
The Amiga Demoscene Mixtape Vol. 1 [video] - doener
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7WyhlRetU0
======
bemmu
Scoopex has a video series of Amiga demo programming starting all the way from
the basics of using an assembler:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p83QUZ1-P10)

I would have killed for this back when I had an A500. It seemed like dark
magic and all I could find was a book on ASM game programming tricks, which
was too advanced for me.

~~~
infodroid
In a sense, Amiga demos were actually open source. Coders wrote in assembly,
which is a short step from machine code. As most demos were compressed, it
required an additional step to get to the actual machine code before you could
disassemble. Alternatively using a cartridge like Datel's Action Replay makes
it possible to dump the relevant routines to disk. Granted that reading
disassembled code is a little more difficult than the original code, it is
enough to learn how various demo routines were implemented.

~~~
hollerith
Ever since the term "open source" was coined in 1998, it has had a precise
definition[1], and according to that definition, most (all?) Amiga demos are
_not_ open source.

1: [http://opensource.org/definition](http://opensource.org/definition)

~~~
infodroid
It should have been clear I was referring to the spirit of sharing in the
Amiga demo scene itself.

It was no secret people were looking at each other's code. Reviewing the code
was a way to learn about how to implement demo routines. But it was also a
practical way to learn about programming the machine itself. Things you will
not find in any manual.

I was not making a claim about licensing. Perhaps you are not familiar with
the notion of a metaphor.

------
ChuckMcM
Oddly it makes me sad, one because I remember it fondly (the BADGE group some
of the early demo contests) and it was fun to code them up, but today its not
nearly so fun even though you can make things look so much better. Writing
code for the Amiga was so much more fun than writing code for the PC. I'd love
to figure out how to create such a fun environment again.

~~~
vanattab
I have never played with an Amiga so I am curious as to what made it so fun to
write code for?

~~~
vidarh
Consider that when the Amiga arrived most PCs had monochrome text only
displays, and the PC speaker was the only sound option. In 1987 VGA arrived
and you would start to get the opportunity to compete with still images, but
it still took a while before most PCs would use more than 16 colours. And
prior to the Soundblaster in 1989, most PC users still had no proper sound.
And until 1995 most PC users had not used a pre-emptively multitasking OS.

Meanwhile the Amiga shipped with a fully multitasking windowed OS, 4096
colours, higher resolutions (until VGA), the copper (a coprocessor that let
you update things like the palette and video registers synced to the raster
beam, e.g. to let you combine multiple graphics modes on the same screen, or
duplicate hardware sprites multiple times on the screen without involving the
CPU), the blitter (letting you move areas of memory; geared towards moving
graphical objects while the CPU did other things), 4 voices of sampled music,
and a CPU (M68000) that was simply far more pleasant to program for.

For most of us who saw Amigas in the early days, the PC looked like a
dinosaur.

~~~
incepted
The Amiga was ridiculously ahead of its time until 1995, when Windows 95 came
out and pretty much crushed everything else.

That year is when I realized it was time to sell my Amiga and buy a PC because
the future had just jumped to a different hardware architecture.

To me, booting Windows 95 was as jaw dropping as seeing the ray traced juggler
demo and Marble Madness on an Amiga 1000 Kickstart 1.0 in 1986.

~~~
zurn
And if you weren't impressed by Windows, by that time Linux was quite good on
the PC if you built it with Linux in mind. And you could still dual boot to
DOS games.

~~~
whaaaaaaaat
Linux was horrendous on PCs in 1995. First of all, OP is talking about
hardware support: switching OSs doesn't give you a copper, or a soundcard with
four voice wavetable synthesis.

Linux was slightly convenient on PC in 1995 if you really cared about: (1) a
basically Unix-y userland, with all the good and bad that implies. Shells and
stuff worked better than cygwin (2) tcp stack (3) gcc

That's really it. X was a fucking nightmare to get to work "correctly" and
then, as now, "correctly" on X means "it handles a remote networking case no
one cares about better than the alternatives but still poorly, and everything
else about it is totally broken."

Hardware support for every feature that was becoming interesting in PCs in
1995 (basically anything where economies of scale were making interesting
stuff cheap) was absolutely terrible on Linux. Drivers for PC hardware, even
the kind of PC hardware nerds liked (SCSI CD-ROM drives) were super flaky or
non-existent. Application software was horrendous. There was no support at all
for anything that still had a licensing regime around codecs, which, at the
time included all the media software.

Linux was "quite good" in that you could set it up in a corner of your house
and run httpd. That was dope in 1995. But compared to Amiga as a user-facing
hacking desktop, it sucked shit. Hell, it sucked shit compared to a PC running
Windows or a Mac.

