A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

It was seeing some of the more recent A500 demos that convinced me to come back :-)


This very much so. For me it was the birth of this sort of demo that made me leave the scene. I do like watching them, but I have no interest in making them as I don't find it fun - too close to my area of work, I guess :-/

Maybe I'm getting old really, but I 100% agree.

Well, its easier to get your hands on a A500 than an A1200/060/50+. And with that in mind other sceners, who are working on PC, Gameboy and such today, might try their wings on A500 if the Amiga scene would have more focus on A500.

I think that is a very good point. I have a feeling that this is one of the reasons why both the Amiga and pc platform have seen a decline, especially in the last couple of years. That might even be more the case for pc demos.

Most of the coders have found a day job doing code. In that sense, doing a C64 demo might be a more substantial difference from day to day work than a pc and (to lesser extent) amiga demo?

Also, i have the feeling that there is at least a renewed interest in doing A500 demos in the past year(s).

No need for more focus, people should talk less and make more demos ;)

Point taken ;D

That's the spirit :)

I just like to add that as a viewer, i would really miss AGA demos if they weren't made anymore. I really enjoy a good AGA demo. I always found it a nice platform in between C64 and pc.

The most interesting thing (for me) would be AGA demos and fresh modern A500 demos (like 15 years of fame for example).

A500 Demo or Die! Like it's 80s ;)

I'm with deadguy on this one. Especially if you consider the memory specs as well. Maybe we should do a completetely unscientific survey here on ada... :P I see/have another problem with the current A1200 compo-standard besides limiting the audience who can watch the prods. (Now that I'm finally a lucky 060-owner I can, although still not all as I "only" have 32 Mb installed..)

The other problem, from a coders perspective is the complexity of the stuff I can code. With 060/50 and 64Mb memory there's for example room for a pretty complex modular 3D-engine, which consumes a *lot* of time to write, pretty similar to writing one on a modern platform. It get's to a point where things start to look suspiciously similar to a software design for a medium size projects in C++ or so. I believe this is one major factor for the lack of releases compared to other platforms.

As an example - I got this interesting new idea for a texture mapper that could be quite "wow". It'd probably take a week or so to implement. Writing a good extensible 3D-engine from scratch to utilize it would take me like forever.. :)

I have no real solution to this.. (errm.. to my own beliefs of a problem that is hehe). Lowering the memory requirements would reach a wider hardware base and put more constraints on the platform. Limiting executable size would create some nice constraints too. Personally, I'd love the challenge of 16Mb ram and 8 Mb exe. :D

Other than that, collaborating on tool chains and the higher level parts to make available for everyone might increase the productivity and number of releases.

..my 2c..

In my book I tend to distinguish between A) chipset programming, that is, using the built in structure as-is, and B) for lack of a better term "CPU programming", where the load of the visual effects are done using raw CPU power/architecture.

Nexus 7 is probably the most famous example of an AGA demo w/o any acceleration and yet, providing stunning visuals.

When it comes to the availability of ac-cel-era-tor cards, the 1230 is abundantly present these days and even is still produced by some small shops and companies.
In terms of competition confusion, however, I'd say that things actually got better since Breakpoint.
Before that we've had a mixture between 68k(accelerated) and PPC productions where the "uninitiated" audience more or less thought they were interchangable, and how many of us could actually enjoy Planet Potion or Fate Fits Karma on the actual hardware ?

For what it's worth, I'll stick to the chipset banging aspect. More OCS rather than AGA because OCS simply is easier to deal with ... as I'm being taught these days again, straight up AGA can be a gorram pain in the arse.

On the C64 vs Amiga.
So, to sum up, it seems like:
- doing C64 stuff is more challenging and interesting for coders for some reason,
- C64 scene is bigger.

I have also the feeling that C64 coders are more eager to experiment with new effects/ideas. In last few years there were only two A500 demos that I'd dare to call innovative – Superoriginal and Vold. These are among my favourite ECS/OCS ever actually. Maybe there are old routines only with a modern twist, dunno, but for my untrained eye it's something modern and gives the impression of being new. These demos are also the best proof there's still a lot of unexploited potential in trusty old A500.

