The Amiga “Boing Ball” Demo Animated GIF
Amiga Boing Ball Demo animated GIF
As an old Amiga-geek, this little GIF here makes me smile. The bouncing “Boing Ball” demo was an amazing thing for its time, as is the lore behind it. Consensus seems to be that RJ Mical and Dale Luck were looking for a way to demonstrate the graphical powers of the Amiga. However their main priority was getting Amiga OS stable enough for the public unveiling of the Amiga 1000 at the winter CES show in 1984. Rumor is that the night before the unveiling, both Workbench and Intuition were behaving well enough for Mical and Luck to be able to spare a few hours on something else. That “something else” was genius.
A red-white checkered ball, spinning and bouncing in simulated 3D space, smoothly, without lag or stutter, and in real-time. Like the Amiga Juggler Demo, the Boing Ball demo was thought impossible for a home computer system. Rumor has it that CES attendees and press suspected the demo had been created on a supercomputer, and the Amiga was actually a TV hooked up to a VCR playing the ‘demo’. When shown that, in fact, the demo could multitask, and the user could jump back to Workbench, people were stunned. Because Mical and Luck were so deeply involved and knowledgeably about the capabilities of the Amiga and its custom graphic chipset, the Boing Ball demo used virtually no CPU time.
Since then, the Boing Ball has been a beloved icon, and sometimes semi-official logo, for the Amiga. It many ways, it really symbolized the Amiga – extremely impressive technology, while also simple and playful. I remember when I first saw it, I was incredulous. Mostly because I had made the mistake of getting an Atari 520ST, and it wouldn’t be until introduction of ST’s with Blitter graphic chips that even crude attempts at something like Boing could be made.
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This Amiga demo didn’t rely on the blitter chip. Color cycling was used for the rotation (using some clever math to create the faceted ball object first- which could be seen if you quickly dragged the Workbench screen down immediately after double-clicking the icon to start the demo).
The motion was accomplished by simply changing the horizontal and vertical fetch and display start for the boing ball. You only get this efficiency with elegant hardware. I can’t recall if this was done using the Amiga’s amazing dual playfield modes or by diddling the display start of the bitplanes that held the ball.
I think the latter, since the they got a free shadowing effect with no real overhead. In all this time, I have never seen the source code for this demo! There was a later tweak that let you speed the ball up to insane rates.
But yeah, an Atari would need a blitter to try attempt to simulate this.And there’d be little bandwidth left for much else.
This is great info Patrick, thanks for sharing!