A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

As I recently heard, Revision 2015 might even take place, and it's also a distinct possibility that yours truly will be back as Amiga orga. :) Any wishes/ideas/suggestions regarding changes in the usual compos and compo rules?

Increasing the demo size limit comes to mind as a first. Generally I'm against such a change, but experience says during the past few years most of the better demos had an issue with the 20MB limit we have. People went around it in various ways (like using .7z as an archive compressor which is not allowed explicitly on Amiga but we were flexible, or crippling music quality). Do you/we want to increase that or better stick with it as a challenge? I'm a bit afraid we'll see even more animations in the demos if we increase that to say - 32MB. Additionally, some demos then will take an absolute age to load, 20MB is already a pain on the A1200 IDE controller.

What do you think?

Revision 2015 that is excellent news. These are two small thoughts that comes to mind.

1. I would actually decrease the size limit if any definitely not increase it. We are getting into shaky territory when amiga demos gets above the 20mb mark. I also say that the size should be based on the LHA archive and nothing else.

2. I can totally see why people wouldn't agree with this but I would merge the Amiga entries into a single intro (4 and 64k) and demo compo, rather than having separate OCS and AGA compos. Its the same community producing these things and being stated before the entry is shown I think people are perfectly capable of judging AGA stuff next to OCS productions. With the recent OCS trend I think this would be nice way to keep the community together and make for one massive Amiga feast on the big-screen.

Maybe I shouldn't have opinions until I start actively participating again though ;-).

Otherwise, just keep doing exactly what you are doing as it is top-class and very appreciated.

@bonkers:

1. Why does it actually matter if a demo is larger than 20MB? I'd say 32MB (uncompressed) is an okay sizelimit.

2. There are no separate OCS and AGA compos at Revision. OCS stuff is usually submitted to the oldskool compo, where it competes with other 8/16bit prods. And to be honest, I don't think most visitors are able to really judge AGA/060 vs OCS ;)

@chainq

20MB might be a pain on the A1200 IDE controller, but it's not like a titanics crunched 800k exe is fast to load from a floppy on the A500 ;)

For me, merging AGA and OCS compos certainly makes sense in case we’re talking about Amiga-only parties, where people are able to understand the differences between the two platforms.

Someday it’ll come in a natural way, I’m afraid. There are less and less AGA demos every year and one day Revision orgas will be forced to merge. I see no need to speed up this process.

But there’s one question that burns like Blueberry’s nostrils after taking a pinch of some german snuff. How many demos can we expect next year? Are you guys working/planning anything yet?

I've heard rumors that I myself might be doing something for Revision, not sure if the rumor is true though...

I just think that having a somewhat limited size makes a lot of sense for demos, sure we are not constrained by hardware to the same extent anymore, even though some of todays demos are a bitch to load. But having a size limitation still feels very natural to me, making something small was part of the motivation for doing demos in the first place rather than just making animations. Last years winner demo had a considerable amount of animations and I'm not sure if that was obvious to everyone during the compo but it was quite clear when you saw the size of the demo. Same thing goes with the music, if you use streamed music this should constrain you such that you are not able to include as much other content. This is at least my opinion and how I see demos and then size limitations makes a lot of sense. But 20mb or even 10mb is not really a huge constraint. Thats just how I see things.

As for the AGA/060 vs. OCS, I thought OCS stuff had to be in the old school compo, but if that is not the case then there is no problem. Clearly the people behind the production should be able to choose whichever compo that they want and if groups producing OCS prefer to be in old-school then that’s where these productions should be. However, I would much prefer for them to be with the other Amiga stuff. If I would ever do something on A500, not very likely, it would be there.

Good rumours!

At the moment the authors of OCS productions pretty much have the choice to either submit it in one of the oldschool competitions or to the respective Amiga compos, given that the entry will run properly on the big 1200/060.

As for the rumours, since Slayer pretty much put us on the spot in the Pouet thread to our last intro, it would look like we'll have no other choice than to work on a demo for a certain en-vogue chipset.
Let's see how that will turn out.

@bonkers:

It's perfectly possible to fill up tens of megabytes without resorting to animations. And we already have size restricted compos in the form of intro compos.

A500 demos should probably also be restricted to one single floppy, right? ;)

Totally! The laziness and faking popularized by demos like Hardwired and Desert Dream needs to stop!

