I was an active demoscene member in a famous group named Scoopex. Back in the days, we were looking at the scandinavian scene like they were from a different planet. Most of the talents were from there. People were sharing a common underground passion, made of very good creative vibes. Just think that most of these guys (and gals :)) were between 15 and 20 years old. At 15, we were able to code amazing routines in assembler langage ! Without internet/ code stealing, just with some books and hard work. Demoscene left some great legacy in my life and it's OK. I'm proud of this :)
i just found photons amiga tutorial. He was in your group, right? Spend the day yesterday to dig up some free kicksarts and workbenches, today, after some sleep i will make the emulater run smoothly an follow the tut! i love this! There is so much to learn..
I love your work man. I was mainly active on the ST as a member of TEX and I agree with the legacy. I'm still in touch with quite a few demo sceners from over 30 years ago. Fond memories.
WOW! you just gave me goosebumps ! I was a demo-scene coder from 1988 to 1992 on C64 and Amiga (groups: Daniax, Cheyens, Goonies 2041 and Direct). These years is still defining who I am today. I was away from programming for 15 years, but the skills and mindset I learned back then enabled me to return to the video games industri where I have been working the last 14 years. I tell everybody that I essentially live of the stuff I taught myself on my C64 and Amiga 500 in my teenage years. For the last 6 months I have begun to code demo effects again - because it just feels right :)
I was also a demo-scene coder/swapper/etc on the C64 from 86 to 91.. I met Lars from Goonies at a friends house back then. Cool guy :) And i agree. The C64 gave me a deep foundation and mindset i still use to this day as a devops/sysadmin. I actually think i learned more coding and playing around with the C64 than i did at any school/computer course ever since..
We participated in the demo contest on the party 1992 as well, and although our demo ended 10th place, the experience of seeing that Spaceballs demo blow the audience away in that compo was a truly epic and unforgettable moment. As with the other comments, the legacy of the Amiga demo scene is still a part of my daily life. ❤️
My older brother was a swapper back in the day, so I grew up on all those demos; State of the Art, 9 Fingers, Desert Dreams, and who can forget the Budbrain megademos😂If there's anything that can get my nostalgia juices flowing, it's Amiga demos and diskmags 😄
Programmers the world over should pay close attention to the demoscene, regardless of the platform they're working on. They the kings of creative optimisation, and always on the bleeding edge of cool
For me the peak of the Amiga demoscene was between 89-95. That was an incredible journey from the likes of RSI megademo, mental hangover by scoopex, diskmags, music disks, and later on blockbuster productions such as demos by the black lotus 😊
one of the best times ever. the demo scene and cracking scene at the time was incredible. so many late hours. and the robotics modems hooked to our amigas to share everything with each other.
How cool and how difficult still is to explain that, in the late 80s and early 90s, besides Radio, Vinyl, Tape and CD, I actually used another line in my Hi-Fi Amp... AMIGA line in! Just insert the floppy disk, instant music videos, some with great tunes. But again, try telling that to some people... I just turned 50, and when people do realize that we are talking about a time when most IBM PCs was still black&white and mostly mute, than some give in and scratch their heads. Cheers from 🇵🇹
I still get blank looks to this day when I get asked at work or wherever by new faces, what my favourite music is. I try hard to explain that it's still mostly the old .mod tracker music and .it tracker music. I even list ModArchive and my old fav musician (Reactor Grits - PC) but still the blank faces, still a week later no comment like "oh I checked it out, wow" Oh well, I still enjoy my Amiga and PC tracker music and to me it's like others replay Pink Floyd or David Bowe, and I know somewhere out there there are others (ie above and below :)
Seeing the original footage used for the 9 fingers demo is adorable. Those ladies had some moves, but I was around in the mid 90s (and in fact made some fairly well received .Mods) and people who dressed like that were not the types I expected to start throwing hands 😂
I always wondered what music they were actually dancing to, and seeing the footage with 2 Ulimited actually surprised me not as much as I thought since they were an "agreeable" dance project both over- and underground could relate at least a little bit :D
I witnessed both _State of the Art_ and _EON_ as part of the audience when they were first shown on the respective parties. I remember being fascinated and annoyed at the same time when _State of the Art_ came up, as this was almost exactly the demo I had in mind for our group back then and had tried to persuade our coders to execute such a concept. Interestingly, _State of the Art_ and _EON_ are very similar technically, as both are mostly vector animation players. The 1991 Amiga game _Another World_ already showcased the aesthetic possibilities quite well. A great challenge we needed to solve was the vectorization of video footage. Digitizing analog video already was not easy. I had a DigiView Gold digitizer which could only digitize still frames in slow scan and each RGB component separately (with additional RGB splitter hardware). This was the kind of equipment available for guys like us at the time. Now once you have a sequence of digitized video frames on the Amiga, which approach should be taken to generate vector data out of them? That's more tricky than it might appear, especially considering the hardware limitations. And there was no off-the-shelf software you could really use for that. You had to write your own. So what Spaceballs did was quite impressive. It was pioneering a different type of demo, where most of the coding effort is not spent on realtime effects, but on offline automatic preprocessing of data, which is then "played" at runtime. Later demos like _EON_ take this to another level, made in an era of cross-development, where the production process happens on much more powerful modern PCs instead of the target platform itself.
