You're doing the machine a disservice by hyping up the ball demo. The "real" physics you are talking about are really simple. The 3D look is nice, but can simply be precalculated. Just look at the video's of the bouncing ball on 8 bit systems on the right --->
What *is* important is that it showed that the Amiga could do real time graphics and run the rest of the OS at the same time. Also, this ball became (or was?) synonymous for "Amiga."
This is a simple sprite animation written in the middle of the night by some geeks at a hotel room. I had an Amiga 500 in 1989 and I was very amazed over what it could do more than what it was. The hardware was not compared to PC or MAC, it was actually a very slow and cheaply designed computer. Anyway, the games and graphics just rocked more than anything else! PC was 5 or 10 times faster in most cases but the games just sucked. That is why I still love the Amiga and the persons behind it!
I remember the Amiga version of Defender of the Crown had the very best graphics ever seen in a computer game at the time. In terms of real-time graphics capability, the Amiga was head and shoulders above anything else in it's price range. Anything comparable actually cost more than a nice car at the time.
I loved my Amiga back in the 80's and 90's and actually actively used it up to very late into the 90s and bought the powerpc card for my A1200 before i had to switch to the pc for work reasons. Still fire up winuae now and again to play some classic 16 bit games. sadly the power pc card died some years ago though
it was from the EARLY 80's... and was even in a fully multitasking environment... a concept totally alien to PCs and the new black and white Macintosh.
You can actually run two Amiga Boing demos on an Amiga1000 which shows you that the demo wasn't hitting the full power of the 1984 Amiga and wasn't using any hardware tricks....
It also had a four voice sound processor, with 8-bit sample playback.. Something that was new at the time for computers to have.. The Mac had some sound but it was limited compared to the Amiga.. The Amiga is practically where the Euro Demos started, the use of custom music and hacking the amiga to do complex graphics effects with the graphics copressor like creating reflective water, sinusoidal messages, with complex music and 3D animation. Also the amiga had a configurable voice synthesizer.
What was so great about the Amigas was that they wer more affordable than the Apple Macs, they had more colors and better sound than the PC's (soundblaster came later, PC's only had at best EGA), and the Amiga's used special multimedia processors (sound, graphics and a scan sync'd coprocessor that could make it easier for the CPU to juggle tasks) .. But overall the thing was affordability, and the quality of the hardware that you got for the money and the resourcefulness of the OS.
What the Amiga could do that neither the PC nor the Mac could do at the time: Animation and Sound.. It was better at multimedia than the Mac and PC combined.. The Mac's used high color graphics cards, but to do animation like the amiga you'd have to move two to six times more information around the bus than you would on the Amiga, because of the use of the Amiga's HAM mode that used 6-bits (byte per pixel) versus 12-bits (2 bytes per pixel). Also page flipping, double buffering came naturally.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH I can't believe you people were fooled by this..
I had an amiga..
This is nothing more than a cyclic 32 color sprite, the CLUT is being cycled to make it look like a spinning ball.. It's not doing any 3D transformations.. It's just a bouncing sprite..
Now if you want something that was a real achievement of the amiga.. Go look at the juggler. It was a 12-bit color raytraced animation done in 6-bit (HAM) data. Also might check out a paint program called Deluxe Paint 3.
Well cyclic 30 color sprint, I forgot the background.. You could probably make a simplistic rendition of it in Deluxe Paint 3 uses a color cycle and making some keyframes.. DP3 is a lot of fun!! Its got a lot of hidden features, if someone can get me the manual for it, I'll do some tutorials.
i know this is sad but i really dont like this guy:L lol in 1958 a little girl was murdered. she was found with many stabs in her. she had words written on her that said emoth termoth. now that you have read the words you will see this little girl in the middle of the night. she will be on your ceiling. the only way to stop it is to repost this comment to 3 more videos
Re jci10's comment: Would it be possible to make of video of this animation, and pull down the screen and format a floppy disc in the background? :) Or any kind of other multitasking...heck on a Mac or PC you can't even pull down the screen...it'd even be cool just to pull the screen up and down really fast and show how it doesn't miss a beat.
While I was using sculpt 4d on my a500, my friends were running dos. When I got my 2000 with a 030 and math coprocessor and a new a1200, my friends were getting windows 3.1.
We Amiga users were ahead of our time. Some of us still are...
My work then is still evident in my art work now:)
It wasn't just that Amiga ball back in 1984, but I was sold once they "pulled down" the screen (with the amiga ball still bouncing) and formatted a 900k floppy disk in the background!!! An extremely impressive feat for hardware and OS design...
