The Amiga Boing Ball Explained

Not explained whatsoever.

Here's a short interview with Dale Luck, discussing the Boing Ball. I like how they came up with the sound for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJcO628yCcU

For readers following along at home, R.J. Mical [1] was a co-inventor of the Atari Lynx [2]:

"Under the auspices of a game company called Epyx I was co-inventor of the first color hand-held game system, the Lynx, which finally was acquired by Atari.

I was co-designer of the Lynx hardware system, and I implemented an entire software development suite including a run-time library of hardware interface routines and a celebrated set of debugging, art and audio tools. We received many patents for the Lynx.

In addition, we developed 6 games to be available at the launch of the system. I produced these 6 titles, was co-designer of several of them, and managed the programmers, artists and audio/music designers." [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Mical

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Lynx

[3] http://www.mical.org/workhistory

A bitplane is a region of memory rendered as pixels. The Amiga hardware allowed you to (basically) define a width and height for the region, as well as a x,y offset. So by e.g. increasing the x-offset you could scroll horizontally through a bitplane with a width larger than the screen's.

The ball is in the middle of a large empty bitplane. By simply changing the offset values it bounces around the screen. The graphics hardware does the heavy lifting. No pixels need to be erased, no polygons rendered. You're just looking at the same ball, but the window through which you look has moved.

Colour cycling can be used with palettes. Lets say you have 32 colours in your palette. Draw a row of 32 pixels, each in a different colour. Now change the palette so all colours are white, except for the first, which is red. Your pixels still refer to their respective colours in the palette. A frame later, make color 1 white and color 2 red, etc. This way you get animation without redrawing pixels (expensive), but simply by resetting the palette (cheap).

Anything else?

In this version, the ball actually bounces around. OP version doesn't seem to do any actual bouncing. The "boing" name didn't make much sense. I have to say, the bouncing version is a lot more impressive.

Would be hard to sleep in those houses with that waterfall crashing ad infinitum...