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Saxonia Issue 02 Part 021
An introduction to the Amiga scene
By Rumrunner/VOID
[l
I guess that there are people who wonders why I write an introduction to
the scene in our days. There are no new people interested anyway right?
Wrong, there are interested people. Just a few days after releasing
Saxonia 1, I got a mail from a guy who had not been into the Amigascene
before, however he knew the concept from the Commodore 64. He had taken
an interest in our computer and he was even interested in learning to code.
He also asked various questions about the scene and so I promised an article
in this issue. Not long ago, I also got a mail from a gruop called
Jupiter 77 who had worked on ZX-Spectrum until now, and now had fetched
interest for Amiga. So there are new people interested, perhaps Saxonia
reached these people better than the established mags because we showed
that it was possible to start up something in 2003? It's still not too late,
the feedback we got after Saxonia 1 showed that.
Well, better start off on the main subject of this article then. The Amiga-
scene ofcourse started off when some people from the Commodore 64 became
curious of this new machine. At the very start, we saw very few people
producing things for the Amiga. It was mostly cracktros, just like the
case of building up the scene was on the C64 some years before. The groups
that started on Amiga early didn't come from the countries that later ruled
the Amigascene, like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, UK, and later Poland. We had
for instance StarFrontiers from USA who are known to be the makers of the
first "demo" on Amiga according to Raw 7. The demo called cube is included
in this mag. It's an intuitionwindow with a vectorcube spinning in it, if
I remember correctly, this was made in 1986. This group also cracked some
games, I know for sure that they cracked Leisure Suit Larry 1. Other groups
worth mentioning in this starting phase is Paranoimia, mostly known for
their cracks
When the scene had become somewhat more established, we saw demos similar to
those we see today. Ofcourse there were other effects, but the concept of
demos was laid out by now. Early demos that people should take a look at
is for instance the first megademo from Phenomena. Take a special note of
the first part in this demo (excluding the loader). This part is coded by
Mr. Gurk and in the compulsory scroller, he claims that he is the first to
blit 200 bobs onto screen. This was in the start of the "bob-wars" we saw
late 1980-early 1990. The point was to get as many bobs as possible on
screen at once, mostly by optimising the code. Later on, this faded away,
as people became more known with how to do it. Other effects that was
often used is equalisers. Playroutines were fairly simple in the days of
SoundTracker and people soon found out how to use the playroutine to trigger
an equaliser-effect on screen. You can see this in the same megademo by
Phenomena, in the part with the skull with the bones in the back. Perhaps
the most, let's say special, equaliser was the one that Crusaders used in
their musicdisk Audio-X. It was toilet-seats bouncing to the music, one
toilet for each of the four audiochannels.
One demo that we need to mention specifically is the megademo by Red Sector,
coded by Delta if I'm not mistaken. This is regarged as the first ever demo
to use a custom-coded trackloader. As you all know, coders liked to load
tracks from disk directly instead of using the file-system on Amiga. The
first productions to do this used the trackdisk.device, which meant that
you could not use all memory as you wanted as you had to keep the memory
the os used intact. It also meant that you couldn't write interrupts that
finished as soon as you had done your routines, but you had to jump to the
os-interrupt in question after finishing your routines. In addition to not
being able to use all memory, this also wasted some rastertime and
democoders didn't like that. Now, what Red Sector did was code a
trackloader that didn't use the trackdisk.device or any parts of the os.
Thereby you could use whatever parts of memory you wanted, and you didn't
have to write selfmodifying code to jump to the os-interrupts anymore.
A new era had started, people now slowly started to use the hardware at
hand to the limits.
At about this time, there are also other demos that are worth mentioning.
We have ofcourse the Hunt For Seventh October demo by Cryptoburners, which
features the vectorroutine and linedraw-routine that Tec/Cryptoburners
still are known for, there are even people who still use his routines.
Another demo is Cube-O-Matic from Spreadpoint. We all know all the texture-
mapping that is commonly used on pc's today, and this demo is known as the
first one to use texturemapping. The difference to most new pc-demos is
that it does it in a good way, not the boring scenes found today. Buddha
(the coder of the demo) shows pictures, textures and even scrollers on a
cube which is rotated. I remember that Rob Rose from Brainstorm got a little
upset when this demo was released, as he claimed to have the same effect on
hand but he didn't want to release a demo with only one effect.
Now, let's take a little jump further. We are now in the golden age of the
Amiga, around 1991-1993. There were loads of demos coming out now, and as
the groups had started to care about the design, most of the demos were
excellent (at least for one who liked to see Amiga-effects on Amiga, like
me). There are ofcourse some highligths to mention, like D.O.S from
Andromeda, Multica and Mind Riot from the same group, several demos from
the legendary Danish crew Kefrens, and ofcourse lots of other groups.
