Demoscene coverage ?

[Antiriad2097]

There wasn't much room for snobbery in the ST demo scene. Not once the Amiga arrived

[RichL]

Some of my favourite ST demos:-

The Big Demo
The Union Demo
The Cuddly Demos
Whattaheck Demo

[TMR]

Yays, my demo came second in the Atari 8-bit category at Forever 13 - i expected it to finish last so that's a bonus! =-)

Link to download (don't use Altirra, run it on Atari 800Win or preferably a real Atari 8-bit!

[Greyfox]

Thanks man, just gonna grab it now...and congrats on coming 2nd , those demo sceners sure make it harder every year to blow people's mind, can't wait to have a watch cheers...

[joefish]

There wasn't much room for snobbery in the ST demo scene. Not once the Amiga arrived

True - there were so many ST demos that openly admitted to trying to emulate Amiga demos. In that respect, many of them were far more inventive technically; hacks to perform hardware scrolling and overscan; one even claimed to be using the keyboard chip as a co-processor (did it really?)

I did do those demos in STOS, but I always wanted to do games. To be frank, STOS held me back a long time from getting stuck into assembly. It was possible to write just simple snippets of code to do intensive tasks (like scrolling the screen, or combining screens on different bitplanes) and calling them from BASIC, so I got a bit lazy.

[TMR]

True - there were so many ST demos that openly admitted to trying to emulate Amiga demos. In that respect, many of them were far more inventive technically; hacks to perform hardware scrolling and overscan; one even claimed to be using the keyboard chip as a co-processor (did it really?)

i'm not sure they were far more inventive, just inventive in different ways - Sack/Cosine is having a play with the Amiga at the moment and was telling me about a wonderfully twisted way to draw fast filled vectors by creatively (ab)using HAM the other night.

[RichL]

I wish I was more clever and could have done all this myself

It used to fascinate me. Well I guess it still does.

[TMR]

I wish I was more clever and could have done all this myself

It used to fascinate me. Well I guess it still does.

So... what's stopping you? =-)

[RichL]

My brain. I'm not clever enough to understand all the code and what it means.

[Antiriad2097]

I don't think you need to be clever. Most of it is very simple. That's the trick, working out how those simple instructions do complex things.

If you can get someone to explain it in the right way, and have a play about with it, at some point it just clicks and starts to make sense. In the 80s I thought it was unintelligible gibberish impossible to learn on your own. IN the 90s I started to actually work it out. Now I understand it reasonably well (at least the theory).

[TMR]

I don't think you need to be clever. Most of it is very simple. That's the trick, working out how those simple instructions do complex things.

What he said.

And when i were a lad we learnt machine code from books and guessing, you kids today have the internets to help!

[RichL]

I guess, like I said before I used to try and follow the Bullfrog stuff in Amiga Format that they used to do but it never went anywhere, they seemed to stop the tutorials after a couple of issues.

[joefish]

I've seen a lot of demos and tried to figure out how they work.
The one I really don't get is how anyone managed to do dithered shading on 3D objects at any reasonable speed. I can't imagine any bit of code on an ST or Amiga running fast enough to be able to address the shade of each pixel individually during a fill.

[NorthWay]

So, back to the topic.

I can't see demos fitting in with the magazine as Darran has defined it. What I _can_ see however is a "this was what these people did before they did game X": A look at game developers with a background from the demo scene. List their demos and games. Show some pictures from both. Do a "rise to fame" story. Talk a bit about art exhibitions showing demos.

(I think I have said something like this sometime before?)

[TMR]

I can't see demos fitting in with the magazine as Darran has defined it. What I _can_ see however is a "this was what these people did before they did game X": A look at game developers with a background from the demo scene. List their demos and games. Show some pictures from both. Do a "rise to fame" story. Talk a bit about art exhibitions showing demos.

i still can't see this working in RG personally... sure it'll be interesting for a small subsection of the readership, but if you've ever tried explaining the scene to someone who isn't interested you'll know that glazed look of disinterest. Even talking about technical stuff can upset some folks...