51–60 of 65 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd guess BCPL. Most early Amiga software was written in it.
Only the file system portion (dos.library) was written in BCPL (ported from TRIPOS in two or three weeks). The kernel (exec.library) was in assembly, and the GUI (intuition.library) was written in C.
Any compiled language would have been good enough.
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 graphic…
It's worth mentioning the reveal, which the page omits entirely, and was the astonishing bit of the CES demo at the time. In the original demo they were showing the normal desktop screen, showing window dragging, resizing, showing text editors, clocks, shell and what not. Running 640x480 4 colour. The whole time you could hear the bang bang of the boing ball bouncing, but see nothing. At some point a viewer asks "wha…
[0] http://obligement.free.fr/gfx/modes_graphiques_fashion.png
To be honest, it makes me a little sad whenever people choose to use "smoke and mirrors" to create an effect, rather than do the technical correct thing (or admit the effect is impossible to achieve in general).
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-de…
The bouncing sound: took a platic bat (used for working out 'disagreements') and hit an alumimum garage door while digitizing the interior sound of the garage with an apple II, and masaging the digital data to play on the Amiga.
Wait, that's how it worked? That's it? It was a trick? That demo was my introduction to the Amiga. Whenever I met an Amiga fan later in life I would picture that demo in my head. Adult, programmer me knows all too well that demos are marketing material, aka "lies you can't be sued for", but really faking 3D rendering is pretty low even by marketing standards. I am extremely disappointed. This kind of screws with the…
Wait, that's how it worked? That's it? It was a trick? That demo was my introduction to the Amiga. Whenever I met an Amiga fan later in life I would picture that demo in my head. Adult, programmer me knows all too well that demos are marketing material, aka "lies you can't be sued for", but really faking 3D rendering is pretty low even by marketing standards. I am extremely disappointed. This kind of screws with the…
My memory of the era is that no one would have thought they were actually 3d rendering in real time: that was Just Not Possible. I'll point out that once they finally, FINALLY made a memory card for the Commodore 64, that plugged into the megabyte-per-second DMA port, there was a similar bouncing ball demo done for the C-64. Purely by loading whole frames into the memory card and blasting them onscreen as needed, lik…
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 graphic…
It might be obvious from the name, but there's also just one bit per pixel in a bitplane, and then you stack five bitplanes to get 32 colors. You can have different offsets into each bitplane, which is why the grid could stay in the same place while the ball bounced. The Amiga only supported bitplanes and not "chunky" modes like VGA where you have one byte per pixel. This made graphics with 256 colors (supported by t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My memory of the era is that no one would have thought they were actually 3d rendering in real time: that was Just Not Possible. I'll point out that once they finally, FINALLY made a memory card for the Commodore 64, that plugged into the megabyte-per-second DMA port, there was a similar bouncing ball demo done for the C-64. Purely by loading whole frames into the memory card and blasting them onscreen as needed, lik…
Yep. Every computer of the era ended up with a boing ball clone - it was just that iconic. [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSwwqt3ue2M
