A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

As discussed on Amigaworld, someone (Vikke) started a website on asm coding on the Amiga. It can be found here. It includes tutorials on effects + code + video.

Wow! Great initiative! :)

Yeah, great site for the future Amiga coders (if there are any).

Btw - I was wondering if there exist a kind of encyclopedia of Amiga demo effects? With info on who and when invented each one and in which demo it appeared for the first time. And with its proper name for all the lamers like me who suck big time in naming the effects :)

I have a really good time reading the Pouet comments to the old demos, just as Cube-o-matic/Spreadpoint. I didn't know it was Buddha who first showed texture mapping on Amiga, while Rob Rose/Brainstorm might be the one who actually invented it (read Axel's comment). I love such stories! The problem is these are scattered across various productions and it would be fab to have them in one place.

I had/have a fantasy of creating a wiki for amiga coders for many years. Much like codebase64. But like everything else, time I do not have in abundance =(.

I like what this guy Vikke have done, but it is always hard to maintain such sites if they are not wikis.

Like Raylight said, great initiative!

An encyclopedia of Amiga effects would be great - if it contained things like basic description, first release, Improvement, including links so the user could see it. Example:

Glenz Vectors - filled 3d object with half the triangles being bright, and the other half being colored, drawing both front and back sides, giving a transparency effect, usually morphing between different shapes.
invented by Celebrandil/Phenomena, for Animotion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evl4Ec9TkKE#t=1m01
48 faces by The Spy/Crionics, for Hardwired: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CGOh-jb4QM#t=2m7

Yeah, exactly something like that (and I love your Improvement idea!): 1) screenshot, 2) a brief description and name of the effect, 3) info on the demo it was used in for the first time, 4) name of the coder, 5) release date. And perhaps we can even have a source code for every effect (I'm thinking of this Vikke guy here, as he said he would be adding new effects on regular basis). Now, that would be something!

xxxxx mentioned glenz vectors. Here's a nice find – Celebrandil's own words regarding the effect: "Honestly, I didn't find the effect that impressive, but for some reason people liked it. I was overjoyed seeing similar things in later demos. Due to my poor black-and-white monitor I never saw the random black dots that occured inbetween vectors. Photon corrected that and called my version Celebrandil mode. My inspiration came from some Danish demo, where balls where floating on-top of a static background. The mixture of colours using different bitplanes was similar, but not the graphics itself."

So, to sum up – I'll pull some interesting stories out of the Pouet and get back to you when I have more than, say, 10 effects.

Hello all.

I'm now also on this forum, so if there is anything you want to ask me about my tutorials I'll try my best to answer. I will also be active in other discussions regarding ASM and HW coding on the Amiga.

On the site http://vikke.net you can find the tutorials as they get ready for publishing, and also some background regarding me.

I am into the _real_ "oldskool" coding on the Amiga (Copper & Blitter). 3D isn't really my thing, so you probably wont get much about that in the upcoming tutorials.

Hopefully I manage to make a real demo at some point, as that was really the reason for me to get back into Amiga coding. If a demo will get finished I'll publish the source of that as well, but then the code in the mainloop will be optimized and a whole lot harder to read. Now in the tutorials the code isn't optimized (it will be a little optimized in future tutorials), as I wanted the code to be as easy to read as possible. And in such simple codedemos as these are, there are CPU cycles to spare.

Jazzcat et al., I like this idea of an effect encyclopedia. Please bear in mind that the task will be enormeous and cries for some crowd-based approach with proper semantics and tagging mechanisms behind it. Without knowing details about the current state of demozoo.org, I reckon it might be a good idea to check with them?

But thats just my 2 cents. Whatever you do, I'd be interested to see it.

As for the tutorials, they seem nice to an untrained eye (i only did a bit of asm coding so newbie status). I think you need to think about the purpose of the site though:

- is it a site for complete newbies on how to learn asm programming on Amiga?
- or is it a site about you programming classic effects and explaining how it was done?

In the first case, i think a bit more basic tutorials would be nice, e.g. tutorials on startup/shutdown code, music, interrupt, color manipulation, fast mem/chip mem, copperlists, image and data import,... but this would no doubt take a lot of effort and time.

In the second case, then this seems to be a nice effort with complete source and well documented code.

z5_

Doing tutorials for how to start programming on the Amiga could be done, but I believe there are such tutorials on the net already. This could be a good place to start for newcomers: http://www.palbo.dk/dataskolen/maskinsprog/

And one thing that every Amiga coder needs to read: http://amigadev.elowar.com/ (and especially the Hardware Reference Manual - personally I think I've read it close to 10 times when i got my HRM in 1988, and also used it as a "know-it-all-about-the-Amiga"-dictonary, yes, I really wanted to understand how the Amiga worked).

My first intention wasn't to make tutorials, but to start democoding again. So I think the site will mostly be about showing how some things were done using the Amigas chipset. I will write more (and more detailed) about the Copper, Blitter, Sprites, Playfields, Audio etc. I just have to confess that the thins I have forgotten the most about during the last 25 years are regarding audio and disk (and of these I haven't made much code regarding disk-access in asm at all, so lets see how that pans out). Probably I will end up asking for help regarding audio- and disk-coding.