Speaking of Danish Crews, I need to mention one demo in particular, and that
is Global Trash from The Silents. This is absolutely worth a look even
today, and it shows excellently that loading doesn't have to be slow even
if you run from floppy. Don't expect to have the opportunity to get a cup
of coffee while this demo loads in.
The most noticable change from the demos the had come before was that the
effects were no longer shown one after another, perhaps with a little
loaderpart in between, there were fades and introductionary effects to make
everything seem more like one big demo and not several small ones.
One step further something happens in the scene. The sceners start to take
notice of the new AGA Amigas coming. These have several new display modes,
more chipmemory and even faster processors. This opened up new ports into
making new effects. The demo regarded as the first AGA demo is HOISaga from
Team HOI. They continued pretty much to use the effects known from the old
days, like dots, bobs and copper backgrounds, but they did it in AGA,
meaning more colours available. They also released a second demo called
Mindwarp, which is more polished than the first one, which is to expect,
considering the new hardware, which nobody had a hardware reference manual
for. That's right, Commodore didn't want to release such manuals for the
new chipset, that way they thought that they could force coders into using
the operating system. While the Amiga Kickstart is the fastest operating
system still made (it can be "relaxed" down to using about 5% rastertime
on a plain Amiga 1200), there's without no doubt a reason why people
preferred to take over the system completely. OS loaders for instance,
doesn't like you using the blitter whenever you want to if you load files
from floppydisk, as the OS routines use the blitter to decode data. Also,
going the os way means to set up an intuition screen, or use LoadView in
graphics.library and run the demo with the os interrupts on. If you need
your own interrupt, that means that you have to use the addicrvector and
corresponding to remove the interrupt routines again. Also, you cannot use
all the shortcuts around when having to use the os. To make it even worse,
the copper, one of Amiga's best features which no other computers have even
today (except the Commodore One, read separate article) doesn't match well
with intuition screens.
Well, coders soon started to disassemble copperlists, and step by step
figured out what the new adresses was and how to use them. They fortunately
published this (which was uncommon at the time) and soon people had enough
information to code for the new chipset.
There were some problems in this phase, when faster Amigas were taken into
use. Before, most people had the Amiga 500 with perhaps extra diskdrives,
extra memory, and if you were lucky, a harddrive. However, more than 9 out
of ten had the standard 68000 processor, which meant that coders could use
the processor for timing, with a simple loop looping back to itself a
certain number of times. This was most often used in hardware trackloaders
like described earlier, but people also used them (but seldom) in other
places needed a wait. Try for istance the Flower Power demo by Anarchy (at
least that's the demo I think it was) on a faster processor and listen to
the music. It plays too fast. This is of course a problem that's less
annoying than waiting problems in the loader which means that computer will
hang up, but it's still irritating. Also, for keyboard reading, which most
of the time is done by utilising the level two interrupt, timing loops were
often used, look for instance at the othervise excellent musicdisk His
Masters Noise by Mahoney and Kaktus. Not that it will run on faster
computers perhaps this is due to the same problem with the loader. Anyway,
often, a program will run, but as soon as you press a key, it locks up.
You will often hear that the music keeps playing, but you cannot do
anything. This is because such a timing fault in the keyboard reading
routine will lock the computer up so that it will not exit the interrupt.
Thereby, anything running outside the interrupts will not be processed any
more. However, music is most of the time played by either the level 3 or
level 6 interrupt which have priority over the level 2 one, so it will keep
running. This kind is compatibiliy errors, along with other ones like
expecting a certain part of memory to be free, annoyed many people who
bought an Amiga 1200 as replacement for their 500, when they discovered
that they couldn't watch their favourite demos on it.
Soon, however, most sceneproductions were compatible with most computers.
If specific AGA features were not utilised, the demo could run on ECS
Amigas, but also supported AGA ones. For people who want to fix some old
productions, there's not much to do to get a trashed screen to look right.
It's a matter of setting the registers fmode, bplcon3 and bplcon4 to zero,
for instance in the copperlist, with some additional code needed if sprites
are to be used. Also, you can do a loadview from gfx.library, which will
assure that the demo also works from other videomodes than pal. But keep
in mind that loadview has some bugs.
Since this article was not meant as a coding article, I will leave it at
that and take a look into some of the demos we saw after the AGA Amiga
came into use. I will ofcourse have to mention my own alltime favourite
demo here, it's again Andromeda who made it. It was released at the party
in 1994, and won the first price with over twice as many votes as the demo
ranked number two. It's of course the magnificent Nexus 7 demo. It features
the only light flashing effects I have ever liked (the discoball and screen
fade with light from background) along with a really impressing natural
motion part coded by Mr Hyde. It's a lamp jumping about on screen, up
stairs jumping over holes and so on. It's very good. Also effects like the
shade cluster and plasmazoomer makes this demo something very special.
