Amiga Graphics Archive organizes its material under Artists, Game Companies, and Logos, alongside broader groupings like Applications, Games, Publications, Sceners, and Specials. That structure is the fastest route: pick the person or company first, then browse the images attached to that entry.
A practical sequence:
- Open the Artists section if you know the individual's name.
- Open Game Companies if you know the publisher or developer rather than the artist.
- Try Logos when you are after a company's branding or title screens, since the archive keeps logo collections there — its update notes mention batches from Rainbow Arts, reLINE and Titus, including animated ones.
- Fall back to Publications for images tied to printed sources, such as scans from Das Grosse Amiga Jahrbuch 1987.
The trade-off is that a curated archive reflects what its maintainer has collected and identified, so some artists and companies will be thin or absent, and images credited to a company may not name the individual pixel artist. If a direct match fails, check the Updates page: new additions are logged with dates and descriptions, which often reveals where a particular artist or company has just been expanded.
As a concrete example, if you want Jim Sachs material, look him up under Artists; the archive's own update notes describe restoring his image Multimedia from a badly scaled version, which shows the kind of restoration work that sits behind individual entries. For deeper context on how Amiga images were made and displayed, the Articles section is worth a look — its listed topics include comparison, display technology, Extra Half Bright, and screen modes.
What are the different screen modes and display technologies used in Amiga graphics?
The Amiga Graphics Archive is a curated gallery of pixel art and graphics made with or for the Commodore Amiga, and its article categories point directly at the two topics you asked about: Display Technology and Screen Modes, alongside a comparison article. Those are the archive's own groupings, so they are the best places to see period examples rather than abstract explanations. You can browse them at Amiga Graphics Archive.
Screen modes, in plain terms
Amiga screen modes were largely defined by resolution and colour handling:
- Low resolution, many colours — the everyday workhorse for games, demos and most pixel art, trading detail for a richer palette.
- High resolution, fewer colours — sharper text and line work, but a more limited palette.
- Interlaced modes — double the vertical resolution at the cost of visible flicker on CRTs; useful for still images and desktop work, awkward for fast motion.
- Overscan and border modes — using screen area normally hidden behind the display border, a common trick for full-screen images and demos.
- HAM (Hold-And-Modify) — a mode that produces far more on-screen colours than the base palette by modifying one channel per pixel, excellent for photographic and painted images but prone to colour fringing along horizontal edges.
- Extra Half-Brite — a mode that doubles the apparent palette by adding a half-brightness variant of each colour, handy for shading and anti-aliasing effects.
The archive lists Extra Half Bright as its own article, which suggests it is worth treating as a distinct technique rather than a footnote.
Display technology
"Display technology" here is less about monitors and more about the custom chips that generated the picture. The site's own description credits "an intricate collection of custom chips" for capabilities that were otherwise impossible on personal computers of the era. In practice that meant hardware sprites, bitplane-based playfields, smooth scrolling and a copper/blitter arrangement that let artists and coders manipulate the display while it was being drawn — the reason Amiga graphics often look more animated and layered than contemporary machines.
How to use this
If you are a pixel artist or retro developer, start with the Comparison article to see modes side by side, then open Screen Modes for the technical framing and Display Technology for the hardware context. Use the archive's artists, games and logos sections to see how those trade-offs looked in finished work. A useful decision rule: choose HAM or Extra Half-Brite when colour depth matters more than crisp edges, and low-resolution indexed modes when you need clean sprites and fast motion.
For broader context on the machine itself, Amiga is the current official brand site, though it covers the platform generally rather than this archive's specific articles.
Can I download high-resolution versions of the images for personal use?
Yes, the Amiga Graphics Archive offers multiple download resolutions for its images, and personal use is the context the site appears to assume. The page lists resolution options at 360px, 540px, 720px, 1080px, 1440px, 1800px, and 2160px, so you can pick a size that suits a desktop wallpaper, a reference folder, or a closer look at pixel detail.
Keep in mind that "high resolution" here means a larger rendering of pixel art, not a higher-fidelity source. The archive is built from graphics made with or for the Commodore Amiga, whose native screens were low-resolution by modern standards. Scaling up gives you a bigger file, but it cannot add detail that was never in the original; a 2160px version of a 320×256 image is essentially an enlarged copy. The site also notes that images are copyrighted to their respective owners and credited where possible, so personal use is reasonable while republishing or commercial reuse is not automatically covered.
Amiga Graphics Archive
A practical next step: open the image you want, compare the 1080px and 2160px options side by side, and download the smaller one if the extra size does not reveal anything new. If you plan to use an image publicly, look for the credited artist or rights holder first.
What does the Extra Half Bright mode do and how does it affect Amiga graphics?
Extra Half Bright (EHB) is an Amiga display mode that doubles the number of colours a screen can show without increasing the amount of graphics memory used for the image itself. It takes a standard 32-colour palette and adds a second set of 32 shades at half intensity, giving 64 on-screen colours. The archive lists it as a display-technology article alongside screen modes, which is the right place to look for period examples.
The trade-off is that you do not choose those extra 32 colours freely. Each half-bright entry is derived from one of the original 32, so the palette is effectively fixed as a base set plus its dimmed twins. Artists used this to fake shading, metallic highlights and depth in scenes that would otherwise look flat at 32 colours, and it became a recognisable look in Amiga artwork of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Because the extra colours come from halving, the mode tends to produce muted, darker companion tones rather than a fully independent second palette.
If you want to see the effect rather than read about it, start with the archive's Applications, Artists and Games sections and compare images that use EHB against plain 32-colour work; the difference usually shows up in gradients and shadowed areas. For background on the hardware, the site's Display Technology and Screen modes articles sit next to the Comparison and Cyber Assault 556 entries. The archive is at Amiga Graphics Archive, and its updates page notes ongoing additions of rare and restored images, so it is worth revisiting if you are tracing a specific artist or publisher.
How can I contribute my own Amiga graphics or report an issue with the archive?
Contact the archive operator directly: the site gives amiga at lychesis dot net as the address for issues and suggestions, and updates show the curator regularly adds newly found or restored images from outside contributors. There is no public upload form or submission portal described, so email is the route.
What to include when you write
- For a submission: the image itself (or a link), the artist's name, the program or format it was made in, and where you got it. The archive cares about provenance — update notes mention restoring an image to something close to its original state after finding only a badly scaled copy, so a clean original beats a re-saved screenshot.
- For a correction: the page or collection name, what is wrong (misattribution, wrong artist, wrong title, duplicate), and your evidence. The archive states copyright belongs to the respective owners and is credited where possible, so attribution fixes are squarely in scope.
- For a technical issue: the resolution setting you were using (the site offers 360px through 2160px) and the browser, since display problems often depend on which resolution variant loaded.
Practical expectations
This is a one-person curated gallery, not a community platform. The updates log shows batches arriving in bursts — logos from several publishers in one month, book scans in another — which suggests submissions are reviewed and published when the curator has time to identify and process them. Don't expect instant posting, and expect that not everything sent will fit the archive's quality bar.
If your interest is broader Amiga graphics history rather than this specific collection, Amiga Graphics Archive is worth browsing first to see whether your material duplicates something already catalogued under Applications, Artists, Games, Logos, Publications, Sceners or Specials.
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