A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

Apparently, FAP is happening again in about a month (20-22 november)! Previous years have seen some great releases for this amiga focused party.

Website and registration is up now.

I hope you don't mind me asking a perhaps philosophical question. Given that this year has seen quite a number of Amiga productions, many of which haven't made it to this site. And seeing that the latest added demo is from May, i.e. half a year ago.

The question is: Why do you still add informations about parties which might see Amiga releases when those releases don't make it to the site in due time?

I'd guess that is because this is a forum where people discuss things like amiga parties from time to time, completely unrelated to the prod database.
Regardless of whether Z5 has the time (and wants to) add new stuff to the database it's kinda neat that there's other activity on the site, don't you think? :) I personally feel that the forums, where you can find people who actually have a clue, is the most interesting part of ADA even though the overall activity isn't all that high.

On the slightly harsher side, as ADA is a curated demo collection it's quite logical that not all prods will be considered good enough to be added. ;)

Yep, exactly my thoughts, Noname. And what is even more confusing is that you, Z5, keep cheering people up saying that you are hoping for new releases, but then it turns out that you don’t even care to add them to ADA.

First I thought that you were burnt out, but then I saw that you were still pretty active on forums and came to conclusion there was something amiss. 2015 is a true annus mirabilis for Amiga scene. (Annus, not to be confused with anus!) There are many nice releases that still haven’t made it to ADA – for example some of the Revision stuff such as Quintessence, Interparallactic or Planet Rocklobster. But some demos wait even longer ;) Ghostown’s Sunglasses at Night final has been released on January.

I'm pretty sure none of us are entitled to regular database updates though. No matter how pleased we are with our own releases. ;)

@noname: i find the question strange allthough i get what you were really trying to say: it sucks that there aren't any updates anymore (and i agree). I don't see the connection between both things though. I still watch (and enjoy) most, if not every, release that comes out on Amiga (and other platforms). That has nothing to do with wether i do updates for the site. I can't see why i shouldn't enjoy watching demos or look forward to them in any case.

Also, i'd thought FAP deserved a little extra mention because it seems to have been flying under the radar a bit this year and it has produced quite a lot of interesting productions and it has actually managed to get coders from other platforms into doing amiga stuff (e.g. Traction, ADF, Trilobit) with great results.

You all have valid points. Let me say that I wrote the above because I care about this site and let my try to elaborate my point of view.

Z5, of course you care about demos and have every right in the world to “just” enjoy them. But as the admin and driving force behind this site over the years, you also have another status and role. And thats where my argument connects. If it is too taxing adding the screenshots, let us know and let us work something out – maybe you just need a hand? If our demos are too bad, also tell us and lets have that discussion. But you cannot just do nothing :)

We like to see our productions here and it is a major boost to see them featured, ideally when they are fresh. Of course we are not entitled to anything, like Slummy said, but on the other hand this site has become quite a haven for many active Amiga sceners and is thus quite a bit more important than any random site on the Internet TM. It’s a great pity to see ADA fade away over the past five years or so. I love this site, not only because of the features productions.

The second and maybe biggest selling point of ADA is the forum. It has great stuff hidden inside, esp. in the coding section. If you don’t mind me adding a feature request to the mix: It would be great if the forum would be searchable, indeed!

Ok, as some still seem to enjoy and care about the site, i need to have a long hard think about this. Please do keep in my mind that we are essentially two people (me and my silent friend and partner in crime) who have been maintaining the content (helped ofcourse by a few www developers) for longer than i can remember (14 years iirc?). But i'll try to find a solution.

@Jazzcat: can you drop me an email sometime? I don't seem to have your contact details anymore

And yes, can we all look forward to the FAP releases now? :)

Fap fap is the only possible answer :)

Hey, this is a party thread! It is supposed to contain demo progress reports! :)

Music mostly done, save for tweaking and polishing.

Player and rendering code done. Still missing actual shapes and movements, for which I have... 18 bytes left.

I guess some more squeezing is on my to-do list as well. ;)

@Blueberry: Argh! You picked the one year when I'm not taking part in the bootblock compo. :(
Hopefully Stingray and some others will give you a run for the money!

Really nice bootblock, as one would expect! :D

Not a lot of other executable entries that really stood out but nice to see more firstprods.

Thanks! :)

It was fun trying out an AGA/060 bootblock for a change. That did come with some new challenges:

First of all, I of course wanted the decrunched code and data in fast memory. For chip memory, I just place stuff at some absolute address, but that doesn't work for fast memory, since you never know where fast memory it is located. And an allocation takes up valuable space.

Dirty solution: A1 points to the trackdisk.device IORequest, which is in fast memory and probably one of the last things that was allocated. 32760 bytes after that is a good spot. ;)

Second, the caches are not fully set up at bootblock entry. In particular, the data cache is disabled. Thus, to get (closer to) full speed, the call to CacheClearU needs to be replaced by a call to CacheControl enabling the data cache.

Finally, the stack is in chip memory, unless some patch has moved it to fast memory. This caught me off guard: it ran fine when I rebooted into it, but when I ran it from a cold boot, it was slow. Bugger.

Good point on the stack. I did play around with some ideas for an 060-boot myself some time back but didn't get as far as running into that issue.

hmm... the FAP releases were... interesting. It's great to see that once again people from other platforms (e.g. Mercury) do amiga stuff for FAP.

I personally missed my dose of badass Traction demos. Oh well - I didn't do anything either, so I'd better just shut up and start coding again myself :-)