You're again iterating what everyone knows while completely ignoring the huge part of the fan base consisting of people who loved the Amiga not because is supposedly was or is the better choice for video production, but for the responsiveness of the AmigaOS, and how you could program the Amiga's hardware directly, the actual COMPUTER, instead of messing with a dozen boring layers of abstraction top of another in an uninspiring environment like that of a modern OS. Let's argue on the Internet.
Now I never dissed that exact aspect of the old-school! I'm a techie. I hate operating systems as much as you do, probably more, but... like you said, this isn't the place for this discussion. : )
This comment has received too many negative votesshow
Yes but to what end? Most programs on the Amiga offered no absolute advantage over other desktops machines around at the time except for the dubious benefits of amusing other obsessive Amiga users. How can you 'love' a computer in the first place? Especially one who's productive value was never in its life substantiated by definitive results. Computers are ostensibly media production entities, if you can't get publishable results from it, well, what's the point?
The sycophantic view is that the beautiful Amiga suffered from bad marketing and myopic studio purchasing. The truth is it was hurt by the myopia of the zealots themselves who never really saw that the Amiga was great for developing Amiga games but unsuited to the demands of a professional rendering outfit where its was let down by poor connectivity, low CPU power and, accept it or not, by substandard graphics resolutions and video source.
News of moronic activity riled Amiga loving friends so much that relations are still tender over a decade later. What are you gonna do? If I had equipped the studio with Amigas we would not have been able to supply local TV with broadcast quality masters. If you look at the juggler animation it speaks for itself. Taping a second or two of ram video from a composite output just doesn't cut any ice. Historically PC hating helped it on because people were willing to say "we don't like this!".
It was like a closed circuit: It was a graphics chip with nerve. The user base blinded itself to the fact it was never a complete productivity platform. We had PCs in my graphics studio. Why because it's fine to play around with Imagine 3D and say "wow!" but when you're producing TV animation its the PC you need to connects to every output device imaginable, including remote controlling Betacam SP recorders to master-copy full-rendered five-minute animations.
I apologize for being so negative, but jeez, give us all a break, the Amiga was a capable desktop shrouded in hype perpetuated in the main by fans who, to this day, have no idea that in the stratosphere above the Amiga where enough graphics computers to knock down a castle wall, most of them better than the Amiga. I mean really, what do they think commercial graphics were made on before the Amiga was invented?
As you have already said Value-for-money was why Amiga was thought of as being the best computer at its time, especially in the Multimedia terms. Of course there was more powerful computers at its time, but you had to pay triple if not more to do the same kind of effects that the Amiga could do.
There's no need to iterate how poor the Amiga was compared to the million dollar toys of the graphics industry, and compared to what sits on people's desktops today, everyone knows this and no one disputes it.
The Amiga helped pioneer home computing and the computer game industry, and probably other software industries indirectly as it had very high performance to availability, and it took quite some years before alternatives were on par.
How can you not understand people are fond of this?
I can totally appreciate people regarding the situation in the way your posting has it. I attended the computer show it was launched at in the UK. I loved it then too. For the same reason I think most people were hooked into it: Think of the potential! What I didn't see until gaining a deeper understanding of what was powering the computer, was that the demos written for the Amiga Were it's potential. It became a case of demo after demo.
@amigang It's just the hype that bores me. Read the titles above "surpassing all other systems of the time", "seamlessly handiling real-physics". It matter-of-factly did not surpass all other systems of the time. It arguably did better than other simlarly priced desktops, primarily because there weren't any alternatives in the same price range except the ST, but that hardly covers All other systems. Meanwhile, making a sprite arc follow a simple parabolic curve is hardly "real" physics.
@amigang It's just the hype that bores me. Read the titles above "surpassing all other systems of the time", "seamlessly handiling real-physics". It matter-of-factly did not surpass all other systems of the time. It arguably did better than other simlarly priced desktops, primarily because there weren't any alternatives in the same price range except the ST, but that hardly covers All other systems. Meanwhile, making a sprite arc follow a simple parabolic curve is hardly "real" physics.
You're missing the point of the Amiga, the Amiga 1000 a.k.a "Lorraine" was the first HOME computer that was extremely powerful and could do near identical commercial quality graphics and sound, at a much MUCH lower price point than commercial computers. The Amiga 1000, 500, and Amiga 1200 were aimed at the home consumer, while the Amiga 2000, 3000, and 4000 were aimed at the professional or business users.
No Hype, all fact. The Amiga was the most powerful computer at the time.
