Ah yes, I think this was one of the first things I looked for this in particular at the first run when I just got my first Amiga. Brings back good memories!
The Juggler showed off the Amiga graphic abilities. It is what helped sell some of the 1986 and 1987 Amiga computers.
Before that it was a bouncing checkered beach ball. Other computers did their own bouncing ball, but the Amiga could multitask and had multiple bouncing beach balls, each program running on its own. I think you could have multiple jugglers as well.
A few years later 1992 "State of the Art", Spaceballs demo shows off Amiga 500 pretty well. That whole thing fits on 880 kB floppy and it's rendered realtime.
I think Jannicke, the state of the art girl dated Paul (Lone Starr) at the time. They were all teens when they made this and Paul was one of the by far youngest democoders in the scene at the time.
There were different ways of expanding the Amiga RAM and the demo became so popular it was reverse engineered by a popular cracking group Skid Row[3,4]., patched and re-distributed
7.16 MHz (NTSC) / 7.09 MHz (PAL), and what's worse, average instruction takes about 8 clock cycles. Fastest ones take 4 cycles. "move" (like mov on x86) takes from 4 up to 36 cycles depending on addressing modes. Multiplication is up to 70 cycles. Divide up to 140 cycles (unsigned) and 158 (signed).
In some sense it's really like a 1.7 MHz machine. And that's being generous.
Correct, just like with the Commodore 64, the CPU clock actually differed based on the graphics hardware output, which was back in the day adjusted for the household CRT TV sets.
The master clock crystal oscillator on the motherboard was set to be 2 clock cycles per pixel and other chips clocks were derived from that.
Hence the CPU was set to 1/4th of master clock, so the European PAL[1] machines (a 50fps TV standard) actually ran slightly slower than the American NTSC[2] machines (a 60fps TV standard with a smaller vertical resolution).
I was the only one from my friends having a PC at home instead of an Amiga, but luckily we had lot of scener parties at their places so I got to learn lot about the system.
It was an environment ahead of its time with dedicated hardware for sound and graphics, pure multitasking even if lack of MMU meant occasional crashes and the whole libraries concept was great.
Some of the amazing capabilities of the Amiga were influenced by one of its architects: Carl Sassenrath. He has since gone on to create the Rebol language which is even more astounding once you begin to look into it.
He's currently at Roku where I can only begin to imagine what he's working on. My only wish is that they'd replace the horrific BrightScript with Rebol.
The hardware owes it all to Jay Miner and Ron Nicholson (rhn). Jay Miner passed a long time away from a long term kidney condition and is still out there doing lots of stuff:
Notice how he was the guy behind the IWM (Integrated Woz Machine) for the Mac and the beautifully minimized Apple //c in addition to being one of the key persons in creating the essence of Amiga hardware magic: Denise, Copper and Blitter.
Carl Sassenrath and RJ Mical were super influential on the OS side, making a super lightweight preemptively multitasking OS with small components that messaged each other and the OS abstraction layers that the rest of the personal computing world will not see in the next 10+ years.
Dave Haynie, one of Commodores hardware engineers, films the last day at the Commodore plant. And the layoff party afterwards. Hilarious, informative, and sad at the same time.
I consider Andy Hertzfeld's site a very accurate reference as well as a patchwork of authentic fascinating stories that just draws you in.
However, Ron Nicholson (rhn) is on the Mac case signatures, he also did major work on Apple //, so I find it strange that he is not mentioned anywhere on folklore.org . I think this is something worth researching..
Ha! :) Sorry, meant to write "rhn is still out there", but I dropped I replied to hastily and by the time I figured it out it was too late to edit my post..
It's pretty cool to click on the link and be able to run a ray tracer on your phone. Maybe more exciting because you get the drama of it taking a couple seconds to render.
Ironic that compute has come so far yet real time movie quality graphics are still only a dream.
We have GPU based ray tracing, and if you stuff a 44u rack full of them it becomes more tolerable, but still nothing approaching 24fps for complex scenes and effects,
This has a lot to do with the content being more complex compared to say, what was done for a movie like Tron. But it's more than that. How many other problem domains could eat 5 orders of magnitude of performance increases and easily make use of it for everyday consumer applications? That still might not even be enough to get us out of the uncanny valley.
This has nothing to do with the Amiga, but shameless plug for a cool in-browser ray-tracer we made for a school project http://camargo.github.io/tracejs/#/
Rendering times become exponentially slower with more objects in the scene (100% native Javascript, hence 0 hardware acceleration) but it's fun to play with if you're in the mood!
It's interesting that they chose to port the source to JS by hand, rather than compiling the C to asm.js with emscripten. It'd probably have been easier, and the resulting code faster, if this approach was taken.
They should have just taken a still of the original and pasted it as a png. Would have been easier, and requires less CPU. But I don't think that was the point of the whole exercise.
I just realized I can't find the original code on this guy's website but I have the extracted Amiga disk image from a public domain disk circulated at the time... so, here's the annotated 1987 K&R C code on pastebin for comparison:
For what it was aiming to do, I think it makes a lot of sense, albeit it might be a little bit too factored for the data(e.g. passing in the whole world to functions called only once).
You can kind of tell that this is more "proof of concept" than "artistic triumph" because the scene itself is relatively bland stuff, with its most impressive aspect today being that the juggler actually animates somewhat like a person. Everything else is just a straightforward demonstration of the Amiga's compute resources and display capability. Since the output was always going to be a single prerendered animation, deep optimization probably wouldn't be worth it.
Some more context here: http://home.comcast.net/~erniew/juggler.html
and a bit more here: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=10776
The source code is refreshingly simple and easy to read: both the original C code and the ported JS code.