You got yourself a new yt channel there. Explain in-depth and how a single demo effect works and alle the work that is needed to make it possible. I would totally watch every single episode.
Still listen to the Enigma demo music to this day. I play the piano now because of the great music of the Amiga. Turrican II, Impossamole, First Samurai, Shadow of the Beast, Twintris, Lotus Esprit II, 4mats Madness, Benifactor (CD32), Harlequin, Speedball II. Good times. Did you know that VLC can play mods files?
I got my amiga stood up on my steam deck recently and was transported back to my childhood, I played through almost all the games I remember being obsessed with back then, watching this filled me with joy :)
I made my first demo in the mid 80s, 84 or 85, and as Steel (a fellow groupmate in Brainstorm) says, you never quit, and I haven't. That said, I have been more active in the C64 and PC scenes, though I am now mostly targeting the Mega65 (some guys from TRSI and Fairlight took the Commodore 65 prototype and made it into a real computer). This is THE demosceners' computer, IMO... made by sceners, and for sceners. As you say, it's an art form, and it is a very satisfying one at that. My tongue-in-cheek explanation for the demoscene is "It's a competitive, team-based art form... like football." It's certainly one of the few places where even the code is art. Oh, and my obligatory "you forgot this one:" "Hunt for 7th October" by Cryptoburners. The soundtrack, "Klisje Paa Klisje," was and still is brilliant, and that opening landscape flyby was just SO COOL.
One or two of these females won some disco dancing competition on NRK, National Norwegian TV before this. I heard about this in 1993 when the demo released. There were a myth that some rich parents sponsored motion capturing for this, but this is not true. I spoke to one of those who made "State of the Art" a few years ago.
I'll never forget how awestruck I was when I watched State of the Art on my poor old A500 - I couldn't believe this hardware was capable of handling such a production (I knew nothing of how it was actually achieved). Very fond memories of watching demos in the early 1990!
Black Lotus latest demos are pure computer art. It still runs on Amiga hardware that came out in the mid 80s. Thanks for making videos like this... Keep the history alive girl!
I used the amgia demos in order to prove to my PC friends that the Amiga was a very powerful system, I do remember a Demo running on a 060 machine at my highschool hooked up to a projector. The demo blew my friends mind.
Yes, and how sad it was when pc suddenly was light-years ahead with doom 3D.. The Amiga was in just a little moment totally left in the dust, like obsolete or something.
I went from Amiga 500 to a A1200 that then turned into a Tower system, Blizzard 1260 with SCSI controller, 256MB Fast RAM, Mediator PCI with a Sooundblaster 128, RTL Networkcard and, of course, a Voodoo 3 3000 with 16MB of VRAM. I was involved in the Demoscene as a musician, but the system I had allowed me to really dig deep into 3D animation with tools like Imagine, LightWave 3D, Cinema 4D, ImageFX and Scala MM300. I've been working within the games industry now for over 16 years, mostly working on pre-rendered and in-engine cutscenes. :) For me the most interesting part of the Amiga demoscene was when people started doing things with AGA+accelerator cards, such as the Blizzard 1230, 1240 and 1260. I think one of the most impressive ones of those is one of Potions demos... Planet Potion. It did require a PPC accelerator card though, but it was a 64k demo that felt like it was a BIG demo. And for 68k+AGA they released a 64k intro called Gift which is almost 10 minutes long and heavily optimized for 68060.
Hello from Melb OZ! Thanks so much for going into the demos! I have still have a box full of 3.5” disks of demos. Sometimes I still have these tunes in my head. Great work with your channel!
Only one box full? I have at least 3 boxes full if I would put them in boxes. They are however in a fully automated storage system I build my self from scratch. There are 317 disk in there only demo. It also contains the Amiga magazine all episodes with all kinda software on them including demos. The system can hold 600 disk total and has room left for 37 disks. Games and apps are on the rest.
