Why cant noobs figure out bitplanes?

Oh yes, it took me a while to figure it out too, the trick is getting your hands dirty, and its easy mode.

Bitplanes is a funky way of `layering' planes of memory in such a way that it saves video memory for the amount of stuff to be display.

In atariland, a single pixel can have 16 colors (0-f), and this color is set by 4 bits that are organized in a funky way.

Rather than being organized sequentially like:

Pixel0 = 0..3 bits, Pixel1 = 4..7, Pixel2 = 8..11 etc  each bit is grouped with 16 other pixels. Hence you get a bit layout of:

						pixel
		0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15
bpl1	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-				0x00		
bpl2	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-				0x02	
bpl3	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-				0x04
bpl4	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-				0x06

So in these 8 bytes, 16 pixel values are stored, using 4 bits (4 bites, per 16 pixels = 64 bits = 8 bytes)