Amiga Memories - The Boing Ball [Episode 1]

A story of the Boing Ball ...
How the engineers of Amiga Corporation made it sound so enormous ...
and how it became so emblematic of the Amiga, even before it was presented to the public as a fully working home computer.

IDEA/SCRIPTING/RENDERING : Astrofra
MAIN 3D MODELING : Saleh Al-enizi & Gregory Thomas
PIXELART ROBOTIC FACE : Sven Ruthner
3D ENGINE : GameStart3D
LIPSYNC EXTRACTION SCRIPT : Thomas 'Scorpheus' Simonnet
Text to Speech : DFKI MARY-TTS

Music LLuvia & Radix, "Tournesol"

[batteman]

Toujours aussi beau et très instructif !

Bravo ! Vivement la suite ;)

[digistar]

Wow! This digital video is _awesome_! Imagine if this video was a full 16.8 million colour and 16-bit digital audio Amiga demo back in the 1990s (had the advanced technology been available for Amigas back then!). There is a terrific all synthesizer-based soundtrack with this video too, which I _loved_, being very much into electronic music since the 1970s. When I saw the foreign subtitles, I thought the commentary would also be foreign, but thank goodness it was in English (well USA English anyway, via the Amiga speech synth, which by the way, was _so_ cool.)

The Amiga never really caught up with modern PCs, which was a shame. We did eventually get full 16.8 million colour graphics, but the early 24-bit graphics cards for the Amiga B2000 and A1500 were far too expensive for home Amiga owners to afford (£1, 000.00+ in the UK in 1991 and 1992, and I assume not including VAT at 17.5% either.) But the _real_ let-down was that Amiga digital audio stayed at 8-bit and 28 kHz (I think), and was never really upgraded to full 16-bit 44.1 kHz CD quality format. And the number of sound channels also stayed at 4 (4-note polyphonic in synth terms.) Amigas should really have got _at least_ 32 or even 64 digital audio channels (as well as full CD quality audio) by the 1990s in my view. We did get some 16-bit Amiga B2000 and A1500 sound cards (to use the PC term), but even these (such as the Sunrize card), were also £1, 000.00+ in the UK in 1991 and 1992 (and again I assume not including VAT at 17.5%), and _still_ only had 4 sound channels. What was the point of having full CD quality sampling and playback, but still with only 4-note polyphony?

I still have my original Amiga A1500 at home (I bought it way back in 1992, and I am 46 now.) I am sending this comment on my 3-year-old Samsung NP350V5C laptop PC which I kind of consider to be a 21st century equivalent to the Amiga, even though laptop Amigas never came out, due to all the power issues of the custom chips, which would prevent laptop Amigas to be battery-powered. Of course, it would not stop them being mains-only, but wouldn't that defeat the object of having a portable Amiga?

Anyway, thanks for reading -- comments are always welcome.

Alastair C Parker (a mega Amiga fan since 1988, when I bought my first Amiga A500.)

[MonsieurRitournelle]

Merci pour la traduction astrofra ! On veut la suite !! xD

[astrofra]

Salut Arnaud!
ça fait plaisir d'avoir des news :)

[astrofra]

Haha.
Thanks a lot :)

Indeed, there's no need to genlock the Amiga with the camera when doing that stuff in 3D :D

[LeGlod]

J'aime bien le Goldorak et les vaisseau d'Albator :)

[maxbertioga]

Yes, it will work without this option, it would be interesting if the HDR option, could work on Radeons, an awesome graphic feature, I loved the demo, very good. :)

[astrofra]

Oui, 100% GameStart :)
La grosse balle dans l'écran est scriptée "à l'ancienne", et les balles qui rebondissent partout son en physique, voui :)

J'avais scripté une espèce de "moteur" qui génère ces vidéos tout seul il y'a quelques mois, donc j'ai plus qu'à saisir du texte et ça parle tout seul :]

[astrofra]

The demo version doesn't need the HDR option to be enabled, you can uncheck it.

[astrofra]

In realtime 3D ? Maybe.
In pre-rendered 3D, yes, without any problem :)

[astrofra]

Merci :)
Le son a été mixé par Seb, entre midi & deux :]

[sergiusmorpheus]

Salut Astrofa, je découvre tout juste tes vidéos Amiga memories et je les trouve super.
Elles semblent maintenant dater un peu. travailles tu à l'EPS2?
petit détail technique, sur les dernières secondes, on voit le visage du robot qui apparaît sur une image à deux reprises.
perso, j'aime beaucoup ce que tu as fais, surtout qu'après toutes ces années, tu arrives à m'apprendre des choses sur l'amiga.
bravo.

[TheFlipChannel]

your opinion, could blender do the same final work?

[MrPlykaan]

wé je m'en doutais un peu vous entendant parler de balle rebondissante... c'est du game start ? avec de la physique ?