This won't be the 1st time that something originally from an Amiga (7mhz?) cannot easily be done on a more modern machine.
Similar to some of the Demos that have to be converted to video for the YouTube generation to view. All the horsepower to now run something that used to run from a floppy, back in the day
The demos are converted because that's a quick way to view them, rather than starting up WinUAE, etc.
And palette cycling is a nifty solution, I used it in Amstrad CPC pictures I created, so that's a 4MHz Z80 scraping 0.1 8-bit MIPS. That's because it's just updating some colour registers every frame, not exactly taxing.
When you suddenly have to do this in a browser, at a high level, and support IE7's slow Javascript (let's just say that it probably takes thousands of machine cycles to run each Javascript instruction, turning an xGHz machine into an xMHz in terms of power), you run into issues when updating 640x480 bytes of information every frame (especially with the blend-cycling used).