Great video! Since The Party was in December, the demo (9 Fingers) was made in the months preceding it - and the video footage was shot probably in October - in the cold Norway. I wonder why they didn't do it in a studio or something... However it would have been interesting to note that State of the Art was clearly inspired (and animations ripped from) the music video for Don't You Want Me by Felix, released just months earlier.
I think they shot the 9 Fingers footage outside on a hill to have a nearly white background to make rotoscoping easier. Doing that inside would require lots of light.
I used to love the Enigma demo! Also, anything by The Silents, (Ice Demo, Global Trash, Hardwired). The X-Ray Megademo was good, and don't forget BudBrains! I mainly grew up on C64 demos until around 1989 though, so I have a soft spot for those. PC Demos are great too starting in the late DOS era (Future Crew, Triton, etc. on up to now. All of the current day scene parties are putting out cool productions still, even on older machines like the 64 and Amiga.) I had an A500 with Fatter Agnus chip, and 1MB memory :D Later a friend of mine gave me an A2000, but I didn't really use it. My cousin had a hugely expanded A1200. Now I do all of my Amiga-ing on my MiSTer FPGA.
Loved this vid. I was a A500+ teen and I always had friends around to show off the latest PD demos. Even the tracks that were made using pro tracker were brilliant. To this day amigas are still being used to create tunes (Pete cannon and the one and only HOFFMAN). Hoffman did the music for the black lotus demo I believe. You can check out a vid on retro cave where Hoffman does a dj mix using 2 A600!!! I recently got a PI400 and installed PIMIGA onto a usb stick and relived my youth lol. And not to mention the hours of arguments had about what was better Amiga or Atari st (the only argument was the ST had midi ports and cubase)😅
how amiga could lose the race against PC or even Apple is just beyond me. We were so ahead of all the other computers and their scenes ...but there you go. Thx 4 keepin' the amiga spirit alive.
The Amiga Demoscene is ALIVE and WELL to this day, and has produced tons of content, and I have a lot of it, 842 demos in fact, in my own collection. The Amiga is impressive on stock A500 and A1200 hardware, but with AGA, faster processors, hard disks and much more memory, the sky's the absolute limit! I use WinUAE emulator as I just don't have the money or space for real hardware, and it works just as well, and I even developed my own PC-based launcher for these demos and others in the Demoscene!
Please keep with the demoscene 😁 so many great demos on the Amiga, what I loved the most was the music!! that Enigma megademo wow so punchy. First demo we got was Red Sector demos, check them out!
Its always nice to see the amiga still getting leases of life even to this day, as a developer on many platforms back in the day with both Atari ST and AMIGA being my favorites' but I cannot help but include the 8 bit era mainly the 6502 based Commodore 64 which had a lot to offer the demo scene back then too .. I was lucky enough to own amiga's and STs back then as I was programming for software houses back in the day.. long live 8 & 16 bit .. A lot of programmers made it rich through there skills on these systems.. made then what they are today.. Ive not wrote code on 16 bit machines since 2000s but can still have a lot of good memories on how far we could push the hardware back then especially the graphics and audio chips, now they can push the limits even further with raspberry pi and extender boards that just blow my mind on what I could do with these systems today.. The stuff we could do now .. i wish i could take back to that time.. My first Amiga cost me £499.99 with 1MB ram .. oh what fun..
The Tech Tech Demo really set the scene back in '87 (?) for me - "THE" iconic multipart "Megademo" (way before we called it like that) impressed the teenager that I was so profoundly that I also started coding in assembler shortly after. I never reached the heights of Spaceballs / TRSI / Kefrens / The Silents / Melon and left the scene shortly after Desert Dream was released to "earn money" with what I've learned by then, but as was quoted in your video: You never leave, you're just on stand by :) Still lots of fond memories of that time!!! Demo or die!
Cracking video as usual Gemma, still to this day I put Jesus on E's on my Amiga when I tidy the bedroom it's a great tune also 242 by Fairlight & Virtual Dreams is another great demo
How can you skim over the surface without mentioning the duo, Kaktus & Mahoney? From the C64 scene, hit the Amiga with storm. Their productions had a very unique sense of humour and style that set them apart and I believe Mahoney is still active to this day.
State of The Art and 9 Fingers look so early 90s😄Never seen any of this before. Am I not the only one thinking some of these demos remind me of the old Windows PC screensavers? As I've said in the past, I'm learning so much from these Amiga videos
Wow, this video brought back a tons of childhood memories! I was part of the C64/Amiga demo/party scene. I haven’t seen these demos since then but all the parts and logos came back instantly. Great work, keep it up!! Scotex/Trias
I remember seeing these for the first time in the early 90s. And I still have State of the Art, 9 Fingers and Phenomena on working floppies copied 30 years ago.
