Even without overlays, being able to reuse the same bitmap with multiple stretches of the palette (by combining it with a solid colour as palette offset) was nice. It got you a bit more variety in the scene when memory was tight, and memory was always tight.
Back in my greenhorn days on the Amiga, I remember feeling very pleased with myself for "inventing" (hah!) a cheesy semi-dynamic lighting system using a 1-bit stippled gradient plane to effectively switch the main bitmap between "bright" and "dark" sub-palettes, at no performance cost.
I'm sure this wasn't original, of course, but back before the Web most hobbyists were trapped in their own little silos reinventing the wheel over and over again. It was fun. Then Quake came out with its -ahem- rather better lightmapping and... yeah, couldn't really kid yourself any more.
Back in my greenhorn days on the Amiga, I remember feeling very pleased with myself for "inventing" (hah!) a cheesy semi-dynamic lighting system using a 1-bit stippled gradient plane to effectively switch the main bitmap between "bright" and "dark" sub-palettes, at no performance cost.
I'm sure this wasn't original, of course, but back before the Web most hobbyists were trapped in their own little silos reinventing the wheel over and over again. It was fun. Then Quake came out with its -ahem- rather better lightmapping and... yeah, couldn't really kid yourself any more.