Amiga 1984 CES BOING demo in 4K!!!!!!!!!!!

[@azch6424]

I worked for Commodore UK in the early 80s when the Amiga came out. This bouncing ball demo was out of this world. I even went on to write a similar one for the Commodore 64 a few months after that and we had it playing on the demo C-64 machine in Commodore Corby reception area!

[@madcommodore]

Very interesting, thanks for posting. I remember back then hearing that people had done the bouncing ball for C64, Atari 800, Atari ST. I think I got this demo with some disks that came with a used Amiga 1000 I bought in 1987

[@azch6424]

@@madcommodore Thanks. Its good to know people still remember it. One of the most memorable/hilarious Amiga demos I went to in a flash London hotel sticks to mind. It was where they played the different sounds it can make like a male voice or a female one. It went like this "I can speak with a female voice" [in a female voice] "I can speak with a male voice" [in a male voice] "Or I can speak like a real computer" [In a monotone robotic voice] The crowd were in stitches!

[@johnsmith1953x]

@@madcommodoreMany of those bouncing balls demos fell far short of the Amiga one. Primarily, most were a single or two colors, while the original Amiga Boing demo was 32 colors (for shading and whatno) AND, most importantly, you can scroll the screen down and run ANOTHER boing demo or other program! That was MIND BLOWING in 1984!!

[@madcommodore]

@@johnsmith1953x Not only did it scroll but the Amiga was the only computer you could mix screen displays of low and high resolution in the OS. The Amiga ball is two identical shades of red/blue on the Amiga, there is no animation of the ball it's just colour cycling. The move impressive version of this demo is now lost, it had some message and the ball would shade the message using the bitplane method Amiga uses. R J Mical talked about it, I think it was a Commodore logo over the ball. Impressive for the time still due to the sound and the size of the ball and the fact it is running in the OS. Only the Archimedes version could match it but that was 2 years after Amiga 1000.

[@alexkubrat3868]

All these sounds ware made in garage, and edited with apple II computer. Amazing!

[@madcommodore]

I can't find the documentary where R J Mical is explaining the sound was him and Dave Needle went outside and were recording themselves on tape recorder banging those roller garage doors with foam bats and then playing it into a sound sampling card expansion on an Apple II. Star Wars (1970s original movie) had the same sort of thing, they actually did with Star Wars to get the laser blast sound effect haha a great story indeed. All it really shows is how fast you can move a static 100x100 pixel 4 bitmap area whilst playing 2 sample channels whilst cycling colour palette registers :)

[@blenderbachcgi]

@@madcommodore Here it is. kzbin.info/www/bejne/mXvGgGlobd52mbc

[@madcommodore]

@@blenderbachcgi Ahhh the History of Amiga VHS documentary I think that is, thanks for the link :)

[@fradd182]

Certainly, the most famous demo in history.

[@supakusuta]

It sure is

[@peteralexander2941]

The bouncy beating heart of the amiga :)

[@TheRetroEngine]

This is the one which made me want to buy an Amiga 500. Went from C64 to this. And even saw a C64 demo of it by Allanon. It's included in my top 15 demos of the 80s. Classic stuff.

[@madcommodore]

One of the Amiga documentaries has a bit where RJ Mical talks about going outside to bang on garage door with a foam baseball bat to make the crashing noises (and recorded on an Apple II I believe).

[@dieklaue1]

It even changes direction after boinging on the wall :)

[@madcommodore]

But today we know they just reversed the colour cycling on the same single bitmap moved around :o)

[@jesuszamora6949]

@@madcommodore Still, hell of a feat for 1985. Sucks Commodore was too incompetent to really make it succeed.

[@xander1052]

@@madcommodore honestly that's just smart programming on their part :)

[@TheLawrenceWade]

This will sell a lot of TVs. :) Not to be missed is the way the Amiga was so screwy that it could drive one display at two resolutions at the same time. Not kidding. Thank you for this video.

[@madcommodore]

The Amiga was probably the most sophisticated CRT gun controller (as was the VCS and Atari 400/800 before) to actually build an image on the CRT. Was also horrendously difficult to program in machine code to get the full power. There never has been as huge a gap to the competition as the day the Amiga 1000 was launched I think.

[@saganandroid4175]

The AGA Amigas can do even crazier things.

[@pingasbungus4517]

Demo, sure, but when is the full version coming out?

[@madcommodore]

lol there was a proper polygon based version for the original 1987 Acorn Archimedes I think.

[@bruhchamp16593]

it bounced off the corner at 1:56

[@Kungpaoshizzi]

Thank you for that :) I used to watch that as a kid discovering computers

[@mariosanchezolmedo6898]

My school computer has this as a screensaver

[@madcommodore]

My school computer had crappy MS Windows 1.0 which wasn't even up to Atari ST levels let alone Amiga power lol

[@kurbusmax]

i got a new iphone today, the first thing i did was watch this video. it looks great

[@madcommodore]

lol my eyesight without glasses is too poor to use smartphone screens nowadays otherwise I'd be interested in messing about with them too.

[@Paguun]

I can't get bored watching this.