@britelite:

Of course it is possible to fill stuff with other things than animation. But take the argument with a look-up table. You can either compute it in the demo meaning lots of pre-calc or you can just include the data. What would be the right thing to do here? If the pre-calc is too long to make the demo watchable should this effect really be on this platform, in this form? I just think that some type of size limit keeps us honest to the way I atleast see a demo, be that 10,20,32 or 50mb. I've never really had to think about these things but that has more to do with my lameness than through choice ;-). But I guess you see a demo slightly differently.

Not saying that a A500 demo should be on one floppy at all the same way as I'm not saying that a AGA demo should be 1mb.

It seems a certain controversial demo has spurred some discussion, yes? ;)

The demo size limit should be 20MB for the simple reason that that is how it has been for many years. It makes comparisons across years possible, which is part of what Amiga is about.

The rules about archive format could indeed be more clearly defined. Currently it says (iirc) zip or lha. When I inquired further, back then, the answer (from Bstrr) was that it must be decompressible on an Amiga. Since there is an Amiga version of 7zip, which can decompress .zip archives using lzma-compression, such an archive was allowed under the (slightly bended) rules. :)

I personally find that OCS demos have much more in common with other oldskool demos than with AGA+060 demos. The way effects are put together is a different world entirely. So I hope the "oldskool" grouping will remain as it is.

When it comes to the high-end machines I personally don't see any reason to impose any form of limitations (other than what the compomachine can handle and the fact that stuff needs to run under 680x0 and AGA).
I compare demos based on how much I like them, not "how much storage they had available".
Also, comparing demos across many years is a purely academic (and therefore uninteresting) task. "Oh, if only I was born 15 years earlier my supreme skills would've made me king!!"

As for the merging of newschool (060/AGA) and oldschool (000/OCS) prods I'm much more against that simply due to the fact that most of the audience (at least at larger parties) do *not* have any clue about what's what. So if you're doing a demoshow: sure go ahead and combine, but if you want to give people any chance of "fair" competition then don't.
Obviously smaller parties don't always have this luxury of multiple competitions so there one just does whatever feels fun.

I personally think that the current compostructure is near perfect. If people want to enter the real Amiga compo with their a500 stuff,then it's fine to have that as a option. For Aga demos I still feel it makes sence to have a sizelimit of 20MB. True,we're not that many Agademo people left,but as somebody said,the average scener is not able to really figure out stuff about Amiga demos,so forcing a500 into the democompo would not be fair imo.

Oh,and why not allow PPC stuff? Not sure if there is still a scene for that,but really - why not allow it?

for me most important thing is old school gfx compo and quality of big screen image. I know its not only about amiga, but still..
in short words - it looks like shit. Doesn't matter if it's c64, amiga or whatever.

pixels should be sharp - if there is no other way - next time please convert and resize all gfx to projector native resolution (with no interpolation) and show it on pc.

That's true - I wanted to write exactly the same as Jok. And I know that some other graphicians -
who often take part in a oldschool gfx compo at Revision (as Darklight for example) are of the same mind.

In last two editions of Revision, the technical quality of Amiga pictures which are shown on the bigscreen was VERY BAD (blurry and poor).

if I remember correctly - Charlie - told me that the oldskool gfx rules have been changed a bit and Amiga pictures are (now) recorded from the real Amiga. Due to some 'technical recordings reasons' the quality is just that.

I understand that demos should (or even must) be recorded from the real machines, but the graphics - if it 'destroys' its quality - not necessarily.

About the 'OCS / AGA category' discussion.

As long as the oldskool categories allow to combine the 8 and 16 bit platforms (as Atari ST for example), Amiga OCS should be there as well. Merging can be considered dynamically if there are too few entries in the Amiga Demo Compo (and/orintro) - but then it will probably mean that the Amiga scene is dead and no one will care about it :)

Last years revision came close to the minimum amount of entries needed for a proper compo (there were 4 demos which iirc is an alltime low for that compo) so that time might come sooner than later. Wish there was something that could be done to bring some groups back (Tulou, Haujobb, Skarla, Ozone, Potion, Traktor, Nature amongst others). Also, someone should track down rLoaderro and bring him back. That guy was a genius in demomaking with Cheetah.

Another thing, though more about compo execution than compo rules as such:

For at least the previous two Revisions, the Amiga output was cropped, presumably to utilize the bigscreen area better. This is a good idea as such, but it had two problems:

1. The crop was asymmetric. The left crop was closer to the edge of standard non-overscanned PAL than the right crop.

2. The crop was quite narrow. The left crop was less than 16 pixels from the non-overscanned left edge, cutting into the area that at least some demos used.