@vapourmile I am sorry man but you are clueless. At the time Amiga 1000 was introduced, there was ABSOLUTELY NO other desktop computer under $50000 that did the same OR CLOSE. Silicon Graphics IRIS 1000 was introduced about 1 year earlier but was WAY TOO EXPENSIVE and used... erm... THE SAME CPU as Amiga. I don't remember the prices but IRIS 1400 (also using Motorola 68000 at 8MHz) that came late 1984 (about the time Amiga was demoed) costed ~$75000. (continue below)
@vapourmile ...ALL MAJOR BROADCAST NETWORKS INTERNATIONALLY has used Amigas for their broadcast graphics at least for a period. Especially after VideoToaster came along. NASA used Amigas. Hell even intel used Amiga with SCALA (they are still making software) to demo... OS/2 multimedia extensions. But let graphics aside. Amiga has introduced to the mass public SO MANY things common now, that is actually scary.
@NULUSIOS Quick tip: It is extremely unwise to begin your posting with personal remarks like 'you are clueless', esp, when you know nothing of the person posting. Social tips aside, it's a long shot to speak as if to suggest that every single TV company in the world used Amiga exclusively for broadcast graphics, since in reality, very few of them used them in major contracts and none but the low-end enterprises used them exclusively and without other machines.
@NULUSIOS One of the keys to lack of Amiga adoption was a simple deal breaker: The Amiga did not have broadcast quality graphics which have always been 24bit. You do score points for observing that the Amiga introduced 'the mass public' to many things they hadn't seen, I 100% concur, in fact, it was largely because the public had never experienced CGI systems in any capacity that they were so easily seduced by the Amiga.
Value-for-money wise, I've got to hand the crown over to the Amiga, even if only to avoid a pernickerty argument. The fact is though, describing it as "the best computer of the time" is akin to describing the Volkswagen Golf as the best car available at its release. Except, sweep price aside, and suddenly the Amiga is actually found among the most underpowered computers of its age alongside the other shopping-basket consumer hardware of the mid-eighties.
What's also historically galling is that the determination that the Amiga was "Better than anything else at the time" is not quite the grandslam truism its fans would have us all believe. A more accurate description would be "Superior only to supermarket shelved consumer devices of the time", thus limiting comparison in the main to bog-standard IBM PCs and Atari STs. Elsewhere, 24bit paint programs and ray-tracing hardware had been available to professionals since the early seventies.
The Amiga died because it was underpowered. It's video chip was impressive for the day. But it lacked the necessary backup silicon to do anything useful with it beyond trick demos like this one. Sadly, as is amply demonstrated by the bombastic and technically naive introductory text to this program, the machine's power is vastly overrated by its ferociously defensive but essentially naive fan base.
The Amiga is also a little more powerful than you might make it out to be. Check out "Juggler" and "After 18 Years". These are great demos that might surprise you about just what the computer can do.
If you REALLY want to see an underpowered 68000 based computer/console, look at the CD-i. It's severely hampered in what it can do.
I'm prepared to be flamed for this, because Amigans are so protective of the machine's reputation (for some reason?): It's common knowledge that the ball is a single, flat, 2D sprite animated using a colour palette trick. The program to animate a simple parabolic curve is terrifically simple to write: i.e: SpriteX = 170, Velocity = -16, Loop: DrawSprite(), WaitForRetrace, SpriteX = SpriteX + Velocity, Velocity = Velocity + 1, If A = 16 then A = -16, Goto Loop. That's (almost) all there is to it.
I agree there's nothing to that demo, especially when they could easily have rotated an equivalent mesh arbitrarily, drawn and filled the polygons using the Blitter, in 50 smooth frames per second, instead of just using pre-rendered graphics. You're totally right.
Yeah but they couldn't. Here's where the technical naivete comes in. The blitter wasn't all that good. Many games, even the polygon style like starglider wrote it out of the rendering pipeline altogether. it has a cool sounding name, but it was almost useless. Even many sprite games failed to sync at 50Hz precisely because there was not enough power available to render them all in a frame. It is not until programmers developed modulo techniques that smooth games became commonplace.
Well, having programmed the Amiga hardware I can tell from what you write, that you have not. I know the clock cycle costs for the common Blitter operations and the costs for doing the equivalent operations with the CPU, the various DMAs, as well as how the true sprite hardware works.
On the graphics performance being slow as such I agree - the shared chip memory was terribly slow and while there were enough cycles for nice games provided good programming, there still weren't nearly enough.
This comment has received too many negative votesshow
Well, surprise surprise, I have programmed the Amiga and I say that to take a polygon object, of this screen-size and vertex count, and rotate it in 3D at 50Hz, well you're pushing it. Tell you what, put me straight, point me to a demo with a free rotating object of this size and I'll believe, otherwise I say you're another smoke blowing Amiga pundit.
