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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0
A year later same group released "9 Fingers", also running on Amiga 500.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPoYzwib7JQ