The reason for starting the tutorial webpage is helping others that are coming back to Amiga coding, or if we get newcomers to the "scene" to show how the old stuff was created. I believe that many of todays coders would be better at doing their work if they had at some point had to code on a restricted computer (compared to computers of today) like the Amiga. Perhaps universities should have Amiga programming courses, wouldn't that be something? :)

Funny how I had a lot more time to code and test many many things on the Amiga when I was a teenager (I was 17yrs when I bought the HRM) and was supposed to do my schoolwork. Now time is a lot more restricted, and upon that it is a little frustrating knowing that I used to do much everything I wanted in asm on the Amiga and now have to relearn it all (the "big picture" is still my head, but all the small details....).

Vikke,

Keep up the good work. Also, it seems that you are still very comfortable with asm and amiga coding. At some point, maybe you could put all this into a real demo (which was your original intention). There has been a renewed interest in doing demos on A500 in the demoscene in the last (couple of) year(s). Would be cool.

The new effect (picture roll) is one i always liked, especially in the Wild Copper demo, which was one of the first demos i watched on my A1000. I loved that demo so much and still do.

z5_,

Well, old habits die hard :) I haven't forgotten everything about Amiga coding, especially the hardware codingstuff.

I will make a real demo at some point, some of the effects shown in the tutorials will be used in the demo as well, but there I don't have to make them as simple as in the tutorials. I have some plans already :)

I too really liked the Wildcopper demo, it shows very nicely how an quite an impressive effect in the late 1980s, could be done on the Amiga without using the CPU very much at all.

It's sad that I didn't save my old sources, it would have been interesting to be able to actually read through my old code today. I tested a lot of different things in assembler on the Amiga, I made own code of almost every effect I saw in different demos/intros, so just about every oldskool Amiga-effect is familiar to me. 3D and C2P demos are a totally different story, they never interested me, they might have been fun to watch, but coding without using the Amiga chipset wasn't my thing.

Stay tuned, a demo will be made. And who knows, maybe more than just one. The Amiga deserves to get new demos made for it.

Vikke,

You would be crazy not to put all this knowledge into a new demo (time permitting ofcourse). If you need a bit of inspiration and motivation, this might help :)

Also, if you need to find musicians/graphicians, feel free to come over and post about it here.

Hope to see you on a bigscreen somewhere in the coming year :)

Allright, back to the tutorials!

Nice to see such pages where ASM is introduced for possibly new coders directly from the demo-perspective. Looking forward to see next tutorials.

When I get the tutorials made as far as I have planned, I will start making a real demo. Tutorials will still be made, but perhaps not a new one each week when coding a demo at the same time.

I will have to test a little more code regarding the Blitter and Sprites before making definite plans regarding a demo. So, expect tutorials regarding the Blitter, such as scrollers, bobs etc. and something about Sprites as well.

Thanks for the tutorials Vikke! Just what I needed to get something up-and-running again!
I've tried before with some cross-assembling (since I actually like PC-editors a bit more than the Amiga editors), but I had problems getting it to generate proper Amiga executables.
Using a pc-editor, saving to a dir that is mounted in an emulator and then using trusty old AsmOne to build turned out to be much easier.

A quick question though - for some reason your c1.exe example always crashes the Amiga when exiting (first an error dialog, then guru), while for example h1.exe doesn't. This seems very strange, I've looked at your setup and exit code and it looks the same on both.
Do you get this behavior as well?

Thank you sdw.

I'll check what the problem is with the c1.exe, at the time of doing the tutorial it worked without problems, but I think I made some changes to the code after that, I just didn't notice any problems then.
I will update both the source and executable during he weekend.

I put up the 5th tutorial on the site, I have had some problems exporting the sourcecode into HTML with syntax-highlightning, and that's the reason it didn't get realesed according to my plan.

The sourcecode isn't shown on the page at the moment, but it is included in the LHA-package. I will udate the page when I get a JavaScript syntax-highlighter working with M68k and Amiga-registers.

This tutorial is a simple horizontal scroller using the Blitter to do the scrolling, leaving the horizontal shifting for other effects in a copperlist.

@vikke: did you manage to have a look at sdw's problem?

z5_,

Yes, I did just now. The LHA-package for tutorial #1 is updated, both c1.asm and c1.exe are updated.

The problem was that for some reason I had changed the loop-register addressings to .b and it won't work. Now they are changed back to .l and everything seems to work ok.

welcome

As a newish ASM coder (for about 5 years or so now), the one thing I am craving to know is how the graphical tricks are done. Most of them are so simple that it's easy to overcomplicate how they can be done. I will look into your tutorials, Vikke :)

Found this from Photon of Scoopex;

http://coppershade.org/

He got a whole ASM course on Youtube;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10

Amazing detail and step by step course.