It's amazing that the Amiga (and C64) demoscene is still alive! Recently I discovered that even here in Poland there are still AmiParties where the demoscene presents its work
@michalp.1484 OK. Will keep an eye out. Are you aware of MBR free album called WAREZ? The dude mixes chiptunes with heavy metal. There was a live event in Poland but I missed it.
The Black Lotus, some of the greatest in the scene since forever.. I'm no longer a part of the demoscene but I still remember how impressed i was last time i saw one of their amiga releases- starstruck, and to this day it's still one of my favourites.. I had to go watch it again just now :) Not to mention how Stash and Jizz on PC inspired me to write my own procedural texture generator back in the days :) sweet demo, great talk!
excellent talk. i'm 50, and have been an avid demoscene enjoyer since i was a watching friends and their Amigas as teen in the UK, the graphics, the music, the amature understanding of the programming art that makes it all happen, Amazing. Now living in Australia since 20 years ago, throughout the years it's great to see how demo guys went on to do genuine commercial games on PC, and consoles, but also still have their connections to the demoscene like this. Beautiful to witness, thank you 👍
That would surely rewrite history, albeit briefly. As without modern tooling it would be almost impossible to continue the same level of advanced development.
It's amazing that software development has evolved allowing this to be possible on a 30 year old hardware. We always focus on how computers became faster but this shows that pure ideas have improved immensely as well
It’s fascinating to hear this insight into demo development from a legendary coder. He briefly mentioned working for Insomniac - one of the most respected development studios in the industry, known for pushing the limits of modern-day consoles - at the beginning of his presentation. I wonder how many AAA game developers cut their teeth coding 68k assembler on an A500 back in the day?
The Amiga (500) ... "only" 32 colors*, but when I see them on Screen it still feels "magic" to me. Back then this machine was so advanced, so capable of amazing things I'd never seen before. I'll never forget this little computer, she'd been something special, last but not least because of the people who really pushed her to the limits. It's just great to see that she's still loved by the demo scene :) *) or 64 or even 4096, or with clever hacking 31 different colors per line - I know ;-) But handling these modes was quite tricky, used mostly for static images.
I think because it was also 32 colours from a much larger palette (4096 IIRC?), where eg. DOS was common using the fixed CGA/EGA palette of those same garish 16 colours (I say that as someone who grew up with DOS, but always wanted to go play with my neighbours' Amiga)
With the limited memory and throughput of the machines back in the days, it was always a trade-off between color depth (number of bit planes) vs resolution (bit plane x-y dimensions)
When I saw EON for very first time, I didn't like it. I thought, ok, another PC-like demo where all is streamed from the HDD. Only later, when understood that this is bare A500 + 2 FDDs my jaw just dropped... Massive kudos for the demo, massive thanks for this talk 👍👍
There were some cracktro's from the scene that I would just listen too endlessly. I'm too young for the demo scene, but seeing what it can STILL do on old hardware, and even the demo's back then, are super super SUPER impressive.
This is why I’m not worried about the future. Right now most code running is so abysmally unoptimised it’s crazy. If tech ever does stop progressing we’ll figure out how to make crisis run on a 32x or cyberpunk 2077 on a PlayStation 1
I need more advice from that guy. I didn't fully understand all of the advice he gave, but he seems to have a lot of experience with many of the aspects of programming that I am very interested in.
I am wondering: He says the CPu was the main constraint on the well spread A500+512K slow RAM. But why don't all these modern demos requiring an 68030+ not really look significantly better than all the OCS unexpanded demos? Having my Amiag expanded through all the generations, from 68020, through 68030 and 68060 up to the PPC, I was always very disappointed with what it actually brought to the table - including the ridiculously useless AGA, which IMHO did not make a singkle game look better than ECS.
While EON is very impressive and I love TBL's stuff a lot, let me point out that for us old farts in the 80's it was about "What can we achieve in realtime better than others so that they can go home?" Precalculating data and using the machine as a "Player" was something we frowned upon. (Maybe some sinedata for scroller was allowed here and there ;)) But of course, that made the constraints even bigger.
Precalcing data was never really frowned as long as the demo sat in the space of a floppy, constraints of the system and didn't effect the flow of the presentation. Mainly because you wouldnt know what was precalced without knowing the code. And almost every demo effect involved some kind of precalc simply because of the bitplane nature of the Amiga framebuffer. Everything was always a combination of precalc and realtime code. My favorite TBL effect ever is applying a pre-rendered animation loop to a realtime spherical projection, that gives the illusion of a fully realtime rendered complex backdrop. The brilliance of achieving that effect on a painfully constrained CPU with😂 no FPU is what matters. On the other hand, the PC demo scene with 50-80MB 5min long productions, I dunno. I know of one award winning demo that stuffed in a fully pre-rendered sequence as it's wow-factor finale.