Horizontal crop should be unnecessary for the purpose of utilizing bigscreen area, but if it is to be cropped, I suggest that it crops either at 16 pixels on each side (common overscan resolution) or 19 pixels on each side (maximum symmetric horizontal overscan). Probably 16 is best, as this will give the common overscan resolution a no-borders look.

The vertical boundaries are not quite as clear-cut. Reasonable values could be 12 pixels top and bottom (maximum symmetric overscan) or 18 top and 12 bottom (maximum overscan).

Nice to hear! Would be cool to see some 'german A500 demo battle' (Moods Plateau VS Y-Crew) at Revision 2015 :)

Could it be an idea to host a separate A500 compo? Datastorm did it quite successfully this year with five entries and at Gerp all eight demos/intros in the Amiga compo were OCS. Some quick statistics from Pouet also says that OCS is the more popular chipset these days and if there's one party that could host a really strong Amiga 500 demo compo it should be Revision, right? Well, just a thought... Maybe Revision isn't as popular among the Amiga sceners as I think it is, after all I've never been there myself... :)

Hi, thanks for all the input and ideas. :)

@Jok:
As Blueberry said, we record the graphics compos from real hardware and yes, our recording equipment had its limitations. On the bright side, we plan to introduce an improved recording setup next year (after working with the same thing for 5+ years, dating back to Breakpoint times), which should improve the quality on Amiga at least. Can't comment on C64 and other 8 bit stuff.

@Blueberry:
I'm sad to report there was no scientific method in setting the overscan cropping, more than "OK, this looks reasonable, lets finally record something because the Test Compo is upon us!" :) And our previous equipment didn't even allow to set the cropping to a certain pixel size (I tried to avoid digital postprocessing). I can't tell how it will be from this year, but as I said, we're trying to improve the setup. :)

Even if I'd love to see a mixed Amiga or even OCS only compo at Revision, I don't think it's realistic (yet :)) since the majority of the visitors know the Amiga as Aamiiiiigaaaaaahh and that's pretty much it.

The reason this works so well at Gerp and Datastorm is that they are Amiga (and that bread box) oriented parties with a few or no PC visitors.

Regarding PPC I say no thanks. Just a personal thought, but this hardware didn't make it into many homes and was quite soon beat by other platforms. To keep the Amiga demoscene alive I think it's crucial to keep it oldschool and let the Amiga user community take care of the PPC.

I admit it's a difficult question. Is the Amiga 500 an oldschool computer or an Amiga computer?

For now I'll go with oldschool since I think it's a helpful term for the Amiga 500 scene to be more attractive in the future.

Sigh. Wrote a lengthy post and A.D.A. signed me out while posting. So it lost. Blah. Shortened rewritten version:

OCS - If we have enough entries, we can still split the Oldskool demo compo and make a separate Amiga OCS compo. We can even do that during the party, if we have enough good entries. So if you want to see that, c'mon, get crackin'! ;)

PPC - We can run anything. I have the hardware, software and experience (I am a daily MorphOS user and betatester) to run anything PPC, but the PPC scene first need to prove itself. Now WinUAE supports PPC, no hardware is no excuse any more. :) But I'm still against merging a PPC Amiga compo to a 68k Amiga compo due to reasons which were mentioned before by others.

Demo size - my main concern was the "trickery" with the newskool Amiga-alien archivers. There were multiple entries doing that, so it's not because I hate someone or not... ;) (Disclaimer: I love you all.) So I would change the rule to 32MB or 40MB uncompressed. If someone wants to squeeze in more bytes, he can in true scene spirit implement his own packer for that instead of picking the latest and greatest packer on Windows. Objections? ;)

Actually it kind of is, because there's no way to know how the code will perform on real hardware ;)

@britelite:
Given the benchmarks I've seen it would be probably faster, especially on standalone PPC boxes. ;)

Invitation (pc) got released last night..
Website is up for reservations..

http://2015.revision-party.net

Amiga!!!!! (who is making something?)

Happy New Year! I got the Amigas back from the attic and have plans to do something again, hopefully for Revision. Here is a short show and tell video that I did yesterday to celebrate that my Rock Lobster and the Channel Z are still working.

Very good news, Noname. Always enjoyed your demos a lot and Prototype was such an awesome return to demomaking. Fingers crossed for a Revision production!

Hey, Noname, did you get my message sent through YouTube 2 weeks ago?