

A history of the Amiga – The demo scene (2013) - bane
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/04/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-9-the-demo-scene/

======
bane
Just a quick reminder. The Amiga, Wild, PC 8k and Demo competitions at
Revision (a big demo party going on right now) are coming up in just a few
hours if you want to see what the scene is up to.

Schedule (German time) [http://2015.revision-
party.net/events/timetable](http://2015.revision-party.net/events/timetable)

Live stream here [http://2015.revision-party.net/live](http://2015.revision-
party.net/live)

Live stream with chat
[http://salinga.everywebhost.com/sofascener/](http://salinga.everywebhost.com/sofascener/)

 _edit_ Wild compo is ongoing:

demos on a Microcontroller, a Gameboy Advance, Gamecube, and some guy made a
digital camera out of a scanner, some lenses and a Rasberry Pi.

And a version of a Rachmaninoff Rhapsody with orchestra provided by several
Commodore 64s. This would have been on the forefront of Avant Guarde music not
too many decades ago.

~~~
kken
Also, Revision releases:

[http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1550&when=2015](http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=1550&when=2015)

~~~
wrongc0ntinent
Great compos this year. The PC 64k had some amazing stuff (conspiracy floored
me). For anyone checking those out at home, your AV software is wrong.

------
tdicola
Folks interested in Amiga demos should absolutely check out the Mind Candy
volume 2 DVD:
[http://www.mindcandydvd.com/2/frames?p=download](http://www.mindcandydvd.com/2/frames?p=download)
It's long sold out but now available as a free download from the creator at
the link above. The DVD is a great set of classic Amiga demos that were
captured and put on DVD at very high quality. Also lots of good extras like
commentaries from the creators, short documentaries, etc.

There's also another volume on PC demos and a blu-ray with more modern demos:
[http://www.mindcandydvd.com/](http://www.mindcandydvd.com/)

------
dep_b
I remember switching from my Commodore 64 to the Amiga thinking computers
would always keep improving in the same rate as the vast improvement between
the Commodore 64 and the Amiga in just a few years.

But they didn't :(

~~~
baldfat
I still remember taking the Apple OS emulator on my Amiga 1500 and it worked
twice as fast as the fastest Mac. I thought Apple and IBM Clones were dead.
Sad to say I was wrong.

It took till 1993 that the Mac even caught up to a Amiga 500.

------
bane
Also, in case you want to see the guts of this machine
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNVIgsbYrA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNVIgsbYrA)

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pixelbath
In addition to the scene links posted here, I highly recommend reading the Ars
articles from the beginning. I have the ToC bookmarked because the entirety of
it is like a love letter to the Amiga: [http://arstechnica.com/series/history-
of-the-amiga/](http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

~~~
digi_owl
Notice how the demo scene chapter came 5 years after the others. Caught me off
guard. And nearly missed it as i have pretty much abandoned reading anything
but the science section of Ars Technica.

Bloddy site is filled with Apple wankery and minutiae about the intersection
of tech and US law (i'm not American, for the record).

I really miss Hannibal's detailed articles on CPU internals, but i guess he
was right about how there was nothing new to write in that field any longer.
These days it seems to be all about cache misses.

------
yodsanklai
I remember when I switched from Amiga to PC. Maybe around 1992-1993. The PC
took all the fun I had with the Amiga. Assembly programming, games, demos. It
was no longer the same on a PC. Eventually, internet + linux + learning CS at
university made things fun again.

~~~
richardjdare
To me, Linux lacked a lot of the aesthetic aspects of the Amiga. It had no
games scene, the culture was older, more academic or "heavy industry" and
didn't have multimedia in its blood like the Amiga scene did.

One thing that made the Amiga special, that can't really be replicated is that
it occupied a sweet spot in the history of computer hardware. You could make
like a C64 programmer, kick out the os and write pure ASM to the hardware
(which was strange, complex and fascinating, unlike PC hardware), or you could
go in the other direction and write object oriented (using BOOPSI) GUI apps in
a true multitasking environment. And to top it off, it was a system that one
programmer could completely understand, more or less. There was a real feeling
of power and elegance when you programmed an Amiga.

I probably spend too long thinking about this :) It was the "Amiga feeling"
that got me into computers when I was younger, and I keep trying to replicate
it :)

~~~
yodsanklai
> To me, Linux lacked a lot of the aesthetic aspects of the Amiga. It had no
> games scene, the culture was older, more academic or "heavy industry" and
> didn't have multimedia in its blood like the Amiga scene did.

Sure, nothing comparable with the Amiga. But coming from Windows 95, Linux was
at least programmer friendly.

My biggest frustration coming from the Amiga was that I wasn't able to display
anything on a PC (at least, not with the limited knowledge I had at that
time). With the Amiga, it was easy, no need to worry about system calls, you
just wrote at the right place into the RAM et voila. And it wasn't complicated
to make things move using the Blitter and the Copper. It was something a kid
could do.

EDIT: talking about the aesthetic aspect of the Amiga, I think it was a
beautiful computer too. People always praise Apple for making computers
beautiful. But to me, my Amiga 500 was much better looking than an Apple II or
a mac from that era.

~~~
pjmlp
> But coming from Windows 95, Linux was at least programmer friendly.

Depends. I came from the ZX 80, Amiga and PC. My first UNIX was Xenix on 1993,
followed by DG/UX in 1994 and Slackware 2.0 in 1995.

Never found out an environment similar to Devpac, Amos, Turbo Pascal, Delphi,
Borland C++, Turbo Assembler back on those days.

Sure I did learn a lot from UNIX, but the spirit wasn't really the same.

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aikah
I remember when I saw "hardwired" (2disks) on my Amiga 500 and I was like
"wow" at the time. Is there a place where I can download these and play them
on an emulator?

~~~
bane
You'll want to find a build of UAE for Amiga emulation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAE_%28emulator%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAE_%28emulator%29)

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filmgirlcw
Man, the Amiga community is so fascinating to me. It still keeps trucking,
albeit minimally, after all of these years.

Fun times.