It's true this isn't a game but shows what the amiga was capable of for intros or cutscenes. If a hard drive or cdrom was standard in every AGA amiga, this could have been the norm for most games. Being stuck on floppy really curtailed the success of the system. The CD32 barely benefited from the CD, as most games were just the same as the floppy version but more expensive.
It is both I think. Demos had a "license" to precalc as long as their size was reasonable. People were amazed even by full screen animations because there was nothing comparable (see State Of The Art, 9 fingers, 303 on PC for examples - although I read that SOTA was criticized at first for being an animation ;) ). Size-constrained compos were (and are) more about realtime (or a very smart precalc lol).
@@RussGreeno An interesting thing about the CD32 that no other Amiga has is a hardware chunky-to-bitplane converter that would've been pretty nice on other models for the demoscene. Would make certain effects faster like texture mapping.
Is the adopted emulator / dev env available somewhere? I am still using my host only for code editing but assemble and run on the emulator. Some comfort would be nice.
It’s incredible. I remember watching this video from the stream at Revision when it was first shown publicly - the reaction from the crowd is awesome...still give me chills today!
The hardwaredesign and the OS were ahead of its time. Absolutly no doubt about that. But from todays point of view it was a big mess. The components we're tied to work together way too tight. The Amiga never really had a chance to evolve without braking the original design, making it incompatible to its previous version. Some of the functionalities were even quite hacky. For instance: The two CIAs in the Amiga had a signal line to tell them if they were CIA 1 or CIA 2 because both had different functionalities in the system. When coming out of reset state, the cpu started off by reading a reset-vector from adress 0x00004. But in normal operation there is usualy RAM at this location which would result in an instant system crash because the CPU would read random data from that address. They solved it by telling gary to resolve the Reset-Vektor-Address to point to a ROM Location within the first few clock ticks of the boot time. Its the PA0-Line of CIA I that is doing the signaling to gary.
You'd get the exact same difficulty upgrading due to hardware being tied tightly together with any 80s of 90s console that was computerized like the Amiga was. That's just the way it is when you try to make a console design into a personal computer. Be thankful they did as any other approach at the time would've cost way too much retail. This is part of why the recurring, "Why didn't they use ARM?" comment if comical. If they had, it would've needed a lot more RAM. And in 1983 and 1984 -- when they were designing it (and even in 1985) -- that would've massively bloated the system's launch price.
@@Nebulous6 This is not quite correct. The first Amiga (Amiga 1000) was not designed with cost efficiency in mind and it was quite expensive. It was supposed to become a direct competitor to IBM and Atari Computers at the time. So was the following Amiga 2000. These machines were more capable than IBM PC but had many design flaws. So they ended up beeing unable to keep up with IBM and were bound to die... Many people say it was the mismanagement of commodore that caused the Amiga and commodore to die. My personal opinion is, that it is a mixture of many unfortunate events that caused commodores demise. The designflaws of the amiga was a major one of them.
@@monarch73 I'd hesitate to call them design flaws. The Amiga did exactly what it should have done at the time and it did it very efficiently. As for cost, the Amiga 1000 was still less expensive than either the Mac or IBM back in 1985. The primary reason the 1000 was more expensive than it could have been was because it was manufactured in Japan. I do agree that the downfall of the Amiga was due to a mix of unfortunate events though.
@@Nebulous6 Its' like I already said, the Amiga was way ahead of it's time. The guys did a great job at bringing high-end computing at an affordable price to the homes. But let me elborate what I mean: If I was a softwaredeveloper, and if I was to design a software that does what it was supposed to do, it does not nessesarly mean, I did a good job - because as a designer have to take different senarios into account. Does the software crash when the user does unexpected/ unwanted things to your application? Is it foolprove? Is it intuitive? Does it scale when resources are insufficient? It's that kind of stuff where I think the hardware- and software designers failed miserably. The OS was prone to crashes due to the sensible location of lookup tables. Null-Pointer dereference is a very common problem and with gary in place it could have been handled with very little effort. Instead, they completly ignored it and put some very sensitive data at the beginning of the memory map.
I remember people jumped the ship when PC with its ability to use chunky pixels to create games like wolfenstein, and doom came. Also the triple-a was in the making for ages, so people like me stopped caring.
Wolfenstein's covered now with the Amiga 500 homebrew game "Grind". It actually is sort of a hybrid between Wolfenstein and Doom. However, what's really impressive is Hamulet (real-time, giant blitter objects, music, sfx, and no fringing in 6-bitplane mode on an A500); A good engine for a JRPG with thousands of on-screen colors.