[@kevinharrison4909]

In hindsight backing the horse of planar graphics were a mistake. Once this marker was laid down albeit to save on ram it could never be changed and other systems overtook it while it just stagnated. Custom chips are only good if you keep updating them. The Amiga had lots of innovation though that was ahead of its time. Sadly a lot has been lost to the ravages of time. I never associated the boing ball with Amigas for me it's got to be the double rainbow tick.

[@madcommodore]

If you are talking about AGA using 8 bitplane 256 colour graphics vs dirt cheap x86 + byte per pixel VGA screen memory of PC yes I totally agree. For the Amiga 1000 planar graphics were full of win, they allow you to do all sorts of fake transparency/parallax effects in the right hands. The biggest problem with AGA A1200 and CD32 is some idiot at Commodore thought it would be a good idea to have all 2mb as Chip RAM. Any game engine that needed more than 1mb of Chip RAM was written by a f%^$king loser. The Megadrive gets by with 128k of 'chip' RAM as does the SNES and they don't have 99% choppy rubbish looking games like the Amiga had to suffer (and why people who worked hard for their money got fed up and just got free pirate copies of games to make sure they didn't get ripped off again). The real problem is almost all of the talent that made the Amiga 1000 was forced out of Commodore (they were asked to move 2000 miles from one side of the USA to the other) and if you look at what RJ and Dave Needle managed to do with both a 6502 CPU for Lynx and what their custom chip genius did for the 3DO (which is just an Acorn Archimedes A3010 computer + custom chip magic + CD drive). Essentially if Jay Miner, RJ Mical and Dave Needle were at Commodore in the early 1990s the successor to the A1200 or the real Commodore 32bit CD based console (not that useless wanker special CD32 cockup that cost more than SNES+Megadrive price combined) you would have had a CD based Amiga as powerful as the 3DO. Oh well.

[@johnsmith1953x]

*40 YEARS AGO!!!*

[@retrogenius8397]

It's an odd demo because to blit the same image (animation is due to palette colour cycling nothing else) and blit an animated image is no difference to Agnus of Amiga if you think about it!

[@retrogenius8397]

True but even the prototype had 256kb RAM separate from the Kickstart protected memory used and it's only a 2bit/3 colour image so wouldn't take that much memory, but it would take a lot of effort to draw them and then put them into a program to use. It's a good demo of how many on screen colours it can display and the stereo sound quality.

[@saganandroid4175]

There was no blitting (and for good reason). They changed the DSTART and DSTOP (for both X and Y) to control when the the non-empty part of the Boing playfield would be shown. This changed where the Boing ball would be displayed, just by changing two registers. Blitting would be utterly wasteful: it would have consumed bus cycles for no reason, would have been hundreds (if not thousands of times) less efficient than making proper use of the exotic Amiga hardware. You are right about the rotation being due to color cycling. However the routine to draw the faceted ball was itself impressive (you can see it drawing if you immediately drag down the Workbench screen after double-clicking on the Boing icon to run the program). And on top of it, it draws the facets while cycling the pen color, which as you pointed out is how the color cycling works.

[@saganandroid4175]

@Svein Are Karlsen There were no sprites used in this demo. At all. The Amiga's exotic hardware allowed whole screens to be treated like sprites, in that you could control where on the display device they would appear. And then there was dual playfield mode. Strictly speaking this demo didn't even use dual playfield mode.

[@jrgenfrderbergtvedt7506]

❤️ Great info RETRO GENIOUS. Just found out today it was a colour cycle trick, from Judge Drokk

[@kiana.s_]

I can't stop watching...

[@poppycubeplaysgames]

Fun fact: on lubuntu, a Linux operative system, you can put the amiga Boing ball as a screensaver

[@madcommodore]

I think it was on the Amithlon Amiga OS for x86 PCs that it had little boing balls bouncing around the screen on boot-up too.

[@kenshigros3872]

Hi anyone knows about the boing Sound been sampled by an Apple 2e...? True story

[@madcommodore]

They bashed a garage door with foam baseball bats, that's what I read in a magazine but it is not mentioned in Bedrooms to Billions The Amiga Years though.

[@HLF31528376]

Memory lane...😳

[@madcommodore]

They sampled the sound from foam bats hitting metal doors :)

[@Lion_McLionhead]

It's cropped. Guess we really can never go back.

[@madcommodore]

Unfortunately at the time of upload the maximum vertical resolution that lined up was effectively 180 and I didn't want to resize it by fractions. 4k is just a multiple of 320x180 but the demo is 320x200.

[@GastonTheStallion]

Native 4k or upscaled 4k?

[@skejeton]

sounds like a war zone damn it

[@djmarauder]

Sure the DEMO has been always nice.. But first .. left/right Audio Channels are swapped and what is the Benefit in upscaling lores to 4k ?

