OSNews

Here`s an interview with one of the members of Maturefurk, the winners of the largest demo-party ever! A record breaking figure of 5,000 people attended this year`s Assembly party and they voted the Lapsuus demo (DivX video) for the Amiga as the best of all. This is quite remarkable since they only used a 50 mhz 68k Amiga with an AGA chipset (released in 1992) for this demo. It`s a great demonstration of the 3D capabilities which existed on Amigas since a decade ago. Read more for more information regarding the origin of the Demo Scene and other relating info written by Mike Bouma, a long standing Amiga user.

"The origin of the DemoScene can be found in the early 80s when coders created short messages and greetings before the beginning of "cracked" 8-bit titles (particulary on the c64). These introduction messages began to contain more and more complex graphics, sounds and effects. In 1984 RJ Mical and Dale Luck, two of the original Amiga Inc members created and demonstarted their famous Boing! demo to potential investors, the demo showed a sphere with red and white rectangles on it rotating and bouncing around to the screen. The Boingball is now an official Amiga logo. The first Amiga was released in 1985 and gave developers amazing new multimedia capabilities. Competitions were set up to see which team could produce the best intros (40K-64K max) and Demonstrations (which were larger but weren`t allowed to become larger than a previously agreed amount of memory). Sceners were trying to show off the great new possibilties the Amiga offered. The DemoScene grew rapidly and flourished on the Amiga. When fans of other platforms saw the cool stuff that was possible on the Amiga, they started making demos on their own platforms. None of these scenes were as alive as the AmigaScene because of its unique multimedia abilities. The first demo I saw personally was "State Of The Art" (DivX video) by Spaceballs and it was shockingly good while still being very moddest with the system requirements: Any Amiga (Original Chipset released in 1985) with only 1 MB of memory! The demo fitted on a standard double density disk, you just have to put the disk in your Amiga, turn it on and voila a few seconds later you are seeing an amazing music video!

However later when several corporate owners of the Amiga technology experienced countless troubles the Scene slowly dwindled together with the Amiga community in general. That`s why it is particulary encouraging to see that the Scene is still alive and kicking at the Assembly party this year, despite most sceners nowadays use Ghz PCs to impress their audience. The peak of the DemoScene for me was when RJ Mical (one of the original creators of Amiga ) presented Maturefurk their trophy and proclaimed "Amiga rules!" while being followed by a loud applause from the audience. Hopefully the DemoScene will continue to revitalize itself together with the Amiga community now that new Amiga products are finally materializing!"

Mike Bouma