It would be really beneficial if whomever is negging my remarks would be so kind as to point to any certified evidence at all that what I'm saying isn't essentially true. Yes, there were better polygon demos for the Amiga, but they all came years later on enhanced advanced Amiga chipsets, at which time 24-bit graphics were commonplace.
I have a question: why are people so insistant on arguing over youtube? i see so many comments left on youtube that are just bickering over small stuff. You both program for the Amiga. Try: bonding!
Anywho i really havent seen the demo in a long time and im glad it was on youtube. 5/5.
It's a discussion about the importance of particular aspects of technology. The question in doubt is "is the public too stupid to know what's good for it?", companies with useful, new innovative products have died whilst companies with nothing much to offer have thrived. Think VHS v Betamax. Digital v analogue. Mac v PC. Desktop v laptop. Labour v conservative. Environmental threat v terrorist threat. Not everybody agrees on which issues are important, hence debate, argument and survival of...
I've been looking for a video of this so I can show those who know nothing of the Amiga's capabilities way back then. Thank you for finally posting it.
That's pretty cool video. I have the Boing demo too.... plus the giant boing demo done by some AMOS Pro coders. Same thing, but the ball fills the entire screen!
gravity is weird... as if at the top it is weaker than on the bottom.
Azarien 4 months ago
a milestone for it's time
triptothebeach 5 months ago
This is going on my favorites!!
lutzdify 5 months ago
Hey, it's the drumbeat from Morrowind's main theme.
Berleh 9 months ago
Great to see it after years :)
D6Film 1 year ago
sick graphics!
st3f0n 1 year ago
LOL, they made it polygonal to trick people into thinking this color-cycling BOB was real-time 3D graphics!
DevilMaster 1 year ago 2
You're doing the machine a disservice by hyping up the ball demo. The "real" physics you are talking about are really simple. The 3D look is nice, but can simply be precalculated. Just look at the video's of the bouncing ball on 8 bit systems on the right --->
What *is* important is that it showed that the Amiga could do real time graphics and run the rest of the OS at the same time. Also, this ball became (or was?) synonymous for "Amiga."
tsuihark 1 year ago
Coder Colors!
Sprachlaboraudio 1 year ago
This has been flagged as spam show
Coder Colors!
Sprachlaboraudio 1 year ago
Comment removed
Sprachlaboraudio 1 year ago
This is a simple sprite animation written in the middle of the night by some geeks at a hotel room. I had an Amiga 500 in 1989 and I was very amazed over what it could do more than what it was. The hardware was not compared to PC or MAC, it was actually a very slow and cheaply designed computer. Anyway, the games and graphics just rocked more than anything else! PC was 5 or 10 times faster in most cases but the games just sucked. That is why I still love the Amiga and the persons behind it!
fredrik999z 1 year ago
I remember the Amiga version of Defender of the Crown had the very best graphics ever seen in a computer game at the time. In terms of real-time graphics capability, the Amiga was head and shoulders above anything else in it's price range. Anything comparable actually cost more than a nice car at the time.
Phryj666 1 year ago
Comment removed
Wampaa 1 year ago
@Wampaa
ROFL!! someone who clearly does'nt have a clue what computer where like in 1985.
amigang 1 year ago 3
@Wampaa - ROFL indeed! As the other dude points out, you clearly have no clue what we had in the way of computers back then. None.
atuline 1 year ago
suuuuccckkksssss
jonatower8080 1 year ago
@ everyone commenting on this. I have bad news. you're all geeks :0 like those two guys from south park.
paulblackpb 1 year ago
Totally state of the art and ahead of it's time.
TheSunzuki1983 1 year ago
Hehe, and now there is an amiga emulator for the Android phones. But I haven't got the Boing demo :-/
lamtsite 1 year ago
This sound was generated by hitting a sledge hammer against a garage wall. The workers at Amiga talked about this in an interview in the 90's.
Databamse 1 year ago
Ah...The Amiga...so glad I can still run you "forever" on my emulator...still the best computer not still around.
garak0410 1 year ago
1,181,472 free memory is actually BYTES! Yes, the Amiga features 1 MB of RAM :D Well the original system came with as little as 256KB...
papucci 1 year ago
The ball that started it all.
randomunavailable 2 years ago
I like this better than Avatar...
Soul74 2 years ago 20
We've come a long way baby!