There are also other good demos from this time. The group Alcatraz, known
for the demo Odyssey (a trackmo using five disks and lasting for over half
an hour, both records for duration and disknumber) released a second demo
now, called Ilyad. This demo can run from harddrive with the appropriate
assigns made and it has got some excellent effects. Sadly, some of the
effects are shown for too short a time, on the contrary to 3d effects in
many newer demos. The coder of the demo, Hornet, remarked this in an
interview, the reason for the short time given to some of the effects are
that the demo is timed after the music. So I guess that the coders had
their effects (there was also a coder called Shagan involved), the musician
has his music, and then they put it together without altering what perhaps
should have been done to make this a real killerdemo. Anyway it's worth
not only one but several looks.
Now, what happened after this? Well, more and more people started to leave
the scene. Some were tired of it, some didn't upgrade to the AGA Amigas and
slowly disappeared, while some switched platform to pc. The ones left for
some reason or another got more and more hung up in texturemapped 3d
effects. Nearly no demos were real oneframe demos anymore (the screen is
updated every frame which is 50 fps on pal Amigas). People didn't find the
regular doublebuffering (update one screen, while showing another, then
switch the screens) satisfactory anymore and people started to use triple-
buffering (three screens) in an attempt to make the demo look smooth even
if it wasn't updated every frame. Also, the code used most now isn't real
planar oriented code. You know, the Amiga represent every pixel on screen
as a bit (thereby getting eight pixels on a byte) and building up colours
using several bitplanes. The pc way is to use a whole byte or more for each
pixel, thereby the colour is determined by the value of the whole byte.
People started to use this on Amiga, thereby needing chunky to planar
converters, which slowed down anything even more. To compensate for this,
most demos from, let's say 1996-1997 used ugly 2*2 or even 3*3 screens.
However, things have changed for the better after this period. Although
3d effects are still the most popular at least among the coders, the
resolution is better, so it's not that ugly to look at. Faster processors
and optimised code has taken care of this. Also, we see groups now that
looks back and starts to use the real Amiga effects again, kicking out
3d engines and chunky to planar routines. This is good, as it's when we
make real Amiga effects, we can see what the computer we work on is capable
of. It's important to remember that when the Amigascene first started, the
effects from Commodore 64 were used along with new ones that people
invented one after one. So we should not just copy pc-demos but rather
continue the way the Amigascene first started out.
So, to end this article, let's take a look at what groups are worth
noticing today. I would say that the active ones are worth taking a look
at. Although my alltime favourite demos are several years old now, it's
always entertaining to get something new, made by people who are still
active. Also, these groups deserve some credit for keeping up the Amiga
spirit when most other people have switched over to other platforms. It
seems that everybody else than sceners on Amiga and C64, along with other,
let's say old platforms, don't know what a real scene is about, namely
making the best possible stuff on the computer in question, whether it's
an Amiga or C64. Today's pc-sceners newer get to see what their hardware
can do before they exchange it with faster hardware. What's the fun in
that? Anyway, active and good groups on Amiga today are :
Iris - Danish crew responible of the Eurochart and some good demos like
Light 2.
Loonies - They have recently started making better demos than those they
made earlier. As this group focuses much on 3d effects, I suppose that it
took some time before they optimised everything enough to run smooth on
slower processors than the 060. Still objects and scenes in the latter
demos have become better. Dark Rain is perhaps the best demo from them.
The Black Lotus - Occasinally, they release an Amigademo, and more often
than not, they become famous for the second, third ++ time. Sadly, there
are often a long time between releases.
Gunnar's Farvebio - A somewhat strange danish group. It all started out
as a joke group, with productions such as megademos with a diskmag in one
of the parts. But sooner, the group made productions that gave more than
just fun. Look for instance at the Megademo $C. Also, there are interesting
routines in the Megademo $d trailer (intro), and I still wait for the demo
to come. Sadly, it seems that also this group uses lots of time before
releasing a new production.
Void - Of course we have to mention ourselves. The group has struggled for
a long time finding a coder, but I have taken on this task. We make this
mag, and I'm also working on the code for a demo and a musicdisk. You can
read more about is in the articles in the editorial section.
Gods - Until recently, this group released the mag which perhaps has most
fame attached to it's name, D.I.S.C. Sadly, the main editor, Zerox stopped
the mag, because of little support. Hopefully, the group will come back
with other projects.
Nah-Kolor - This group has released some demos, although I cannot remember
much of them now. But I seem to remember smooth running effects on my
040 processor.
Ephidrena - A norwegian group, even with members in my neighbour city if
I'm not mistaken (Tønsberg, that is, I live in Sandefjord). They have
released a lot of demos since the start in 1995, and many of them are good
although they perhaps should consider other effects than just 3d routines.
Anyway, they have their own style and they treat it well.
There are also other groups who should have been mentioned, but as it's
now late, I will have to stop here. Those who are interested in more
or think that I have left out important bits of the present or history,
please contact me. The best is if you write your own article to be
published in the next Saxonia.
