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Jim Sachs was one of the early masters. The Wikipedia article about him does not do him justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Sachs
One amazing thing was that even after the Amiga became available, he continued simultaneously making great art on the C-64.
I also used that LORA and some video models to try to make a little movie with the same style[2]
Here's a guide on how to generate LORAs too if you're interested[3]
Finally, there's a DeluxePaint clone someone released that is pretty cool to play around with[4]
[1]: https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be
[3]: https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-ful...
[4]: https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify
It's straightforward to convert HAM to PNG etc.
It would have sometimes been used together with interlaced mode to double the number of lines and that did flicker.
Two big reasons. First, it's about running memory chips in parallel to increase bandwidth. Image data was hard to get to the screen fast enough with hardware in that era.
Second it allowed for simple backwards compatibility. Programs were used to writing directly to video memory, and in an EGA card the start of the video memory was valid CGA data. The rest of the colour data was in a separate bit plane.
In terms of colors the most popular VGA modes (320x200 or 320x240, 256 color palette, 18 bit color depth) are superior to the most popular Amiga graphics modes (320Ă—200 or 320x256, 32 color palette, 12 bit color depth).
But somehow Amiga graphics is still often nicer.
Now for the shameless plug... My game's protagonist is an Amiga fan and the Amiga has a little cameo in it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
Technology advanced much more rapidly in those days. Similar to how hard drive capacity seemed to double every six months for a while, or how there's a new bleeding edge AI model every three months today.
Also, VGA had 256 colors. The Amiga had 4,096 simultaneously.
Of course in 1987 a Macintosh II with a fully expanded "Toby" framebuffer could not only do 256 colours, it could do it in 640x480 mode where as a PS/2's VGA could only do 16 colours at that resolution. And an Amiga could only do flickervision at that res.
Of course with technology improving all the time, not having a updated chipset circa 1987 that at least had a progressive scan 640x480(ish) is one of those things that really killed the chances of Amiga as a serious computer. They only got that circa 1990, and "Super VGA" was already just about becoming a thing in the PC world (and Microsoft had kinda got round to making a version of Windows that didn't suck by then). I'm not sure if the mythical Ranger had a progressive mode, but it's it does show how Commodore inability to keep the custom chips updated in a timely mannner slowly sunk the system...
If cost is no issue, the PS/2 also had the 8514/A card that could do 256 colours at 1024x768. And there was also the PGC from 1984 that could do 256 colours at 640x480.
That's the highly special hold-and-modify mode (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify). I tried pretty hard to word my comment fairly, remembering the sometimes legendary tenacity of Amiga fans. (Which nowadays includes yours truly.)
Fun memory: I was with my best friend at another friend's place and his father called him to do some chore. He had to quickly mow the small lawn or something like that. So we decided to prank him: I don't remember all the details but basically we launched Deluxe Paint and simulated an Amiga "guru meditation" using a font that wasn't even correct (I think because we were in 320x256 while the real guru meditation was using a mode with smaller pixels). Then in broken english we wrote something like this:
"Hardware failure. If you reboot or turn off your computer it is going to broke forever"
We then did a color cycling between red and black for one of the color and put the drawing software in "full screen".
When our friend came back, we played dumb and said we had no idea what happened but that apparently we really shouldn't turn the computer off. We managed to hold it for something like ten minutes while he though his computer was done for good but we were dying inside.
All three of us remember that prank to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
P.S: as a side note with the help of Claude Code CLI / Sonnet 4.6 I managed to recompile a 30+ years old game I wrote in DOS in the early 90s (and for which I still have the source files and assets but not the tooling) and I was using converter (which I wrote back then) to convert files between the .LBM format and a "tweaked" (320x200 / 4 planes) DOS mode I was using for the game (which allowed double-buffering without tearing). I don't remember the details but I take it that if we had .LBM picture files, me and the artist where using Deluxe Paint on the Amiga.