WILDBULL1984 2 years ago
Comment removed
MacWii 2 years ago
Amiga Back for the Future:)
dancosmo 2 years ago
much way better then crysis
buokopter 2 years ago 24
Boing rulez :) Amiga rulez :)
D6Film 2 years ago 4
now we can simulate water phisics
AVerbene 2 years ago
@AVerbene lol
gibs2b 2 years ago
I loved my Amiga back in the 80's and 90's and actually actively used it up to very late into the 90s and bought the powerpc card for my A1200 before i had to switch to the pc for work reasons. Still fire up winuae now and again to play some classic 16 bit games. sadly the power pc card died some years ago though
ukclear 2 years ago
I miss that style of clean, simple graphics.
felicity4711 2 years ago
deluxe paint 3? why not deluxe paint 4 AGA. that kicked ass all over the place for its time!
owlfood 2 years ago
Comment removed
RomanianUser 2 years ago
In 1984 maya or 3ds did not exist. The first maya version came out 14 years later in 1998.
Jawattdenn 2 years ago
asshole :D
pwEclipse 2 years ago
come on , i didn't know it's from 80/90's
RomanianUser 2 years ago
It even says so in the description...
rourin 2 years ago
a hot blonde was on that monitor side and couldn't see it.
RomanianUser 2 years ago
it was from the EARLY 80's... and was even in a fully multitasking environment... a concept totally alien to PCs and the new black and white Macintosh.
RyderSpearmann 2 years ago 4
You can actually run two Amiga Boing demos on an Amiga1000 which shows you that the demo wasn't hitting the full power of the 1984 Amiga and wasn't using any hardware tricks....
jci10 2 years ago
does anyone know the name of the background tune??? :(
FrederickTears 2 years ago
it from the Gateway Amiga promotion video "Back for the future" was the name of the song
amigang 2 years ago
It also had a four voice sound processor, with 8-bit sample playback.. Something that was new at the time for computers to have.. The Mac had some sound but it was limited compared to the Amiga.. The Amiga is practically where the Euro Demos started, the use of custom music and hacking the amiga to do complex graphics effects with the graphics copressor like creating reflective water, sinusoidal messages, with complex music and 3D animation. Also the amiga had a configurable voice synthesizer.
rofthorax 2 years ago
What was so great about the Amigas was that they wer more affordable than the Apple Macs, they had more colors and better sound than the PC's (soundblaster came later, PC's only had at best EGA), and the Amiga's used special multimedia processors (sound, graphics and a scan sync'd coprocessor that could make it easier for the CPU to juggle tasks) .. But overall the thing was affordability, and the quality of the hardware that you got for the money and the resourcefulness of the OS.
rofthorax 2 years ago
What the Amiga could do that neither the PC nor the Mac could do at the time: Animation and Sound.. It was better at multimedia than the Mac and PC combined.. The Mac's used high color graphics cards, but to do animation like the amiga you'd have to move two to six times more information around the bus than you would on the Amiga, because of the use of the Amiga's HAM mode that used 6-bits (byte per pixel) versus 12-bits (2 bytes per pixel). Also page flipping, double buffering came naturally.
rofthorax 2 years ago
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH I can't believe you people were fooled by this..
I had an amiga..
This is nothing more than a cyclic 32 color sprite, the CLUT is being cycled to make it look like a spinning ball.. It's not doing any 3D transformations.. It's just a bouncing sprite..
Now if you want something that was a real achievement of the amiga.. Go look at the juggler. It was a 12-bit color raytraced animation done in 6-bit (HAM) data. Also might check out a paint program called Deluxe Paint 3.
rofthorax 2 years ago
Well cyclic 30 color sprint, I forgot the background.. You could probably make a simplistic rendition of it in Deluxe Paint 3 uses a color cycle and making some keyframes.. DP3 is a lot of fun!! Its got a lot of hidden features, if someone can get me the manual for it, I'll do some tutorials.
rofthorax 2 years ago
Good catch. I saw the initial screen and thought, "uh, what? It didn't do realtime physics".
campbellmichael 2 years ago
revolutionary for its time
TyredUvBS 3 years ago
This has been flagged as spam show
i know this is sad but i really dont like this guy:L lol in 1958 a little girl was murdered. she was found with many stabs in her. she had words written on her that said emoth termoth. now that you have read the words you will see this little girl in the middle of the night. she will be on your ceiling. the only way to stop it is to repost this comment to 3 more videos
doctoryoinky 3 years ago
I have this demo on my Macintosh Plus
cutebikerwannabe 3 years ago
This is a Classic-Demo of all Time! But..... The Atari-Boing on an older 8 Bit-Atari XL/XE System are better!! ;-)
dreameroz 3 years ago
The bouncing ball demo works great on Winuae emaulator. But I prefer the original hardware ofcourse...
hendrikjanvanduin 3 years ago
Enough bitching. Someone program a version for the windows mobile OS, we need this ball on the phones of the future!
lamtsite 3 years ago
Re jci10's comment: Would it be possible to make of video of this animation, and pull down the screen and format a floppy disc in the background? :) Or any kind of other multitasking...heck on a Mac or PC you can't even pull down the screen...it'd even be cool just to pull the screen up and down really fast and show how it doesn't miss a beat.
