comment by ijs on 10 August 2006
This is some value for bytes... MAN it goes on and on and just when you've seen everything of a certain effect they add another nice detail. Great music too which runs perfectly in sync with the effects. They don't come much better than this!
comment by at0m on 09 November 2006
Incredible production. IMHO best Amiga 64KB intro!
comment by rage on 23 December 2006
I've seen this a few times and I thought this was a demo! but 64k.. the music is amazing. This kicks ass.
comment by z5 on 30 January 2007
What i find the most incredible and beautiful thing about this intro is the way that each effect is presented. This isn't just hardcore coding on boring black backgrounds. Seeing that this is 64k, Potion couldn't do much with real graphics but they solved this so well. Screen 19 and 23 for example are so well done and there is so much going on. Or screen 9 just before the credits: you've got the wirefram at the right side, the background (should recheck to see if it moves in this scene), then the grey stripes at the left side and the white dots moving in front of them. You see this in nearly every screen (for example the bits moving up).
It is as if they thought really hard on each and every scene. Just incredible. Mavey and Skip, you are gods. If only i could track down Mavey one last time for a comment or an interview.
comment by lvd on 12 June 2007
Probably not only one of the best 64k ever seen on amiga, but also one with perfect music. As for me, music is much of every demo - if it is cool, demo looks overall cool, if it is not (for me) - demo could be technically perfect and with shiny design - but not attractive for me.
comment by mavey on 02 September 2007
Thanks for all the comments! We've worked on this intro for about 1 year... but I'm very happy that we've finished it and presented on the best party Mekka Sympsium!
comment by skipp604 on 14 October 2007
Alright, I've managed to dig my HDD and found the final version of the intro. It uses requester to select AHI-mode, so it *SHOULD* run on any AHI-compatible soundcard. Unfortunately, that feature hasn't been tested at all, because none of us has a soundcard... Feedback appreciated! Enjoy:
http://68k.aminet.net/demo/intro/potion-gift_final.lha
comment by z5 on 14 October 2007
@skipp: is the requester the only different thing in the final version? Any changes in the content?
comment by skipp604 on 15 October 2007
@z5: not really, just the AHI-mode selector was added and one typo was corrected in greetings part (Ephidrena instead of Ephiderna ;)
comment by z5 on 15 October 2007
Damn... you shouldn't have corrected the Ephiderna thing :o) iirc, there was another potion release where they were called Ephiderna.
Anyway, really great that you found this version. I'll update the link and change the credits as they are mentioned in the final readme.
Isn't it about time that Potion rises from the ashes and kicks some ass again?
comment by pintcat on 08 June 2008
This is what I like to see, on my 68k machine: loads of real time content compressed into one tiny file - superb! Too bad there isn't more like this. Where are these guys from potion?
comment by skipp604 on 30 June 2008
Since there's no link to the video of Gift anymore, I'm posting my own grab. Just a few words of comment:
1. There was no real grab of Gift until now, all I could find anywhere was this crappy 10MB DIVX with so poor quality it made me cry a little. It was so bad that all the details we (Mavey and myself) put into this intro were lost, not to mention old tape-quality sound (which was, in my opinion, important enough, since I used so much calculated synth-sequences and that was one of the most unique features).
2. My A1200 060/050 wasn't fast enough to capture the intro with a decent framerate (not to mention, I don't have any professional video capture hardware to grab it directly off the RGB pins; I could only be using Composite Video out, and that doesn't help the quality, either). That's why I decided to grab the AVI off the WinUAE output.
3. In the video, there's one quite significant glitch - around the halfway through the intro (just before greetings part) there's this "strobe" effect - frame on, frame off. Now, I don't really know what kind of the trick Mavey has used, but WinUAE shows only like first ~12 pixels from the left, when the real Amiga shows the whole picture correctly. I tried to override this "bug" in many ways, but with no success. I decided to release this vid "as is", because in my opinion it was small sacrifice, when I could have the intro running at 50 FPS (1 frame refresh) the whole time (something I could never achieve on a real hardware). So - in other words - you are getting a video with the highest possible framerate (AVI is encoded @ 50FPS) for a viewing pleasure :)
4. I've uploaded the intro on my temporary webspace, so grab it while you can and put it somewhere else, as this webspace is just a "courtesy" one and I don't want to overload the server with people downloading 276MB AVI (yes, it's THAT big). I'm going to upload this video to Scene.org aswell, but not just yet. So if you can host it anywhere else, please do. And update the ADA-video link afterwards.
5. Video details: 320x256 @ 50 FPS, encoded with DivX 6. Audio: 48kHz 64kbps mono (equals to 128kbps stereo stream; since there weren't any real stereo-effects in the intro, I've decided to go mono; you won't notice the difference, anyways). Audio was rendered off the DigiBoosterPro (not the intro itself). But there's no difference between the two (just the quality - it was rendered to 16-bit WAV with highest quality AHI-Filesave mode). I was tracking this module using exactly the same calculated sequences.
I hope you enjoy this video. If anyone can help me with the issues I mentioned, I would be happy to grab it again and re-encode the video...
Here's the link:
http://skipp.cps.pl/potion/gift_hq.avi
comment by pintcat on 30 June 2008
@skip: This is quite interesting, because I did a video of this demo myself a few months ago, but never released it to public. I didn't know there are people interested in that stuff. A friend asked me to compile a DVD with Amiga demos and I thought that would be an easy job; I just grab some videos made by other people and put them together. But most of the videos I've found turned out to have a crappy quality. It's a damn pity!
The origianl file is MPEG2 (DVD standard), 25fps, 48kHz AC3 audio and very big (about 300MB). Because I like this thing so much, I also did a smaller H.264/AVC compression. It uses only ~100MB and has the same quality. I even managed the issue with the strobe effect which took me some time. It is some kind of buggy behaviour caused by WinUAE. You need to disable the horizontal and vertical centering in the display menu.
comment by skipp604 on 30 June 2008
@pintcat: Now that's interesting news :) Can I get hold of this MPEG2 version somehow? :) I don't even know how to grab anything in that format. What I did is I grabbed to AVI from WinUAE output using Loseless-JPEG codec and then compressing it into DIVX/XVID. I also tried to grab uncompressed RGB but it was so big throughput, my system was too slow to even grab it properly, not to mention the horrendous diskspace it took. So, any chance of a link to your grab? :)
comment by pintcat on 01 July 2008
@skip: I didn't capture it directly to MPEG2, I used a similar way as you: Recorded it to AVI using the REAL lossless Huffyuv-codec (you know JPEG related codecs are never lossless, though they call themselves so) and then after some editing I converted it to what ever I want. I can give you the link to the MPEG2 version, but first I need a place to upload it to (some filehoster which takes over 300MB). Meanwhile you might want to try the AVC version, becase I uploaded this some time ago. Hope you can handle this video format. And remember: Since I only used 25 fps, this one won't be as smooth as your 50 fps video!
Link to AVC: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?my2wbyjixyf
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