Hold-And-Modify - Limitations of HAM

Limitations of HAM

HAM mode places restrictions on the value of adjacent pixels on each horizontal line of the playfield. In order to render two arbitrary colors adjacently, it may take up to two intermediary pixels to change to the intended color (if the red, green and blue components must all be modified). In the worst case this reduces the horizontal chroma resolution from 704 pixels to as low as 240 (for comparison, contemporary technologies LaserDisc and VHS had chroma resolutions of 40 at 0.4 MHz). This problem is particularly noticeable at areas of sharp contrast (strong horizontal image gradients), where an undesirable multi-hued artifact or "fringe" may appear. Various rendering techniques were used to minimize the impact of "fringing" and HAM displays were often designed to incorporate subtle horizontal color gradients, avoiding vertical edges and contrasts.

Additionally, HAM mode does not easily permit arbitrary animation of the display. For example, if an arbitrary portion of the playfield is to be moved to another on-screen position, the Hold-and-Modify values may have to be recomputed on all source and target lines in order to display the image correctly (an operation not well-suited to animation). Specifically, if the left-most edge of the animated object contains any 'modify' pixels, or if the image immediately to the right of the object contains any 'modify' pixels, then those Hold-and-Modify values must be recomputed. An attempt to move an object around the screen (such as with the use of the blitter) will create noticeable fringing at the left and right borders of that image, unless the graphics are specially designed to avoid this. In order to avoid recomputing Hold-and-Modify values and circumvent fringing, the programmer would have to ensure the left-most pixel of every blitter object and the left-most pixel of every line of a scrolling playfield is a 'set' pixel. The palette would have to be designed so that it incorporates every such left-most pixel. Alternatively, a HAM display can be animated by generating pixel values through procedural generation, though this is generally useful for synthetic images only, for example, the 'rainbow' effects used in demos.

Note, however, that Hold-and-Modify only applies to playfield pixels. 128 pixels of sprite data (in DMA mode) per scanline are still available for placement on top of the HAM playfield.