@@perfectionbox Hamulet's top-down, yes with the usual obligatory slide-show intro. You might find Genetic Species AGA interesting. ruclips.net/video/Pl1hctZ8HnY/видео.html
World move on... so you should to. Nothing will change that.... All this Amiga fans/coders should do demo on PC on Linux. Or try to invent new platform that utilize GPU from nVidia or AMD and modern standards like PCIe and NVME.
I loved the demo scene when I was a teenager. So many good ones, and so much good music.
It's amazing that the Amiga (and C64) demoscene is still alive! Recently I discovered that even here in Poland there are still AmiParties where the demoscene presents its work
Is there an official project website?
@@Tome4kkkk probably not, but I'm not sure because I'm not currently close to the community
@michalp.1484 OK. Will keep an eye out. Are you aware of MBR free album called WAREZ? The dude mixes chiptunes with heavy metal. There was a live event in Poland but I missed it.
The Black Lotus, some of the greatest in the scene since forever.. I'm no longer a part of the demoscene but I still remember how impressed i was last time i saw one of their amiga releases- starstruck, and to this day it's still one of my favourites.. I had to go watch it again just now :) Not to mention how Stash and Jizz on PC inspired me to write my own procedural texture generator back in the days :)
sweet demo, great talk!
excellent talk. i'm 50, and have been an avid demoscene enjoyer since i was a watching friends and their Amigas as teen in the UK, the graphics, the music, the amature understanding of the programming art that makes it all happen, Amazing.
Now living in Australia since 20 years ago, throughout the years it's great to see how demo guys went on to do genuine commercial games on PC, and consoles, but also still have their connections to the demoscene like this. Beautiful to witness, thank you 👍
Imagine playing this demo on 23 juli 1985 at the Lincoln Center, New York City.The day that the Amiga 1000 was introduced.
That would surely rewrite history, albeit briefly. As without modern tooling it would be almost impossible to continue the same level of advanced development.
Commodore upper management would mess this up somehow.
It's amazing that software development has evolved allowing this to be possible on a 30 year old hardware. We always focus on how computers became faster but this shows that pure ideas have improved immensely as well
Nobody would buy another computer only Commodore
0:23 "Steve! Steve, it's Marvin. Your cousin, Marvin Jobs! You know that new product you're looking for? Well look at this!"
Andreas is one of the smartest guys I had pleasure to meet during my entire gamedev career.
What games did you develop?
It’s fascinating to hear this insight into demo development from a legendary coder. He briefly mentioned working for Insomniac - one of the most respected development studios in the industry, known for pushing the limits of modern-day consoles - at the beginning of his presentation. I wonder how many AAA game developers cut their teeth coding 68k assembler on an A500 back in the day?
How so much genius went into one man, I will never know. The limits an artist will reach to create the art is what inspires greatness.
Insanely good music and modern looking visuals!
Very very impressive, and fascinating to see the constraints viewed through a modern tooling and coding lens
So many wonderful memories of this lovely machine. Thank you for a trip down memory lane!
The Amiga (500) ... "only" 32 colors*, but when I see them on Screen it still feels "magic" to me. Back then this machine was so advanced, so capable of amazing things I'd never seen before. I'll never forget this little computer, she'd been something special, last but not least because of the people who really pushed her to the limits. It's just great to see that she's still loved by the demo scene :)
*) or 64 or even 4096, or with clever hacking 31 different colors per line - I know ;-) But handling these modes was quite tricky, used mostly for static images.
The HAM mode is pretty impressive. It blew my mind in 1990.
I think because it was also 32 colours from a much larger palette (4096 IIRC?), where eg. DOS was common using the fixed CGA/EGA palette of those same garish 16 colours (I say that as someone who grew up with DOS, but always wanted to go play with my neighbours' Amiga)
With the limited memory and throughput of the machines back in the days, it was always a trade-off between color depth (number of bit planes) vs resolution (bit plane x-y dimensions)
When I saw EON for very first time, I didn't like it. I thought, ok, another PC-like demo where all is streamed from the HDD. Only later, when understood that this is bare A500 + 2 FDDs my jaw just dropped... Massive kudos for the demo, massive thanks for this talk 👍👍
Eon: best demo on Amiga, period. I love the talk!
The irony is people in the 90s would probably say that phone looks unimaginative for the future yet it's spot on
This is by far my fav demo of all time
Absolutely awesome demo, really pushing the A500 hardware
Great talk, as much as Amiga OCS demos are amazing sometimes, the C64 demo scene in the last few years has become even more impressive.
the more restricting, the more exciting to pull off something new and cool!