Extension by Pygmy Projects was the first demo I was given for my A600 and I was hooked. Following that CU Amiga CD Roms gave many hours of demo fun later on when I upgraded to a A1200!
My friend played an Ace of Base 'All That She Wants' demo for me. I still haven't forgotten how jealous I was. Even though I have the mother of all recording studios now. There was something so magical and mysterious about it. Cue the effects that try to emulate the Amiga's chip. This was fun.
We have soooo much power now, all the soft synths, the DAW advancements, yet there's something about these 90s years which was so incredible. Those limitations, iconic sound quality...it feels like something was lost.
I don't mean to be too critical of your video, but it's obvious that you don't really 'get' the demo scene at all. It was about reputation. I was a demo scene coder and did intros, cracktros and demos, quite a few of which you can find on here. It was about friendly competition and meeting other sceners. Unless you went to parties like I did, you'll never remember the joy of lugging a TV/Monitor around. From 1991, it was Anarchy and Digital parties, then The Party and The Gathering etc. Won a competition or two, got owned at others. In fact, I remember winning one party and was so glad that this other group didn't finish their demo in time because it was SO much better than mine. You showed State Of The Art and 9 Fingers, both of which are very reasonable demos, but you missed out on real classics. Digital Innovation, Punisher, Nexus 7, Day Of Reckoning, Cebit 90, Full Moon, Love, Boggledop, 242 and so many other scene defining demos. It's a good try, but it's hard to make a video about the scene and demos when you weren't part of the scene and didn't know what a party was like.
Oh this video brought back a LOT of memories. Thank you 🙏 ❤ I still remember the first A500 demos I saw and that I still love. Red Sector made some pretty awesome stuff. Anyone know „Megademo“? Decades later I even met one of their members at a retrocomputer party.
Loved the demoscene and how it progressed from the A500 through to AGA on the A1200. The visual art always amazed me. There was a little program which non coders could use to create simple demos called RSI Demomaker...oh the memories. Hats off to those who could code, especially in Assembler... The modern Demo scene on and off the Amiga still produces some amazing art work.
I was at the Party in 1992 with two friends of mine. I was very impressed by this demo. But not everyone liked it. The code was dissassembled and analyzed, and some thought it was 'too simplistic' to actually have a go at winning such a huge demo competition; What they missed to complement was it's genius visuals that was almost like a music video from MTV. Good times!
Nova party is still very active in South Devon and the big Revision is still happening. Groups like our SWAG is active with coders, artists and sound wizards, the Amiga is right back to where it was in 1990s
So did I miss it ... or did this video not actually talk about the two women who changed the Amiga demoscene? Who were these women, what did they do? Is she talking about the two dancers on Spaceballs?
thank you so, so much for drawing attention to them 🙏🙇 people have no idea that some of the most significant and influential people in computing history were women. From Lovelace to Rutkowska, from admiral Hopper to Hamilton, and these four are only the ones whose names i remember. True, true, very few are _interested_ in the whole "business" of programming... but these few that do... goddamn they're terrifyingly good
Few classics for me... the original Red Sector Incorporated Mega Demo - a truly great multipart demo... Rebels with their "Mega Competition Demo" - I particularly loved the part called "Subway" and was novel in having a menu to select the different parts... Scoopex Mental Hangover - great music IMHO... Silents/Crionics Hardwired - Nice design...
Think I was too young to really witness the demoscene. I remember getting a disc from The Works called "Mega Demos", thinking it was another great shareware compilation. Couldn't get any of the "games" to run XD. There was a picture of a rollercoaster demo on the back, which I believe was Toasted by Cubic Team.
I remember the first cracktro I saw on my Amiga 1000 ... I don’t even know what game it was attached to, but It was a simple hacked image of the Kickstart hand by BAmiga / The Kent Team playing a digitized loop of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law”. I’ve never seen that intro ever again, but it floored me back in 86.
State of the art is my all time favourite Amiga demo and I remember downloading it from a BBS in the US with a US Robotics modem. I do miss the good old BBS times.
I still remember how State Of The Art demo was a good test for speed of calculation between diffrent Amigas, and as i moved from A600 to A600 with upgrade card and later A1200 later turned into A1200 Power PC it was always the best visible on State Of The Art demo.
