Amiga Boing Ball
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN people recall it with nostalgia as an impressive feat for its era, used as an example of the Amiga's graphics ability.
What it is
The original Amiga Boing Ball demo, written at the Winter CES in January 1984 to show off the Amiga's hardware, with a bouncing, spinning checkered ball running while the system multitasked. It became the Amiga's unofficial emblem.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2016 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends acqq · 2016-08 · on “The Amiga Boing Ball Explained”
The video of the Boing Ball: [this video] I remember what were the effective limits at these times and to me it still looks impressive. As an example, the observer would never get the idea that it's done by changing "the beginning of the screen" as the grid background stays on the same place all the time, and just the ball (with the shadow) moves. Also note the change of the rotation direction as the ball hits the wall.
Cites pjmlp · 2025-12 · on “Big GPUs don't need big PCs”
In the home computer universe, such computers were the first ones having a programmable graphics unit that did more than paste the framebuffer into the screen. While the PCs were still displaying text, or if you were lucky to own an Hercules card, gray text, or maybe a CGA one, with 4 colours. While the Amigas, which I am more confortable with, were doing this in the mid-80's: [LINK] [this video] The original Amiga 1000, had on its motherboard, later reduced to fit into an Amiga 500, Motorola 68000 CPU, a programmable sounds chip with DMA channels (Paula), and a programable blitter chip (Agnus aka early GPUs). You would build in RAM the audio, or graphics instructions for the respetive chipset, s
Cites irchans · 2026-07 · on “Amiga Graphics Archive”
I remember seeing the Amiga bouncing ball demo and being amazed. [this video] The Amiga was the second computer that I ever owned. The first was a C64 that I bought freshman year. (My father bought a TRS-80 before that.)