
An on-going conversion of Scoopex's Amiga Hardware coding tutorials into C - erickhill
https://github.com/spec-chum/Amiga-Scoopex-C
======
unwind
If you're interested, [1] has a long and detailed description of the group's
history.

As someone who was a fledgling member of the demo scene back in the late
80s/early 90s, it's really weird that Scoopex is still so active and talked
about. I guess that's being legendary, in a way.

[1] [https://demozoo.org/groups/361/](https://demozoo.org/groups/361/)

~~~
vidarh
Scoopex' Vectrex [1] was one of the first intros I saw on the Amiga, and I
still have the music to it in my music library. It's not advanced by Amiga
standards (I don't mean that to insult them; when it was released most demo
groups were still learning the Amiga; it stood up fine alongside other
releases at the time, but by a couple of years later it was a totally
different ballgame) - I mostly remember it because it was a huge step up from
the C64 I was used to, but it did impress me at the time.

As for being legendary, I think for many of these groups part of it is simply
_surviving_. Very few had many enough members and/or members with close enough
friendships to have longevity past people moving apart after school etc..

Of course part of that certainly is down to having grown to a certain status
quickly enough to be attractive to be members of, so I'm not suggesting that
longevity alone is _enough_.

But the sheer number of well received early releases gave them a reputation
that made longevity much easier, and longevity makes _maintaining_ that
reputation a lot easier.

[as a total digression, only related in that it's about scene fame/status,
this reminds me when I dug up the phone number for Strider of Fairlight from
some release he made before he was well known and called him at his home in
Sweden (recently he turned up as a Republican politician in California...) to
try to convice him to swap with me; he was "famous" by then and I was an
annoying little kid disturbing him at dinner; I wonder how often he got calls
like that from total strangers in other countries - some of these people had a
weird level of niche fame that most people have no idea about]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZobqjVim-6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZobqjVim-6c)

~~~
pavlov
_> "he was "famous" by then and I was an annoying little kid disturbing him at
dinner"_

At the age of 14, I and a friend decided to pay a surprise visit to a famous
demoscene musician at his home in Espoo, Finland. He was not very impressed by
this pilgrimage.

This was still in the BBS era, just pre-Internet (around 1994), so scene
people would regularly include their mail address for contact purposes. I
don't think they expected young teenage fans to show up.

------
yodsanklai
Really cool! I miss that era. It was quite easy to implement cool effects in
assembly on Amiga, even with limited programming knowledge. As a 12-years old
kid, you could buy a magazine, read some tutorial or having a friend showing
you a few tricks, and you would start from there. Of course, what Scoopex did
was another level. It felt like magic back then, especially without the proper
CS background.

I'm tempted to play a little bit with these tutorials, but there are so many
things to learn, simply to somehow keep up with the innovation...

I also wonder what these guys did for a living and what they do with their
computers nowadays. Have they transferred their skills and interests to the
systems and organizations of our time?

------
z3phyr
Kudos to the effort!

Don't get me wrong, but without Assembly it seems to lose its charm and
clarity. Assembly instructions are far more clear given the subject at hand is
hardware programming

~~~
vardump
You can always use C for scaffolding and then gradually optimize things in
assembly. Great way for a busy ex-scener. :-)

------
grewil2
Scoopex's Mental Hangover was a great demo at the time. I still like its
soundtrack by Uncle Tom.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZETBFv6zWs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZETBFv6zWs)

------
armitron
Nothing beats coding on the Amiga itself with an assembler like ASMOne. The
feeling of immediacy is unparalleled.

~~~
vardump
And those noooooo screams when your speedcode generator writes all over memory
crashing the system and you did not save for an hour...

Luckily memory contents (including source code) was often still in RAM after
reboot.

RAM disks were pretty common that time. Especially if you had lots of fast
RAM, but no hard disk. It also usually survived reboot.

Other common demo writing tools included CygnusEd (text editor), Directory
Opus (file management), Deluxe Paint, various crunchers and packers, graphics
conversion utilities, Noise/Pro/whatever trackers and of course X-Copy.

~~~
panpanna
Well, the main reason I never learned 68k assembler was because it read sooo
easy to crash things.

I simply didn't have the patience to wait 2-3 minutes for the Amiga to reboot
from floppy.

~~~
vardump
Well, you usually quickly learned to be careful to avoid most crashes. You'd
also have a very optimized disk for fast booting. Loading full WorkBench was
pointless, when a CLI window would do.