There were some cracktro's from the scene that I would just listen too endlessly. I'm too young for the demo scene, but seeing what it can STILL do on old hardware, and even the demo's back then, are super super SUPER impressive.
Demoscene presentation in the handmade conferences? Wow!
I had a fight in school over amiga being better than megadrive and I still stand by that.
Utterly inspiring, thank you Andreas and the team!
30:00 wow they actually wrote an emulator to overcome raw testing on hardware without OS. ❤❤❤❤❤
This is why I’m not worried about the future. Right now most code running is so abysmally unoptimised it’s crazy. If tech ever does stop progressing we’ll figure out how to make crisis run on a 32x or cyberpunk 2077 on a PlayStation 1
yeah! Just look at the new version of Doom that unlocked the actual potential of the 32X. Amazing!
Great demo and good example of Amiga drive DMA loading data while playing content. The only thing they forgot to do was check for a second disk drive.
I need more advice from that guy. I didn't fully understand all of the advice he gave, but he seems to have a lot of experience with many of the aspects of programming that I am very interested in.
Maybe you should join a demogroup :)
fantastic demos!
Thanks for sharing your knowledge
I am wondering: He says the CPu was the main constraint on the well spread A500+512K slow RAM. But why don't all these modern demos requiring an 68030+ not really look significantly better than all the OCS unexpanded demos? Having my Amiag expanded through all the generations, from 68020, through 68030 and 68060 up to the PPC, I was always very disappointed with what it actually brought to the table - including the ridiculously useless AGA, which IMHO did not make a singkle game look better than ECS.
Потрясающее демо. Музыка в особенности!
While EON is very impressive and I love TBL's stuff a lot, let me point out that for us old farts in the 80's it was about "What can we achieve in realtime better than others so that they can go home?" Precalculating data and using the machine as a "Player" was something we frowned upon. (Maybe some sinedata for scroller was allowed here and there ;)) But of course, that made the constraints even bigger.
Precalcing data was never really frowned as long as the demo sat in the space of a floppy, constraints of the system and didn't effect the flow of the presentation. Mainly because you wouldnt know what was precalced without knowing the code. And almost every demo effect involved some kind of precalc simply because of the bitplane nature of the Amiga framebuffer. Everything was always a combination of precalc and realtime code. My favorite TBL effect ever is applying a pre-rendered animation loop to a realtime spherical projection, that gives the illusion of a fully realtime rendered complex backdrop. The brilliance of achieving that effect on a painfully constrained CPU with😂 no FPU is what matters. On the other hand, the PC demo scene with 50-80MB 5min long productions, I dunno. I know of one award winning demo that stuffed in a fully pre-rendered sequence as it's wow-factor finale.
The 3D components near the end of the demo are not pre-calculated.
It's true this isn't a game but shows what the amiga was capable of for intros or cutscenes. If a hard drive or cdrom was standard in every AGA amiga, this could have been the norm for most games. Being stuck on floppy really curtailed the success of the system. The CD32 barely benefited from the CD, as most games were just the same as the floppy version but more expensive.
It is both I think. Demos had a "license" to precalc as long as their size was reasonable. People were amazed even by full screen animations because there was nothing comparable (see State Of The Art, 9 fingers, 303 on PC for examples - although I read that SOTA was criticized at first for being an animation ;) ). Size-constrained compos were (and are) more about realtime (or a very smart precalc lol).
@@RussGreeno An interesting thing about the CD32 that no other Amiga has is a hardware chunky-to-bitplane converter that would've been pretty nice on other models for the demoscene. Would make certain effects faster like texture mapping.
Just seeing the font on the code at 29:05 in filled me with nostalgia :D
Well done!
Snyggt jobbat 🤩
Still feel sad today that the Amiga period was way to short but can look back at an amazing time coding demo's.
Loved my amiga!
Amiga !!!!!! 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖
RULEEEEEZZZZZZZ!!!
that logo is so badass
Where is the Q&A?
38:10 sounds a lot like RR; playback to debug
Very impressive! Is disk images available somewhere?😍
thanks!
3:55 glitches?
that is bad ass
Is the adopted emulator / dev env available somewhere? I am still using my host only for code editing but assemble and run on the emulator. Some comfort would be nice.
Black Lotus forever!
3:40 hollyyyy
It’s incredible. I remember watching this video from the stream at Revision when it was first shown publicly - the reaction from the crowd is awesome...still give me chills today!
The hardwaredesign and the OS were ahead of its time. Absolutly no doubt about that.