RaggedTiger70 3 years ago
The early days - now we get things like Animusic
siftvideo 3 years ago
what's name of music? :<
DjMati9 3 years ago
This is the intro music from the Amiga/PC game "Out of This World" (or "Another World" in europe).
archmedic 3 years ago
This has been flagged as spam show
Naa, is not that soundtrack, dude.
Anyway, for the Amiga platform the game was called simply "Another World" (it was perhaps developed natively for it)
mazxim 2 years ago
Do you know where can I find this demo on ADF, DMS or exe?
Scumkill2 3 years ago
While I was using sculpt 4d on my a500, my friends were running dos. When I got my 2000 with a 030 and math coprocessor and a new a1200, my friends were getting windows 3.1.
We Amiga users were ahead of our time. Some of us still are...
My work then is still evident in my art work now:)
fr3qnast3 3 years ago
It wasn't just that Amiga ball back in 1984, but I was sold once they "pulled down" the screen (with the amiga ball still bouncing) and formatted a 900k floppy disk in the background!!! An extremely impressive feat for hardware and OS design...
jci10 3 years ago 9
You're again iterating what everyone knows while completely ignoring the huge part of the fan base consisting of people who loved the Amiga not because is supposedly was or is the better choice for video production, but for the responsiveness of the AmigaOS, and how you could program the Amiga's hardware directly, the actual COMPUTER, instead of messing with a dozen boring layers of abstraction top of another in an uninspiring environment like that of a modern OS. Let's argue on the Internet.
RJLeffmann 3 years ago 3
Now I never dissed that exact aspect of the old-school! I'm a techie. I hate operating systems as much as you do, probably more, but... like you said, this isn't the place for this discussion. : )
vapourmile 3 years ago
This comment has received too many negative votes show
Yes but to what end? Most programs on the Amiga offered no absolute advantage over other desktops machines around at the time except for the dubious benefits of amusing other obsessive Amiga users. How can you 'love' a computer in the first place? Especially one who's productive value was never in its life substantiated by definitive results. Computers are ostensibly media production entities, if you can't get publishable results from it, well, what's the point?
vapourmile 3 years ago
Yeah but you can program any computer like that :P
vapourmile 3 years ago
The sycophantic view is that the beautiful Amiga suffered from bad marketing and myopic studio purchasing. The truth is it was hurt by the myopia of the zealots themselves who never really saw that the Amiga was great for developing Amiga games but unsuited to the demands of a professional rendering outfit where its was let down by poor connectivity, low CPU power and, accept it or not, by substandard graphics resolutions and video source.
vapourmile 3 years ago
News of moronic activity riled Amiga loving friends so much that relations are still tender over a decade later. What are you gonna do? If I had equipped the studio with Amigas we would not have been able to supply local TV with broadcast quality masters. If you look at the juggler animation it speaks for itself. Taping a second or two of ram video from a composite output just doesn't cut any ice. Historically PC hating helped it on because people were willing to say "we don't like this!".
vapourmile 3 years ago
It was like a closed circuit: It was a graphics chip with nerve. The user base blinded itself to the fact it was never a complete productivity platform. We had PCs in my graphics studio. Why because it's fine to play around with Imagine 3D and say "wow!" but when you're producing TV animation its the PC you need to connects to every output device imaginable, including remote controlling Betacam SP recorders to master-copy full-rendered five-minute animations.
vapourmile 3 years ago
I apologize for being so negative, but jeez, give us all a break, the Amiga was a capable desktop shrouded in hype perpetuated in the main by fans who, to this day, have no idea that in the stratosphere above the Amiga where enough graphics computers to knock down a castle wall, most of them better than the Amiga. I mean really, what do they think commercial graphics were made on before the Amiga was invented?
vapourmile 3 years ago
As you have already said Value-for-money was why Amiga was thought of as being the best computer at its time, especially in the Multimedia terms. Of course there was more powerful computers at its time, but you had to pay triple if not more to do the same kind of effects that the Amiga could do.
amigang 3 years ago 10
Yep, and sorry for double-double posting your comments! It's annoying.
vapourmile 3 years ago
But having said that, what did it do?
vapourmile 3 years ago
There's no need to iterate how poor the Amiga was compared to the million dollar toys of the graphics industry, and compared to what sits on people's desktops today, everyone knows this and no one disputes it.
The Amiga helped pioneer home computing and the computer game industry, and probably other software industries indirectly as it had very high performance to availability, and it took quite some years before alternatives were on par.
