Amiga boing ball demo for the Mac

[Sune Salminen]

My friend had this, the Amiga boing ball demo in glorious black and white on his 9" Macintosh Plus.

Does anybody have it? It's difficult to google for, way too many hits for the original.

[prowler]

OpenGL Amiga Boing

OpenGL Boing running in Mac OS X



Download page

Only source code available (2009/03/07), but should compile on Mac OS X.

[Sune Salminen]

Thanks, I found that too but it's not what I'm looking for.

The demo I'm talking about ran in System 6 on a black and white Apple Macintosh with a 68000 CPU. This was around 1987.

[cosmicfrog]

might have found it


http://www.macintoshgarden.org/apps/vanlandingham

[prowler]

Thanks, Cosmic!

Just downloaded it. I'll try it out later.

[cosmicfrog]

yay hope its the one, I hope try it tommor when I set some mac emulator up, or something

that mac garden has some good stuff

[cosmicfrog]

if it is can you convert it from the sit archive to a disk one plz

[prowler]

Hey Cosmic,

You can convert it on the 7600 PowerMac you got from me. Copy the .sit file to a 1.44MB floppy, write protect it, put it in the PowerMac's floppy drive, open the floppy disk's icon and double click on the .sit file icon.

Because the floppy is write protected, you'll be asked where to extract it. Choose the hard drive and the files will be extracted into a folder on the hard drive.

Open up Apple Disk Copy 6.1.3 and ask it to create a floppy disk image from that folder. Choose 800K HFS image and it will be created (and mounted!)

Navigate to where the floppy disk image was created on the hard drive and drag it onto the 1.44MB floppy icon (but first remove the floppy and remove the write protection before replacing it).

Put the floppy back in your PC and copy the disk image onto your hard drive (data fork only). This will be the disk image you require for emulation!

[prowler]

Okay, I've tested the Vanlandingham file from The Macintosh Garden linked to by cosmicfrog above and it is the Amiga Boing Ball Demo for Macintosh!

I have uploaded an 800K HFS Mac-formatted floppy disk image containing the Demo to the Zone to be used in Macintosh Plus emulation on any platform.

I had the Demo running in Mini vMac 2.7.1-nmkwx86s Plus 4M on a P200MMX PC running Windows 95.

This is what the disk image looks like when it's mounted on the desktop:



When the Demo's icon is double-clicked, information about the program is displayed:



After a minute or so, the Demo is ready to run:



Now, click the mouse button and the Demo begins:



I found that the Demo virtually takes over the emulated machine, hogging all the resources. Mini vMac can't be closed in the normal way once the Demo is running, only by using the Task Manager. For this reason, it was actually very difficult to take the last screenshot. With a bit of patience I managed to grab a few screens, and this is the one that looked the best.

[prowler]

As explained in Vanlandringham's opening screen, the program is distributed courstesy of the Boston Computer Society.

A BCS public domain software repository is hosted here:
http://www.applefritter.com/software/bcs/index.html

The Vanlandringham program is included on the Developer 5 disk.

For Macintosh enthusiasts, the individual disk images can be downloaded separately, or the complete collection is available as one file (19.6MB)!

[cosmicfrog]

thanks P

[Retro1234]

That looks so Shit!

[prowler]

Hi Boo Boo,

There is more to the Amiga boing ball demo for the Mac Plus than meets the eye.



Wondering why such a tiny program is such a resource hog, I found this explanation by searching online:

The “Vanlandingham” program uses the Mac's alternate hardware screen buffer, an area of memory that is also used by the Mac Plus RAM cache, to get smooth, flicker-free animation. As a result, when the program exits, Finder information previously in the cache will be lost causing a system crash. This can be prevented by turning off your RAM cache with the control panel. It's possible to design an interface to let the system know your application is using the alternate video buffer, forcing the Mac to configure the cache somewhere else, but this workaround is not, of course, possible in emulation without reprogramming it.

For full details, see the complete article here:
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mact...nim/index.html

[cosmicfrog]

nice

now I`m imaging the black as red hehehehe
going read that link now,

no mac/amiga stuff for me this weekend as had to install a printer and play with a poorly laptop

[Sune Salminen]

lol there it is!! Thanks cosmicfrog.