Seriously, find a 486SX/25 w/ 4MB ram, a 160MB disk, a decent modem, and an S3
video card and put like, Yggdrasil on it. It will be way less fun to fuck
around w/ than an old Amiga/Mac/NeXT/BeBox/SGI....at least in 1995 an Intel
machine running DOS could run DOOM. It's probably the least-fun hardware/os
combo from 1995 you could dredge up to play with.

~~~
vidarh
In 95, I ran X on 486's w/16MB RAM, and an Amiga 3000 with a Picasso II and an
Apollo (?) accelerator. While I still held on to the Amiga 3000 and loved it,
I don't agree Linux was that painful hen.

And of course it would be worse than BeBox, SGI, NeXT. SGI and NeXT were high
end work stations (or above). We had SGI Indy's at uni that they'd gotten at
near cost from the distributor at about 3x the cost of the my souped up Amiga
3000... BeBox was a PPC SMP box - it was where many of us had hoped the Amiga
was headed.

I held on to the Amiga 3000 for 2-3 more years, but mostly out of loyalty and
nostalgia at that point. I still loved (and love) the OS, but already in '95
it was on borrowed time and it cost a fortune to tack on enough third party
add ons to make it viable. And the lack of software was becoming a problem - a
colleague and I even spoke o Escom at the time about writing a browser for
them, because the available Amiga web browsers were already then lagging
behind he times.

And in '95 people _did_ care about the "remote networking case no one cares
about". At university, we also had old Sun servers that served up apps for
dozens of dumb X11 terminals each. At work, by '96 5 of us ran all our
applications off a single 120MHz Pentium w/128MB RAM, using our 486's as
terminals.

------
Paul_S
Something modern on Amiga:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsJnMWX1qa0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsJnMWX1qa0)

There is a Bad Apple on an oscilloscope and a TI calculator so obviously there
would be an Amiga version. Not as impressive as the Commodore C64 version
which is an insane feat of compression:
[http://csdb.dk/release/?id=131628](http://csdb.dk/release/?id=131628)
(reminds me of the famous state of the art amiga demo).

Briefly Bad Apple was a sport akin to porting Doom to the most unexpected
platform you could think of.

~~~
megablast
That shadow demo is all pre rendered though right? Like stats of the art?

~~~
Flow
The file extension was .anim, It's probably a standard IFF ANIM file. It's a
format that contains RLE encoded diff-XOR-data(so you can play the video
backwards).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANIM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANIM)

------
infodroid
There are still a number of groups making amazing Amiga demos for the original
hardware. For example, this is Rift by The Black Lotus (2014):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXDlWHqzSTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXDlWHqzSTg)

------
felhr
It's strange but when I see a video of the Amiga demoscene I feel nostalgia
for a time I didn't experience (I started with a 286).

------
Luyt
It was this kind of demo-scene programming in which DHH was utterly
_uninterested_ in.

"I had a bunch of friends who I loved dearly, but in many ways were exhibiting
all the traditional programmer stereotype themes of being just overly focused
on things I didn't think mattered and at that time programming perhaps also
was a little bit different. Growing up, programming was assembler and C. I had
a lot of friends in what was called the ‘demo scene’, which is mostly an
European thing where you had all these guys on the Commodore 64 and on the
Amiga writing these really awesome visual displays of various kinds, and all
that stuff was usually in assembler. I had absolutely zero interest in
learning or doing anything with assembler, it just didn't make any sense to me
at all.

I only really got interested in programming when I stumbled across languages
that made sense to me on the level that makes sense to me, which is at the
very least high level languages like Java, PHP, or whatever have you, anything
that's above the “I have to dick around with pointers” or I actually have to
move memory spaces around; that stuff has absolutely zero interest to me at
all.

I didn't start programming until I was in my late twenties, and even then I
didn't start programming because I wanted to be a programmer. I started
programming because I wanted a few programs. And that was apparently the
easiest way to get there because the other way of getting programs is that you
actually have to talk to programmers, which is surprisingly painful at times.
I found that the easiest way was just to pick it up and learn it myself."

Source: [http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-
heineme...](http://www.transcribed-interview.com/dhh-rails-david-heinemeier-
hansson-interview-randal-schwartz-floss.html)

~~~
travjones
Thanks for the DHH quote. When I first watched the vid, I couldn't figure out
what was going on and what the purpose was. The DHH quote was perfectly timed
because it explained the context of these types of demonstrations: to make
cool looking stuff for its own sake, rather than writing super practical
programs.

I first got into programming in high school when I took AP Computer Science.
To be honest, I hated it and didn't pick up web development until several
years after that experience. I thought programming sucked. I literally said
multiple times, "I will never program. This is the worst!" I think there were
two reasons for this: the programs I was writing were impractical combined
with pressure to perform well in the class. It's tough teaching a beginning
programming class because most start at the CLI. Although the CLI is great at
helping students learn the basics of programming (e.g., loops, conditionals,
OOP, etc.), it still left me wanting more. Back then, I was still at a loss as
to how someone would write a GUI program, similar to the programs I used all
of the time on a computer, not the CLI "junk" I was writing for class.

Nonetheless, I picked up web development on my own time and the experience has
been incredible. I even developed a preference for the CLI in the practical
productivity CLI tools afford a web developer (e.g., git, touch, mkdir, ssh,
psql, etc.) And I must admit that basic programming skills that I learned in
AP Comp Sci gave me a leg up in getting started, thereby making the path to
writing practical stuff for the web a lot shorter.

I guess it's kind of vain for me to share my personal story here, but I bet
others had a similar experience. If you took an intro programming class in HS
or University and you hated it, give programming another shot. This time, you
won't have to worry about a grade or writing shitty programs you don't care
about. Start a project, get coding, and I think you'll fall in love.

------
PavlovsCat
For those interested in digging deeper :)

WinUAE Demo Toolchain 5:
[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65625](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65625)

And here you can find plenty old and new demos for all sorts of platforms:
[http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php](http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php)

Enjoy!

------
daledavies
My favourite demo, blows me away even now...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jdi3I3Ep6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jdi3I3Ep6k)

------
corysama
If you like this, you would probably appreciate
[http://www.mindcandydvd.com/](http://www.mindcandydvd.com/)

