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
And good to see the Scene is still this hot, hope to see more good stuff like this!
I hope this isn’t their last demo for the Amiga.
I hope to download a new one next year !
Now it`s time for people to concentrate on getting the most out of the new Amigas which are coming our way real soon. I`ll will be buying an AmigaOne 1200 because it will give me full AGA compatibility as well.
Cool!
amiga NEVER had any 3d capabilities!
the never was any 3d-related hardware: it was/is all software….
which makes the scene coders all the more god-like!
Obviously you never played any early 3D games on the Amiga, these existed well before anything remotely impressive was available on other platforms. Trex Warrior (created by the team who did Lion Heart for the Amiga http://www.cus.org.uk/~alexh/games/lionheart/lionheart.html) for instance was one great 3D game I loved to play very much, in this game you would fight against different spaceships in a 3D arena. Some years later Doom was hyped very much within the video game industry. Sadly for Amigans this game wasn`t designed to use Amiga`s chipset features, thus it needed alot of CPU power to be played. Partly because most Amigans hadn`t upgraded their hardware to reasonable CPU specs, ID Software decided not to release it on the Amiga platform. I still think it was a strange decision, as Doom needed the best possible PC hardware configuration available to the PC at the time and caused a real rush to the shops by consumers. Doom (and later Quake) finally made it to the Amiga when its source was released by ID Software. A shame really that they decided not to port it, as it runs with ease on hardware available for Amigas at the time. Maybe it could have done the same for the Amiga as it did for the PC.
Also note that Amigas have a very commendable reputation within the 3D field. Not only were most 3D renderings done on Amigas during the mid-eighties-early nineties (i.e. Babylon 5), the first virtual reality systms also used Amiga technology. With fast CPUS on the horizon Amiga has the ability to start playing a role within 3D market segment again.
> never was any 3d-related hardware: it was/is all software….
Note that many Amigans nowadays use specialized 3D games orientated 3DFX Voodoo video cards with their classic 68k or PPC Amigas.
Amiga still RULEZ!!! Doesn’t this tell something about PC coders? 10-year old hardware beats their ass – Amazing! By the way, the same crew made last years Assembly winning demo for PC.
No anims, no OpenGl no Direct X or what else
Pure Code of fast assembler 68060,
So, hope we ‘ll see the next demos on
Aone with G4/750mhz in full high-resolution
and Real-time calculation **no fake like on PCs**
Amiga can do more, but with a good Coder
Maturefurk == Futuremark, most the people behind those 2000 & 2001 Assembly prods. are from company MadOnion (former Futuremark division of Remedy) . So, essentially they are PC coders these days… They have backgrounds from Amiga and PC scenes.
And you can do decent demos with PC, it’s just that…well.. I personally simply believe, that when Amiga demo scene (by large) died, also the real scene died. Sadly it isn’t the same anymore.