How can you not understand people are fond of this?
RJLeffmann 3 years ago
I can totally appreciate people regarding the situation in the way your posting has it. I attended the computer show it was launched at in the UK. I loved it then too. For the same reason I think most people were hooked into it: Think of the potential! What I didn't see until gaining a deeper understanding of what was powering the computer, was that the demos written for the Amiga Were it's potential. It became a case of demo after demo.
vapourmile 3 years ago
@amigang It's just the hype that bores me. Read the titles above "surpassing all other systems of the time", "seamlessly handiling real-physics". It matter-of-factly did not surpass all other systems of the time. It arguably did better than other simlarly priced desktops, primarily because there weren't any alternatives in the same price range except the ST, but that hardly covers All other systems. Meanwhile, making a sprite arc follow a simple parabolic curve is hardly "real" physics.
vapourmile 1 year ago
@amigang It's just the hype that bores me. Read the titles above "surpassing all other systems of the time", "seamlessly handiling real-physics". It matter-of-factly did not surpass all other systems of the time. It arguably did better than other simlarly priced desktops, primarily because there weren't any alternatives in the same price range except the ST, but that hardly covers All other systems. Meanwhile, making a sprite arc follow a simple parabolic curve is hardly "real" physics.
vapourmile 1 year ago
@vapourmile
You're missing the point of the Amiga, the Amiga 1000 a.k.a "Lorraine" was the first HOME computer that was extremely powerful and could do near identical commercial quality graphics and sound, at a much MUCH lower price point than commercial computers. The Amiga 1000, 500, and Amiga 1200 were aimed at the home consumer, while the Amiga 2000, 3000, and 4000 were aimed at the professional or business users.
No Hype, all fact. The Amiga was the most powerful computer at the time.
Chaniyth 1 year ago
@vapourmile
Remember how XT - 386 looked a like, you must be speaking
of CGI. Amiga brought multimedia to home, check e.g. A2000, A3000,
A4000T, CDTV, CD32 models and its competitors.
Now, after the Commodore killed itself, its only the OS, and
yes, its still being developed. Amazing?
vojinvidanovic79 1 year ago
@vapourmile I am sorry man but you are clueless. At the time Amiga 1000 was introduced, there was ABSOLUTELY NO other desktop computer under $50000 that did the same OR CLOSE. Silicon Graphics IRIS 1000 was introduced about 1 year earlier but was WAY TOO EXPENSIVE and used... erm... THE SAME CPU as Amiga. I don't remember the prices but IRIS 1400 (also using Motorola 68000 at 8MHz) that came late 1984 (about the time Amiga was demoed) costed ~$75000. (continue below)
NULUSIOS 1 year ago
@vapourmile ...ALL MAJOR BROADCAST NETWORKS INTERNATIONALLY has used Amigas for their broadcast graphics at least for a period. Especially after VideoToaster came along. NASA used Amigas. Hell even intel used Amiga with SCALA (they are still making software) to demo... OS/2 multimedia extensions. But let graphics aside. Amiga has introduced to the mass public SO MANY things common now, that is actually scary.
NULUSIOS 1 year ago
@NULUSIOS Quick tip: It is extremely unwise to begin your posting with personal remarks like 'you are clueless', esp, when you know nothing of the person posting. Social tips aside, it's a long shot to speak as if to suggest that every single TV company in the world used Amiga exclusively for broadcast graphics, since in reality, very few of them used them in major contracts and none but the low-end enterprises used them exclusively and without other machines.
vapourmile 1 year ago
@NULUSIOS One of the keys to lack of Amiga adoption was a simple deal breaker: The Amiga did not have broadcast quality graphics which have always been 24bit. You do score points for observing that the Amiga introduced 'the mass public' to many things they hadn't seen, I 100% concur, in fact, it was largely because the public had never experienced CGI systems in any capacity that they were so easily seduced by the Amiga.
vapourmile 1 year ago
@vapourmile : The C64
archon808 1 year ago
Value-for-money wise, I've got to hand the crown over to the Amiga, even if only to avoid a pernickerty argument. The fact is though, describing it as "the best computer of the time" is akin to describing the Volkswagen Golf as the best car available at its release. Except, sweep price aside, and suddenly the Amiga is actually found among the most underpowered computers of its age alongside the other shopping-basket consumer hardware of the mid-eighties.
vapourmile 3 years ago
What's also historically galling is that the determination that the Amiga was "Better than anything else at the time" is not quite the grandslam truism its fans would have us all believe. A more accurate description would be "Superior only to supermarket shelved consumer devices of the time", thus limiting comparison in the main to bog-standard IBM PCs and Atari STs. Elsewhere, 24bit paint programs and ray-tracing hardware had been available to professionals since the early seventies.
