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Saxonia Issue 04 Part 014
What's the point in having the fastest computer
By Rumrunner/VOID
l
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Some day, I took a peek at the readmefile which accompanied the Fake
Electronic Lighshow from Ephidrena. Here, Loaderror tells that he was a
bit sceptic when he heard that Amigademos were to compete with pcdemos at
The Gathering. He speaks of Amigas as "guttercomputers" and overall giving
the impression that pc is a much better computer.
Right, it's true that pc's are faster than most common Amigas, if people
ever left that Windows operatingsystem alone, it could perhaps even be
called a fast computer, but that's another issue.
What I'm heading for here is why do sceners need such a fast computer, and
what's the big problem competing with demos for faster computers than your
own? I hardly think that you need a very fast computer in order to make
a fine demo. We have several examples of this, just look at the old demos
released on Amiga 500 and you will find that in effects and sometimes even
design, these were much better than any of today's demos. Names like
Andromeda with D.O.S, Sequential, and not to forget Nexus7 should prove
this.
I also think that there's a lot impressing which has happened and still do
on the Commodore 64, although I must admit that I sadly haven't been able
to follow that scene closely. If I just got a way of connecting a C64
diskdrive to my Amiga, I would gladly download more 64-productions, copy
them to read C64-disks and watch them on my C128D.
So, I think that it's still the ideas that decided whether a demo is good
or not, not the hardware you run it on. It's rather the other way around,
the faster computer, the more boring demos get. Just take a look at today's
pcdemos. Almost all of them contain nothing but 3d-graphics. The makers are
getting tired of painting textures, so they shove some text on their
objects, and release a demo with the same 3d-effects shown over and over
again, just with another texture (text) on it, and do nothing to push the
computer to it's limits. This was once the big thing on the demoscene, you
were to tweak out every possible effect on as few rasterlines as possible.
Today on the pc-scene, who will ever see what their computer can do before
they buy a faster one? What I like the most here are perhaps the 256 byte
intros, which seem to have become popular on the pc. They have interesting
effects, but ofcourse no music and little variation. What makes these
productions more enjoyable than most other demos on pc is that the effects
are more varied. And ofcourse, putting an effect into 256 bytes should
alone be credited as impressive. There are not many intros like this on
Amiga (256 byte that is), and there are several reasons for this. It's
among other things loadhunks that take more room on Amiga. Although I have
not seen much intel assemblycode, it seems that pc-people also still can
org their code (I guess it's remapped to another adress upon loading), they
can set up a screen by making an exeption after a couple of lines of code
and so on. So, this is perhaps a field where pc-people have an advantage,
although there have been made 256 byte intros on Amiga, for instance you
can take a look at Eurochart 44, there you will find both a 256 byte intro
and the sourcecode for it. Take your time to read the appropriate article
in the mag too, where there's a lot of thinking showing that some people
still have their imagination left.
Having said that about the 256 byte intros, from here it goes downwards
with the pc. As said, almost everything is about 3d-graphics, boring as
that is. Also, the coders are not the only ones who have a (too) easy time
on the pc-scene. I wonder who handpixels their images the way it should be
done. I myself have never been a good graphicsartist, and with the programs
available on pc, I would be an even worse one. There are no programs
dedicated to handpixelling images, atleast not any I have found.
I have also wondered sometimes when I have downloaded a pc-demo and taken
a look at the files. Sometimes the music is a regular mp3-sample (because
that's what these files really are, crunched samples). I then wonder what
the musician has used to make the tune. I don't have anything against
synths and other musical equipment, but atleast when you have a module,
fourchannel or multichannel, I have a more certain feeling that this is
the work of the musician and not a rip. It might be all programs like
Magix MusicMaker and the likes which have got me sceptic, and I might have
no reason to be so, but this is how the case is.
So, to sum up shortly, I think that there's a lot more to demoscening than
owning the fastest computer or computertype. If I want something fast, I
would rather go for a Pro-Modified car for dragracing. It's shit expensive
but so are pc's if you need to upgrade them all the time, no matter how
much cheaper it is now compared to before.