I have been an ATARI fanboy since 1990 and a member of the demoscene since 1994 and while AMIGA and ATARI used to be rivals back then today I enjoy watching new demos on both platforms or even older machines as the root of the demoscene lies in the motto "breaking the limits".
Me and a friend sat and made a demo in demomaker that his brother who was older and worked at a local electronics shop had running on one of their televisions during business hours. It felt so cool seeing our own demo running even if it was just locally. Other than that, I was more into gaming on the Amiga rather than demos but i dabbled a little bit
I just love TBL - EON, I can watch it again, and again, and again with my A500. The art, music, and it's all made on a machine which was released in 1985. At the time I was using MSX, and later PC with MDA -> Hercules -> CGA...
Tech Tech demo was the fist one on the Amiga I saw, also, DOC Demons Are Forever demo, etc etc. Still enjoy it all now, but remember all the BBS'ses, trading, swapping etc. Went to the Quartex Slipstream Mathem party in 1990? Happy days, and they still are. It's great that you find some of your own releases in the TOSEC set etc.
I remember this demo like it was released yesterday and really miss those old days. Trading disk in the mail with new fresh demos and games on it. Turrican/LSD/Addonic
Ah, I remember all those demos, and so miss the 90s. I sold my Amiga 1200 in the late 90s too, biggest mistake I made back in the day as they are so hard to get gold of now. I've been considering getting an A1200 again, but the prices are crazy today. Super video though.
A1200 now around 200 Euro for a good function one. You might wanna recap it when it comes in though just to be certain which will add about another 50 Euro. Try getting an A4000. Now that are crazy prices. Luckily I did not sell my Amiga's and are the proud owner of an A1200 in original state, an A2000 in original state bridged with a 486 Cyrix and a pimped A2000 (PPC accelerated) which is about 80 times faster than stock but not AGA compatible (that will be the next hurdle to take).
wow I never knew that my fave amiga demo of all time, the brilliant Enigma demo by Phenomena was released on my birthday kewl. still own 4 amigas to this day.
Im an Atari demo guy (Im still active) but if we are talking Amiga, Enigma ofc, but a few of the bigger one's for me was Tecnological death from Mad Elks and Human target from Melon. Inspired me in my future works and it can be seen in the productions im involved in. Design over techinques every time. :) The lines between diffrent computers have sort of blurred and many people do demos for whatever oldschool platform holds their fancy at the moment.
Great channel, great video :) I was democene coder and little of swapper at Amiga in years 1993-199 (Kors/Blast/Alex of Obsession), mosty disk magaizne and intros... This time - was the best time of my life. To be true - I left all of this because I couldn't find girlfriend (I was probably pretty boring for them this days and also for my male friends - talking about scroll on Blitter that I did day before)... I still regret leaving demoscene and the way I did it (just left without any explanation and disc back to my swap friends)...
I watched demos on my Amiga 500 with GVP HD8+ sidecar and Commodore 1084S monitor. It was an amazing system at the time, and I really miss it. I eventually sold it to buy a 486 PC.
State of the Art. Stellar Darkroom and TBL Captured Dreams. those sticks hard to my brain even today .( as for games I must say cannon fodder , syndicate war and the Settlers) I'm so glad I got to experience the Amiga scene, and ( allthough only 1 time ) went to the gathering ( 97)
They have done a great job and it was absolutely stunning 🥰 I was there at „the party 2“ back in 1992 and felt it and may be the original disk is still working 😊but they did not really changed the Amiga Demoscene. IMHO the switch from mega-demo style to the sophisticated designed multi-part demos changed the entire style of the demos. How ever, thanks for your contribution that keeps Demoscene alive. 👍
Impressive stuff all of it, made me remember everything about my teenage years! Something I do not remember is who made the chip cracktro tune for Pinball Dreams (I think), probably Fairlight something, and my best friend had ripped it and called it Hyper Pinknukepale, but I dont it was the actual name of the song. Its the crack where you can add unlimited balls and no drain in the game, if you remember (Hard to guess 🙂)
Thank you SO SO MUCH. I've been trying to find the module I loved back in the day ( from Human Target demo ). It was in my early days of owning my a1200. I've been looking for this for 20 years! :) EDIT haha, I nicked some of these samples for my own work :) I clearly remember some of them!