vapourmile 3 years ago
The Amiga died because it was underpowered. It's video chip was impressive for the day. But it lacked the necessary backup silicon to do anything useful with it beyond trick demos like this one. Sadly, as is amply demonstrated by the bombastic and technically naive introductory text to this program, the machine's power is vastly overrated by its ferociously defensive but essentially naive fan base.
vapourmile 3 years ago
I think the reason why the Amiga has such a loyal fan base is because there's basically no competition in the computer industry left. :P
RABBIDGamfan 3 years ago
Understood.
vapourmile 3 years ago
The Amiga is also a little more powerful than you might make it out to be. Check out "Juggler" and "After 18 Years". These are great demos that might surprise you about just what the computer can do.
If you REALLY want to see an underpowered 68000 based computer/console, look at the CD-i. It's severely hampered in what it can do.
RABBIDGamfan 3 years ago
I'm prepared to be flamed for this, because Amigans are so protective of the machine's reputation (for some reason?): It's common knowledge that the ball is a single, flat, 2D sprite animated using a colour palette trick. The program to animate a simple parabolic curve is terrifically simple to write: i.e: SpriteX = 170, Velocity = -16, Loop: DrawSprite(), WaitForRetrace, SpriteX = SpriteX + Velocity, Velocity = Velocity + 1, If A = 16 then A = -16, Goto Loop. That's (almost) all there is to it.
vapourmile 3 years ago
I agree there's nothing to that demo, especially when they could easily have rotated an equivalent mesh arbitrarily, drawn and filled the polygons using the Blitter, in 50 smooth frames per second, instead of just using pre-rendered graphics. You're totally right.
RJLeffmann 3 years ago 2
Yeah but they couldn't. Here's where the technical naivete comes in. The blitter wasn't all that good. Many games, even the polygon style like starglider wrote it out of the rendering pipeline altogether. it has a cool sounding name, but it was almost useless. Even many sprite games failed to sync at 50Hz precisely because there was not enough power available to render them all in a frame. It is not until programmers developed modulo techniques that smooth games became commonplace.
vapourmile 3 years ago
Well, having programmed the Amiga hardware I can tell from what you write, that you have not. I know the clock cycle costs for the common Blitter operations and the costs for doing the equivalent operations with the CPU, the various DMAs, as well as how the true sprite hardware works.
On the graphics performance being slow as such I agree - the shared chip memory was terribly slow and while there were enough cycles for nice games provided good programming, there still weren't nearly enough.
RJLeffmann 3 years ago
This comment has received too many negative votes show
Well, surprise surprise, I have programmed the Amiga and I say that to take a polygon object, of this screen-size and vertex count, and rotate it in 3D at 50Hz, well you're pushing it. Tell you what, put me straight, point me to a demo with a free rotating object of this size and I'll believe, otherwise I say you're another smoke blowing Amiga pundit.
vapourmile 3 years ago
It would be really beneficial if whomever is negging my remarks would be so kind as to point to any certified evidence at all that what I'm saying isn't essentially true. Yes, there were better polygon demos for the Amiga, but they all came years later on enhanced advanced Amiga chipsets, at which time 24-bit graphics were commonplace.
vapourmile 3 years ago
Watch Video IllEiPoiLAs (5:05++). And there is a lot more demos doing similar things, I just chose that one since it is also a ball.
Jawattdenn 2 years ago
But did it drop any phat loot?
I have a question: why are people so insistant on arguing over youtube? i see so many comments left on youtube that are just bickering over small stuff. You both program for the Amiga. Try: bonding!
Anywho i really havent seen the demo in a long time and im glad it was on youtube. 5/5.
lulzicopter 3 years ago 2
It's a discussion about the importance of particular aspects of technology. The question in doubt is "is the public too stupid to know what's good for it?", companies with useful, new innovative products have died whilst companies with nothing much to offer have thrived. Think VHS v Betamax. Digital v analogue. Mac v PC. Desktop v laptop. Labour v conservative. Environmental threat v terrorist threat. Not everybody agrees on which issues are important, hence debate, argument and survival of...
vapourmile 3 years ago
I've been looking for a video of this so I can show those who know nothing of the Amiga's capabilities way back then. Thank you for finally posting it.
n0ukf 4 years ago
My breath... it has been taken!
RedDaVincy 4 years ago
That's pretty cool video. I have the Boing demo too.... plus the giant boing demo done by some AMOS Pro coders. Same thing, but the ball fills the entire screen!
&eB
kinglonewolf104 4 years ago