Boing Ball

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The Boing Ball is a de-facto trademark and well-known symbol from Amiga computers. It is an animation showing a red-and-white balloon bouncing forth and back off the edges of the screen, as a deep 'boing!' sound plays on each impact.

The Boing Ball originally dates back to the middle 1980s and was one of the very first demos shown on the Amiga. The demonstration was specifically designed to take advantage of the Amiga's custom graphics and sound hardware, achieving a level of speed and smoothness not previously seen. The motion and spin of the ball were actually achieved by manipulation of the Amiga's display registers, rather than through a time-consuming repainting of the image. The smooth rotation of the ball was performed by remapping the colors of the image, out of the 4096 colors available to the Amiga's palette.

Boing Ball operated in an Intuition Screen, allowing the higher resolution Amiga Workbench to be dragged down to make the Boing Ball visible from behind, bouncing up above the Workbench while the Workbench remained fully active. Since the Boing Ball used almost no CPU time, this made a particularly impressive system demo at the time.

The Boing Ball was recreated in later years, both on the Amiga and on other platforms, typically with higher resolution but more brute-force means.

Despite its popularity, the Boing Ball was never officially adopted as a trademark by Commodore. The official Amiga trademark was a rainbow-coloured doubled tick mark. After the bankruptcy of Commodore, the Boing Ball has been adopted as a de-facto symbol for the Amiga.