Remember the party enigma was released at. I’m the rules it was stated that there would not be any trackloaded entries. Just single file demos. In the end Phenomena convinced the judges to allow their entry and they won. Our demo came second place, but it was of course a single file demo. So I think morally we still won lol ;)
Compré esa demo cuando tenía 14 años... Esto me inició en el techno! Me tiraba horas viendo demos y escuchando el flipante sonido de mi Amiga 500... Ahora 30 años después escribo esto... ❤❤❤🎉
I was an active demoscene member in a famous group named Scoopex. Back in the days, we were looking at the scandinavian scene like they were from a different planet. Most of the talents were from there. People were sharing a common underground passion, made of very good creative vibes. Just think that most of these guys (and gals :)) were between 15 and 20 years old. At 15, we were able to code amazing routines in assembler langage ! Without internet/ code stealing, just with some books and hard work. Demoscene left some great legacy in my life and it's OK. I'm proud of this :)
I still love to return to many old Scoopex demos from time to time :)
i just found photons amiga tutorial. He was in your group, right? Spend the day yesterday to dig up some free kicksarts and workbenches, today, after some sleep i will make the emulater run smoothly an follow the tut! i love this! There is so much to learn..
I love your work man. I was mainly active on the ST as a member of TEX and I agree with the legacy. I'm still in touch with quite a few demo sceners from over 30 years ago. Fond memories.
honor to you! 👍
Huge respect to you and Scoopex. Thanks for the good times and mind expansion my friend
WOW! you just gave me goosebumps !
I was a demo-scene coder from 1988 to 1992 on C64 and Amiga (groups: Daniax, Cheyens, Goonies 2041 and Direct). These years is still defining who I am today. I was away from programming for 15 years, but the skills and mindset I learned back then enabled me to return to the video games industri where I have been working the last 14 years. I tell everybody that I essentially live of the stuff I taught myself on my C64 and Amiga 500 in my teenage years. For the last 6 months I have begun to code demo effects again - because it just feels right :)
I want to do music for demoscene :) Shout if I can help :)
I was also a demo-scene coder/swapper/etc on the C64 from 86 to 91.. I met Lars from Goonies at a friends house back then. Cool guy :)
And i agree. The C64 gave me a deep foundation and mindset i still use to this day as a devops/sysadmin. I actually think i learned more coding and playing around with the C64 than i did at any school/computer course ever since..
We participated in the demo contest on the party 1992 as well, and although our demo ended 10th place, the experience of seeing that Spaceballs demo blow the audience away in that compo was a truly epic and unforgettable moment.
As with the other comments, the legacy of the Amiga demo scene is still a part of my daily life. ❤️
Thanks for the nostalgic trip!
Rune Winsevik (aka Dark Helmet / Spaceballs)
Wait! The Rune Winsevik? No way!
Are you still in touch with the dancers? How are you? 😃
@@TheGebs24 A previous life, I'm afraid... Not active in the scene anymore. But love to take trips down the memory lane
My older brother was a swapper back in the day, so I grew up on all those demos; State of the Art, 9 Fingers, Desert Dreams, and who can forget the Budbrain megademos😂If there's anything that can get my nostalgia juices flowing, it's Amiga demos and diskmags 😄
Programmers the world over should pay close attention to the demoscene, regardless of the platform they're working on. They the kings of creative optimisation, and always on the bleeding edge of cool
For me the peak of the Amiga demoscene was between 89-95. That was an incredible journey from the likes of RSI megademo, mental hangover by scoopex, diskmags, music disks, and later on blockbuster productions such as demos by the black lotus 😊
The editor deserves props because these women look very stiff dancing. Edits made the video much better.
one of the best times ever. the demo scene and cracking scene at the time was incredible. so many late hours. and the robotics modems hooked to our amigas to share everything with each other.
How cool and how difficult still is to explain that, in the late 80s and early 90s, besides Radio, Vinyl, Tape and CD, I actually used another line in my Hi-Fi Amp...
AMIGA line in!
Just insert the floppy disk, instant music videos, some with great tunes.
But again, try telling that to some people... I just turned 50, and when people do realize that we are talking about a time when most IBM PCs was still black&white and mostly mute, than some give in and scratch their heads.