On a side note: I miss the days when demomaking was more serious and slow process than today, when almost everyone makes demos in sort of a hurry... So, if there's any coder interested in making a polished in every detail and long-developed demo, contact Ghostown immediately! :)


I'd love to hear more on that, as it's not something that happens often!

Not much too it really. I got added to a facebook group of ye old amiga sceners which prompted me to look up what had been happening with the A500 post 1993. Turned out to be not a lot, but there were a few gems that caught my eye and I thought I'd have a tinker and see if I could even remember how to program the machine. I missed being able to get so close to hardware and do things with it we're not supposed to, much nicer than dealing with d3d and gcm library calls all day, assuming I'm not stuck doing network or audio, yawn... -_-.zZ

PS. It was seeing the crowd reaction to Boogietown on last years Revision video stream that convinced me to go this year, it seams I'm not the only one that still likes that kind of demo, so thanks for that :-)

I've recently started doing a1260 demos again and the releases are mainly centered around effects I'd like to do rather than a big concept. SInce I've got a lot of catching up to do on the effects side, they will look very similar to other effects for a while :)

That said, I'm not really that keen on doing chunky-only effects so eventually I hope to be able to actually use some of the real amiga hardware, which I guess is what is more often the case on the a500...

I'm also purely into A500 stuff - it's fun to see the AGA ones, but as others said, the full 3d that's common there is closer to what I do in my job, so I use A500 to do something completely different. Also, I am more of an effects coder than a demo coder, and for me, the beauty in A500 coding is when you write an effect that uses copper, blitter, and CPU in perfect balance. I don't feel that AGA is as well rounded.

To me, the great use of stencil vectors in Major Release was probably one of the things inspiring me to get back, and it is probably the effect that I have appreciated the most in the last decade.I liked Boogietown but it's not the kind of demo I would make myself. I appreciated Superoriginal's colors, but chunky copper effects look like low res PC effects to me, and I prefer crisper stuff with fewer colors.

I got back into A500 because over the last 2 decades I have had many thoughts of "why didn't I try to do X", and so now I'm just into writing all the effects I never tried before. There are still many new effects (or at least new twists on old effects) that are possible on A500, and I want to do them all.

Finally, I'm getting back into it because with WinUAE it is super fast to iterate on stuff, so there's never any waiting. I've expanded my WinUAE toolchain a lot since last release, so it includes a full demo framework and tools, and I am trying to make a full demo with it now. Once I am done, I want to release the source for both framework and demo, so other people can focus on writing effects and sync them without having to worry about all the boring stuff: image conversion, loading, packing, sync systems, interrupts, system shutdown and restore etc.

Don't expect anything from me soon, though - I have a 9 month old baby, so coding happens in 30 minute increments after she falls asleep, and before I collapse myself :-)

Sounds great. Such a framework could probably lure back some people into doing amiga code (your toolchain did generate great interest judging by the comments on pouet).

Also looking forward to a future demo!

I think once Revision is out of the way I'm going to create a few easy to follow test cases that show where WinUAE isn't working so well. The worst problems I've run into are sprites not being visible when they should be (a good example is the rink a dink rotozoom, there is no left edge on the border border in WinUAE) and a veritable ton of HAM mode issues. One of the hardest things I've had to do is make my effects work on both real hardware and the emulator, sacrificing performance in some cases just so those viewing via emulator don't blast me for shoddy detail, lol It would be nice to help in trying to get those problems fixed before I start another production.

You should report the problems directly to Toni Wilen in the WinUAE support forum on the English Amiga Board. He's always quick to respond to these kind of emulation errors.

Sorry for going off topic here, but this thread is really going off topic. I'd rather read two or three separate threads than scanning through page after page about what scene is the shit.

OnT: I've been off the scene for a while and Datastorm was a great followup to TRSAC! The Gothenburg scene is quite tight where many of us meet twice every month over a beer or twelve. Datastorm was a bit like that with the additional Danish, German or occasional Belgian or British guy. Then there were all these guys using totally obsolete computers hogging all the tables. ;)

Thank you, and see you next year! Same time, new location, am I right?

I hope the location won't change, but what the hell do I know. I have no doubts that the orga-crew will be able to create an equally cool party next year anyway..

(also; *my* scene is the shit)

It was cool to meet the Swedes again and see Bstrr create the demo almost from scratch.With his obvious talent I can begin thinking of my retirement :-)