Blitter

Before the Amiga, chips for Block Image Transfer operations were simple affairs, some even unable to mask and shift the image. Along came Jay Miner with the ambitious Amiga Blitter that showed the power of a versatile chip off-loading the CPU.

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It inspired the BLIT chips on the various graphics cards that followed it and which is responsible for polygon filling operations in your PC graphics card today.

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The Amiga Blitter supports quite advanced operations and lots of interesting combinations, like:

• unlimited moving and animated "sprites" - bobs.
• graphics layer manipulation including feedback transformations
• scrolling, warping, scaling
• line drawing, with dot-dash etc patterns
• polygon filling with patterns
• MFM decoding (use this to make a really fast floppy disk track loader!)

It's controlled by loading its custom registers (either with the CPU or the Copper) with setup values for the operation, the final register starting the blit.