Cheers from 🇵🇹
I still get blank looks to this day when I get asked at work or wherever by new faces, what my favourite music is. I try hard to explain that it's still mostly the old .mod tracker music and .it tracker music. I even list ModArchive and my old fav musician (Reactor Grits - PC) but still the blank faces, still a week later no comment like "oh I checked it out, wow"
Oh well, I still enjoy my Amiga and PC tracker music and to me it's like others replay Pink Floyd or David Bowe, and I know somewhere out there there are others (ie above and below :)
Seeing the original footage used for the 9 fingers demo is adorable. Those ladies had some moves, but I was around in the mid 90s (and in fact made some fairly well received .Mods) and people who dressed like that were not the types I expected to start throwing hands 😂
I know right!! It took me back a little
They look a bit like stage or podium dancers. You can tell they know how to move the rest of their body while standing mostly still
I always wondered what music they were actually dancing to, and seeing the footage with 2 Ulimited actually surprised me not as much as I thought since they were an "agreeable" dance project both over- and underground could relate at least a little bit :D
I witnessed both _State of the Art_ and _EON_ as part of the audience when they were first shown on the respective parties. I remember being fascinated and annoyed at the same time when _State of the Art_ came up, as this was almost exactly the demo I had in mind for our group back then and had tried to persuade our coders to execute such a concept.
Interestingly, _State of the Art_ and _EON_ are very similar technically, as both are mostly vector animation players. The 1991 Amiga game _Another World_ already showcased the aesthetic possibilities quite well. A great challenge we needed to solve was the vectorization of video footage. Digitizing analog video already was not easy. I had a DigiView Gold digitizer which could only digitize still frames in slow scan and each RGB component separately (with additional RGB splitter hardware). This was the kind of equipment available for guys like us at the time. Now once you have a sequence of digitized video frames on the Amiga, which approach should be taken to generate vector data out of them? That's more tricky than it might appear, especially considering the hardware limitations. And there was no off-the-shelf software you could really use for that. You had to write your own. So what Spaceballs did was quite impressive. It was pioneering a different type of demo, where most of the coding effort is not spent on realtime effects, but on offline automatic preprocessing of data, which is then "played" at runtime. Later demos like _EON_ take this to another level, made in an era of cross-development, where the production process happens on much more powerful modern PCs instead of the target platform itself.
You got yourself a new yt channel there. Explain in-depth and how a single demo effect works and alle the work that is needed to make it possible. I would totally watch every single episode.
Still listen to the Enigma demo music to this day.
I play the piano now because of the great music of the Amiga. Turrican II, Impossamole, First Samurai, Shadow of the Beast, Twintris, Lotus Esprit II, 4mats Madness, Benifactor (CD32), Harlequin, Speedball II.
Good times.
Did you know that VLC can play mods files?
I got my amiga stood up on my steam deck recently and was transported back to my childhood, I played through almost all the games I remember being obsessed with back then, watching this filled me with joy :)
This made me quite emotional, so many feelings and nostalgia from my early Amiga days 💕🙏
This era defined my life, for me the perfect balance of hardware limitation versus creative possibility, still to this day
Thank you, recognition for them was long over due.
Thank you for being a part of a wonderful community 😃
That Eon demo is a piece of art, and impressive when you know how the hardware works
Truly amazing 🤩
@@TheGebs24 Try Hologon by The Electronic Knights.
I made my first demo in the mid 80s, 84 or 85, and as Steel (a fellow groupmate in Brainstorm) says, you never quit, and I haven't. That said, I have been more active in the C64 and PC scenes, though I am now mostly targeting the Mega65 (some guys from TRSI and Fairlight took the Commodore 65 prototype and made it into a real computer). This is THE demosceners' computer, IMO... made by sceners, and for sceners.
As you say, it's an art form, and it is a very satisfying one at that. My tongue-in-cheek explanation for the demoscene is "It's a competitive, team-based art form... like football." It's certainly one of the few places where even the code is art.
Oh, and my obligatory "you forgot this one:" "Hunt for 7th October" by Cryptoburners. The soundtrack, "Klisje Paa Klisje," was and still is brilliant, and that opening landscape flyby was just SO COOL.
One or two of these females won some disco dancing competition on NRK, National Norwegian TV before this. I heard about this in 1993 when the demo released.
There were a myth that some rich parents sponsored motion capturing for this, but this is not true. I spoke to one of those who made "State of the Art" a few years ago.
I'll never forget how awestruck I was when I watched State of the Art on my poor old A500 - I couldn't believe this hardware was capable of handling such a production (I knew nothing of how it was actually achieved). Very fond memories of watching demos in the early 1990!
Black Lotus latest demos are pure computer art. It still runs on Amiga hardware that came out in the mid 80s.
Thanks for making videos like this... Keep the history alive girl!
I used the amgia demos in order to prove to my PC friends that the Amiga was a very powerful system, I do remember a Demo running on a 060 machine at my highschool hooked up to a projector. The demo blew my friends mind.
There was also a PC Demo scene. I used to watch them in the mid 90s.
It amazes me to this day, the capabilities of the Amiga(s)
Yes, and how sad it was when pc suddenly was light-years ahead with doom 3D..
