Part of the GTA 1 story, is how the 16/32bit high colour modes came about. This engine, came about with me speaking to the SCITECH guys. There was a message from someone at i-Glasses (posted Jun 17, 1996), after a 320×200 high colour mode, on comp.graphics.algorithms, I joined in saying this would be great for games, and a stepping stone to hires, since lowres 24bit is faster than hires 8 bit (less pixels to draw). Someone pointed out Univbe gave these modes on some cards, then a programmer from SciTech said that they had a new version coming out with much wider support. So, I quickly did some tests, and it turned out writing 32bits was exactly the same speed as writing 16bits, and 8 bits. This meant we could run rendering at virtually the same speed. I then got one section of GTA running in 32bit, and after looking, Dave decided we needed this. Believe it or not, this added almost a year to the project, all the graphics needed redoing, along with a new multi palette system (Each tile was only 256 colours, but we had any number of palettes). This was shown at a trade show, and I believe there were lots of programmers hovering around, asking how it was done.. This is a copy of that news group posting….
