Amiga Boing Ball -making of

[@desiv1]

I think it's interesting that he said the original had no sound or horizontal movement. It was just the ball rotating and bouncing straight up and down. And it still impressed like crazy at the time. (Well, I'm sure the fact that it did it WHILE MULTITASKING helped. Not something the 2600 or A800 can do. :-)

[@robcat2075]

I remember we loved running that demo.

[@turricaned]

@TheSpooniest The resolution limitation was only due to the Amiga spec requiring all resolutions be capable of display on a standard TV CRT. The Denise and Agnus chips themselves were capable of going up to 640x400(NTSC) or 480(PAL) versus the Mac's 512x384, but to display those resolutions on a TV required interlace, which caused flicker. External hardware could correct the flicker on multisync monitors, and was standard on the A3000.

[@MatthewSuffidy]

It isn't like it is raytraced or anything. At it's core is basically the pong math from the Ti99/4A demos. It had a fake shadow and either moved the blocks left or right along a predetermined track. I mean it did have a bit of advertising style.

[@elwoodfr]

Huge! Never seen this. Thank you. Now I'll show it to my wife which didn't believe it when I told here about the garage door :-)

[@AnalogX64]

Thanks for sharing this.

[@kinglonewolf104]

ahhh, lol. I have the Amiga Forever 2006 package (2 DVDs & 1 CD), but haven't watched it since... 2007. I still use WinUAE almost daily, since both my A600's went down in 2007 :( &eB

[@104d_3rr0r_vince]

Still today it is a risky thing to broadcast real time with a pc...

[@turricaned]

@Kg277 Rubbish. The PC had cornered office software and the Mac had Desktop Publishing, but the Amiga was the platform on which it was possible to do multimedia before the term had even passed into regular use. In Europe especially, you'll find a lot of creative folks in digital media, games development and video work who all cut their teeth on the Amiga before they were even out of school.

[@kinglonewolf104]

awesome, Dale Luck telling us about the Boing Ball Demo. Thanks so much for uploading it. Where did you find it?? &eB

[@crumplezone1]

Too cool for school ! what a dude :)

[@Kg277]

I found this demo for the Apple II, a system with 0 custom chips. Just a 6502, memory, and off-the-self logic gates.

[@ZylonBane]

The making "off"? LOL.

[@ciolamorta]

@Kg277 Man, do you know what 4 channels audio means? Or what 3d vector in real time elaboration? Come on...

[@D6Film]

Gush! Unbelievable :)

[@scottgfx]

@Kg277 FYI, the man who designed the custom silicon for the Atari 2600 *and* the Atari 800 home computers, *is* the very same person who later designed the chips for the Amiga. You have no concept or idea of what you speak. Please do some research on Jay Miner before you decide to post again.

[@amigang]

ooops :P

[@KaitainCPS]

You're gravely mistaken; about as wrong as it's possible to be. The Amiga was ultimately the most influential computer of the 80s, and modern computers are architected much more similarly to the Amiga of 1985 than to the Mac or PC of 1985. Those latter machines could not multitask, and the Amiga's custom chip-based design (building on earlier work at Atari) became dominant. Eventually, Macs and PCs went on to become updated versions of what the Amiga had been. Your current PC is a modern Amiga.

[@syntesen]

Actually, that's wrong. The Amiga was built around a shit-ton of proprietary, custom chips (Copper, etc.) - whereas the Mac and PC were based around a general-purpose CPU without any "helpers". True, today there's a GPU, but that's really just an additional CPU. the Amiga's extra logic chips did all sorts of weird and wonderful things, but architecturally, it's much farther removed from today's computers. I love the amiga - but as a software developer, I'd much rather deal with a generalised architecture (PC or Mac) than arcane special-purpose accelerator hardware.

[@KuraIthys]