But from todays point of view it was a big mess. The components we're tied to work together way too tight. The Amiga never really had a chance to evolve without braking the original design, making it incompatible to its previous version. Some of the functionalities were even quite hacky. For instance:
The two CIAs in the Amiga had a signal line to tell them if they were CIA 1 or CIA 2 because both had different functionalities in the system.
When coming out of reset state, the cpu started off by reading a reset-vector from adress 0x00004. But in normal operation there is usualy RAM at this location which would result in an instant system crash because the CPU would read random data from that address. They solved it by telling gary to resolve the Reset-Vektor-Address to point to a ROM Location within the first few clock ticks of the boot time. Its the PA0-Line of CIA I that is doing the signaling to gary.
You'd get the exact same difficulty upgrading due to hardware being tied tightly together with any 80s of 90s console that was computerized like the Amiga was. That's just the way it is when you try to make a console design into a personal computer. Be thankful they did as any other approach at the time would've cost way too much retail. This is part of why the recurring, "Why didn't they use ARM?" comment if comical. If they had, it would've needed a lot more RAM. And in 1983 and 1984 -- when they were designing it (and even in 1985) -- that would've massively bloated the system's launch price.
@@Nebulous6 This is not quite correct. The first Amiga (Amiga 1000) was not designed with cost efficiency in mind and it was quite expensive. It was supposed to become a direct competitor to IBM and Atari Computers at the time. So was the following Amiga 2000. These machines were more capable than IBM PC but had many design flaws. So they ended up beeing unable to keep up with IBM and were bound to die...
Many people say it was the mismanagement of commodore that caused the Amiga and commodore to die. My personal opinion is, that it is a mixture of many unfortunate events that caused commodores demise. The designflaws of the amiga was a major one of them.
@@monarch73 I'd hesitate to call them design flaws. The Amiga did exactly what it should have done at the time and it did it very efficiently. As for cost, the Amiga 1000 was still less expensive than either the Mac or IBM back in 1985. The primary reason the 1000 was more expensive than it could have been was because it was manufactured in Japan. I do agree that the downfall of the Amiga was due to a mix of unfortunate events though.
@@Nebulous6 Its' like I already said, the Amiga was way ahead of it's time. The guys did a great job at bringing high-end computing at an affordable price to the homes. But let me elborate what I mean: If I was a softwaredeveloper, and if I was to design a software that does what it was supposed to do, it does not nessesarly mean, I did a good job - because as a designer have to take different senarios into account. Does the software crash when the user does unexpected/ unwanted things to your application? Is it foolprove? Is it intuitive? Does it scale when resources are insufficient?
It's that kind of stuff where I think the hardware- and software designers failed miserably. The OS was prone to crashes due to the sensible location of lookup tables. Null-Pointer dereference is a very common problem and with gary in place it could have been handled with very little effort. Instead, they completly ignored it and put some very sensitive data at the beginning of the memory map.
I remember people jumped the ship when PC with its ability to use chunky pixels to create games like wolfenstein, and doom came. Also the triple-a was in the making for ages, so people like me stopped caring.
just get red sektor's demo maker and bob's yer uncle. no more barrier of entry
I actually used the demo maker back in the day. We where into tracker music, and it was a nice way to have it play with animation.
Engagement ascii \o/
Music sounds like Burial but better
considering the Amiga 500 probably couldn't even run classic Wolfenstein, that demo was nice
Wolfenstein's covered now with the Amiga 500 homebrew game "Grind". It actually is sort of a hybrid between Wolfenstein and Doom. However, what's really impressive is Hamulet (real-time, giant blitter objects, music, sfx, and no fringing in 6-bitplane mode on an A500); A good engine for a JRPG with thousands of on-screen colors.
@ Grind looks like it halved the vertical resolution, but yeah it's cool. Pity it took so long to arrive. Hamulet is just a top-down isometric right?
@@perfectionbox Hamulet's top-down, yes with the usual obligatory slide-show intro. You might find Genetic Species AGA interesting. ruclips.net/video/Pl1hctZ8HnY/видео.html
dread
@@Nebulous6 Genetic Species looks nice but did they omit stairs for performance or was it just an artistic choice?
'dark theme' slides? 🤣 nope.
Peak not peek
No where near as powerful as the Sharp X68000 which also looked far sexier too.
World move on... so you should to. Nothing will change that.... All this Amiga fans/coders should do demo on PC on Linux. Or try to invent new platform that utilize GPU from nVidia or AMD and modern standards like PCIe and NVME.
Very cool presentation of one my all time favorite demos. Thanks!! grtz, cosmiq/inque :)