[@madcommodore]

I upscale because after uploading something like 1,200 videos in uncompressed MP4 files at the actual exact resolutions of the base hardware, which is usually about 320x240ish pixels (240p) which had zero digital artifacts for uncompressed quality KZbin decided to compress the hell out of everything. At 240p my 1gb per 5 minute source videos look disgusting, at 480p they still add significant compression artifacts today and 480p is not suitable for C64 games with sprites in the border or PAL Amiga releases. The uploaded pixel perfect videos I spent many man years creating and editing are now destroyed so now I upscale things to a resolution that KZbin do not compress. 4 years ago I would never have to upscale things to 720p minimum, today I have no choice. 4K allows 320x216 video sizes to be exactly scaled to 3200x2160 which is 4:3 aspect 4K, the difference in processing time for creating 1080p over 2160p is not worth it so I just do that. I have over a thousand videos I need to do all over again, I will not allow KZbin to destroy my uploads ever again.

[@TheLawrenceWade]

ffmpeg can fix that if it upsets you. Remap the streams. Any *nix machine can do it from a command prompt in seconds.

[@TheLawrenceWade]

(Of course, it requires more knowledge than using a mouse.)

[@Amethyst_Friend]

@@madcommodoreThank you for all your work.

[@presauced]

What technique did they use for the 3D effect?

[@madcommodore]

From memory, 4 bitplane ball with the 16 colours cycled (no animation) and the other bitplane to do the shadows.

[@presauced]

@@madcommodore That's really clever!

[@madcommodore]

@@presauced It's a cool advantage of the Amiga's bitplanes method of displaying graphics, allowed all sorts of cool tricks like shadow/transparency etc if you knew how to set your palette colours right.

[@legomasteranimations4765]

What I thought it was real 3d 😂

[@stephandusterhoft9131]

Leider nicht die Original Demo , wie ich sie hatte .

[@LorDFireball1]

Best Demo ever

[@madcommodore]

RJ Mical talked about this demo on a talk with Dave Needle at the Amiga 30th anniversary and how it originally looked with text on the background to clearly show the shadow a proper shadow not just a grey shape on top.

[@Fractal_CZ]

What’s the point with upscaling to 4K?

[@madcommodore]

lol because google purchased youtube and then compressed the shit out of all the 240p videos so they could afford server capacity for 1080p Justin Bieber music videos etc by destroying 1000+ 240p uncompressed custom FLV files I uploaded over half a decade really :) It is 1:1 digital upscale so no matter how poor google becomes in the future it will still look good at 4k haha

[@Fractal_CZ]

@@madcommodore that’s actually a good point :)

[@renxula]

What happened at 38 seconds in the video, when it started running smoother? 🤔 Also, I noticed that the bounce trajectory isn't smooth at the top. Shame, since it would've been trivial on the Amiga to precalculate a smooth parabola and make it a bit smoother without wasting any extra CPU :)

[@MD_il_microcanale]

Amiga the best!

[@flatcat19dx]

Was it really 60 fps in 1984?

[@madcommodore]

Yes but it is just a 16 colour static image about 128x128 pixels moved around the screen with the colour palette shifted 60 frames per second. The shadow is a single bitplane image the same size moved 60 fps. It's not in 3D it's just a really awesome colour cycling static image and they reverse the direction of the colour cycling. You can probably do the same sort of thing real time with the mouse with a 128x128 pixel pasted brush of the ball over the same background with colour cycling switched on in Deluxe Paint 2 (no shadow of course). If it is running in interlace mode (can't remember off hand) then on a CRT TV only the even or the odd scanlines can be updated every 1/60th of a second as the TV only draws the even scanlines on one frame followed by the odd number scanlines every frame. Hence the old 100/120hz widescreen CRT TVs that removed the interlace flicker in the early 2000s.

[@IHateYoutubeHandles615]

@@madcommodore Old school optimization! This is why I recently bought an old Amiga 500 and am slowly accumulating the other hardware needed. Today people call HTML "coding". You want coding? Learn how this kind of stuff was done in C and assembly :)

[@tomyyoung2624]

Yes kidding. Thank you for this video.

[@PlantCentral]

Was this rendered polygons?

[@madcommodore]

It was a static 16 colour(?) bitmap of a beach ball and they just cycled the colours. It's more about the 16 colour shadow cast by the ball on the 32 colour(?) screen and the high quality stereo sampled sounds than the ball I think. The original version had "Amiga" and the tick logo in the background.

[@PlantCentral]

@@madcommodore Ahh, I understand now! Thank you!

[@madcommodore]

There was a documentary about the Amiga where the original designers about how they went around recording the sound of foam bats hitting roller shutters/garage doors to get the boom crash samples (digitised from tape via an Apple II and expensive sound sampler card expansion I think).

[@PlantCentral]

@@madcommodore Ooh! I really should look for that!

[@madcommodore]

@@PlantCentral I think it's called The History of Amiga, 1990s VHS release. If it's the one I am thinking of it also has Jay Miner in it.

[@AzamMujahidProductions]

teleradiocity!

[@stevenpavelish6017]

Boing ball for the win!

[@madblank]

Stereo channels are swapped.

[@madcommodore]

Used the standard setting in old version of WinUAE and the original WinUAE captured output so no idea why :/

[@teletesselator]

Nice! TY!

[@Coldsteak]

ball