Wrong, so... So wrong. The PC had the hardware capability to multitask since the 286, though a bit buggy, and the ability to do it more reliably since the 386. The Modern PC is... Wait for it. A derivative of the IBM 5150... Go figure. You can trace it's lineage pretty clearly, and it borrows very little from anything the Amiga does. The Amiga has more in common with 90's game consoles than it does with a PC. It also has more in common with the Commodore and Atari home computers that preceded it than it does with the PC. The PC was built around a CPU and an expansion bus. It's built-in functionality was (and IS) limited, though various features that used to be exclusively found on expansion cards have slowly migrated to the motherboard itself (though logically speaking they are still on the expansion bus), or even into the CPU. A modern system is basically the combination of a bunch of expansion cards that the PC gained over time. A modern x86 CPU still boots in 8086 emulation mode, and the first thing you have to do is switch it to something else. A modern system consists of all the features of the original IBM PC, (even the AT bus is still present, if not externally exposed in modern systems), with a sound card following more standardised but similar conventions to those set by the adlib and soundblaster cards. Modern graphics cards came about by the merging of the SVGA 2d graphics boards (which, like all PC graphics boards tended to have little if any hardware features at all - all it provided was a framebuffer and some very rudimentary logic for page flipping and the like), combined with a 3d accelerator board that began life as a seperate expansion card but got merged with the 2d graphics cards. Neither the SVGA or it's predecessors has much if anything in common with Amiga graphics hardware. (The SNES is a closer relative of the Amiga than any PC in terms of how it works.), and 3d accelerator cards also have little if anything to do with how the Amiga was designed aside from the very general concept of hardware accelerated graphics functionality, which even the Atari 2600 technically has. Meanwhile, multitasking operating systems were old hat when the Amiga showed up. Mainframes BEGAN as multi-user time-sharing systems. Eg, multitasking was the norm. The Amiga simply was one of the earliest and most usable examples of this in the home computing space. Copying what mainframes did isn't revolutionary so much as evolutionary. The Amiga's architecture really looks nothing like a PC, modern or otherwise. Yet a modern PC really does still look like the 5150, but with extra parts bolted on; Newer expansion bus standards came and went. Processors got extra functionality and faster performance (and internal rearrangements to make them work better, which required different coding techniques to use effectively), and what was previously the sole domain of the expansion card gradually migrated onto the motherboard itself. (which is a superficial change really - putting the logic from an expansion card on the motherboard doesn't really change how the expansion hardware works - it just hides that it's expansion hardware by not visibly having an expansion slot and a card sticking in it anymore.) The Amiga design was elegant, and impressive for it's time, but you really give it altogether far too much influence compared to the reality of what's happened...

[@madcommodore]

@@KuraIthys Technically you can multitask just fine even with a 6809 CPU from the 1980s not just the more expensive 68000/68009 but Windows never had a multitasking kernal worth mentioning until OS2 2.0 from the early 1990s. Windows today is still less efficient than the quickly ported TriPos OS Kernal Dr Tim King of Metacomco, who was rushed in and got it working on the Amiga 1000 prototype within weeks. IBM also gave Commodore the utterly useless REXX scripting/batch processing language in exchange for a look at detailed info on how Kickstart works....which they then used to update OS/2. Doesn't matter whether you can or can't do multitasking on the hardware....the simple fact was Mac was single tasking up to OS 9 and Microsoft multitasking is STILL inferior to Kickstart 1.0. A 2000 horsepower racing truck may be faster than a 1985 BMW M3 in a straight line....but it's still a piece of shit compared to a 1985 M3 in reality around a race track. What Amiga DID bring to the table was the ability for the OS to handle ALL forms of media i.e. still/moving digital images and digital sound along with the usual text based rubbish DOS was designed for. That was partly down to Electronic Arts who helped define the IFF standards and made sure the OS could accomodate such multimedia rich environment. Amiga was also the first computer as standard to remove the soundchip, the Amiga has no soundchip.....just 4 Digitial to Analogue converters tied to the system bus under DMA. Modern CPUs multiplexing the sound into a single stereo DAC is all that happened, the removal of weird and wonderful soundchips was 100% the Amiga way of doing it, ALL computers and tablets on sale now have copied that idea with just a single DAC streaming out the sound under OS control. It also doesn't matter if you use only CPU power or custom chips, the simple fact is in 1984 (Amiga final prototype finished in Dec 1984 with addition of hardware line draw and fill function to Agnus) but in 1985 you would need a 60-70mhz 68000 or a 150mhz 8086 to do what Portia/Daphne/Slim Agnus did. These figures are calculated by BYTE magazine and PCW magazine not Commodore or any fan boy. Today it costs more to make bespoke custom chips on a MIPS/$ basis due to the fact morons/wankers kept buying x86 BOLLOX in the 80s and early 90s.

[@white.lodge.dale.cooper]

​@@KuraIthys The 286 PC had useless cooperative multitasking.

[@Kg277]

@jacelw96 Greatness evolves a different rate for everything. The amiga was directionless and despite a few good demos, couldn't keep up in the marketplace. The foundation for today was being laid by the mac and the pc back then, NOT the amiga.

[@akfreed6949]

The AMIGA and ATARI ST we're a better value then any overrated POS Wintel machine or a too expensive Mac . For quite a few years . They were treated unfairly by people like YOU .

[@white.lodge.dale.cooper]

That's just not true.

[@KaitainCPS]

This just gibberish.

[@ThaDuDeMaN1]

your making off

[@white.lodge.dale.cooper]

*you're

[@Kg277]

nothing special here, the lowly Atari2600 sporting 128bytes of ram running less than a megahertz with no custom sound or graphics chips can do this same thing!

[@Kg277]

crap they do this on my kids toy iphone and and atari 800. Again nothing special here.