The Amiga Boing Ball demo was created during a night at the 1984 CES by Dale Luck and R. J. Mical and it is told that show visitors completely blown away by this.
The demo itself was a very clever demonstration of how it's custom chips could be used to fake an effect rather than to create it with pure processing power.
In reality nothing on screen is redrawn during the demo.
The ball itself is rendered at the beginning of the demo and then 'animated' with the color cycling method.
The motion of the ball is done by moving the scroll positions of the different bitplanes. It uses 3 bitplanes, while the grid uses another bitplane and the shadow uses the last bitplane.
The clever selection of color registers makes it possible to have a shadow that works correctly with the grid while not interfering with the ball. This is also the reason why this image needs 32 colors and why the color palette contains mostly duplicates.
All this means that the demo does full hardware scrolling, costing next to no cpu processing power.
From Defender of the Crown 2
From Defender of the Crown CDTV
From Defender of the Crown
From Defender of the Crown 2
The hand painted map from Defender of the Crown was replaced by a picture that was grabbed from video and touched up.
This was a technique that Jim used more often in his later work to speed up his workflow, because pixeling everything by hand took a lot of time, which was rarely available when developing a game.
From Defender of the Crown
From Defender of the Crown 2
From Defender of the Crown 2
From Defender of the Crown with a day time palette.
The castle pictures from Defender of the Crown used the same picture but with different color palettes for the day and night time versions.
From Defender of the Crown with a night time palette
From Defender of the Crown 2
From Defender of the Crown
From Defender of the Crown 2
From Defender of the Crown
From Defender of the Crown 2.
From Defender of the Crown.
This image was not drawn by Jim Sachs and he was not happy with it. He therefore created a completely new version for Defender of the Crown 2.
This image belonged to a sequence where the Nautilus can be seen sinking slowly in the sunset. Jim captured this sequence from a VHS recording that he had made from the game demo during development and posted it on his personal YouTube channel.
Jim re-used the title picture for Ports of Call in his abandoned [link=/game/20000LeaguesUnderTheSea.html]20.000 Leagues under the Sea[/link] project.
The german magazine Amiga Magazin did an article on Jim Sachs in their August 1989 issue. They previewed a screen from the project, while it was still in development, and you can clearly see the same sky, mountains and buildings.