The Amiga was in just a little moment totally left in the dust, like obsolete or something.
Still haven't found the original sample for "Too nuch death, fight death!"
What a great demo Human Target is; timeless
nice! Connett circles at 6:00. Pickover's books were probably all the rage in those years. Fractals!
I went from Amiga 500 to a A1200 that then turned into a Tower system, Blizzard 1260 with SCSI controller, 256MB Fast RAM, Mediator PCI with a Sooundblaster 128, RTL Networkcard and, of course, a Voodoo 3 3000 with 16MB of VRAM.
I was involved in the Demoscene as a musician, but the system I had allowed me to really dig deep into 3D animation with tools like Imagine, LightWave 3D, Cinema 4D, ImageFX and Scala MM300. I've been working within the games industry now for over 16 years, mostly working on pre-rendered and in-engine cutscenes. :)
For me the most interesting part of the Amiga demoscene was when people started doing things with AGA+accelerator cards, such as the Blizzard 1230, 1240 and 1260. I think one of the most impressive ones of those is one of Potions demos... Planet Potion. It did require a PPC accelerator card though, but it was a 64k demo that felt like it was a BIG demo. And for 68k+AGA they released a 64k intro called Gift which is almost 10 minutes long and heavily optimized for 68060.
hol up
you could use soundblaster sc and voodoo 3d on an _amiga_ ?!
Had hoped from the title that there was a bit more of a story to this. Nice to see a few Amiga demos I had forgotten about though, thank you!
I remember the early Spaceballs demo, another called 'Total Kaos' and 'Jesus on E's'. Class.
Hello from Melb OZ! Thanks so much for going into the demos! I have still have a box full of 3.5” disks of demos.
Sometimes I still have these tunes in my head.
Great work with your channel!
Hello to lovely Australia 🇦🇺 ❤️
Only one box full? I have at least 3 boxes full if I would put them in boxes. They are however in a fully automated storage system I build my self from scratch. There are 317 disk in there only demo. It also contains the Amiga magazine all episodes with all kinda software on them including demos. The system can hold 600 disk total and has room left for 37 disks. Games and apps are on the rest.
Great video! Since The Party was in December, the demo (9 Fingers) was made in the months preceding it - and the video footage was shot probably in October - in the cold Norway. I wonder why they didn't do it in a studio or something... However it would have been interesting to note that State of the Art was clearly inspired (and animations ripped from) the music video for Don't You Want Me by Felix, released just months earlier.
I think they shot the 9 Fingers footage outside on a hill to have a nearly white background to make rotoscoping easier. Doing that inside would require lots of light.
I used to love the Enigma demo! Also, anything by The Silents, (Ice Demo, Global Trash, Hardwired). The X-Ray Megademo was good, and don't forget BudBrains! I mainly grew up on C64 demos until around 1989 though, so I have a soft spot for those. PC Demos are great too starting in the late DOS era (Future Crew, Triton, etc. on up to now. All of the current day scene parties are putting out cool productions still, even on older machines like the 64 and Amiga.) I had an A500 with Fatter Agnus chip, and 1MB memory :D Later a friend of mine gave me an A2000, but I didn't really use it. My cousin had a hugely expanded A1200. Now I do all of my Amiga-ing on my MiSTer FPGA.
Loved this vid. I was a A500+ teen and I always had friends around to show off the latest PD demos. Even the tracks that were made using pro tracker were brilliant. To this day amigas are still being used to create tunes (Pete cannon and the one and only HOFFMAN). Hoffman did the music for the black lotus demo I believe. You can check out a vid on retro cave where Hoffman does a dj mix using 2 A600!!! I recently got a PI400 and installed PIMIGA onto a usb stick and relived my youth lol. And not to mention the hours of arguments had about what was better Amiga or Atari st (the only argument was the ST had midi ports and cubase)😅
how amiga could lose the race against PC or even Apple is just beyond me. We were so ahead of all the other computers and their scenes ...but there you go. Thx 4 keepin' the amiga spirit alive.
You’re welcome. I have another Amiga episode dropping this week 😃
The Amiga Demoscene is ALIVE and WELL to this day, and has produced tons of content, and I have a lot of it, 842 demos in fact, in my own collection. The Amiga is impressive on stock A500 and A1200 hardware, but with AGA, faster processors, hard disks and much more memory, the sky's the absolute limit! I use WinUAE emulator as I just don't have the money or space for real hardware, and it works just as well, and I even developed my own PC-based launcher for these demos and others in the Demoscene!
Please keep with the demoscene 😁 so many great demos on the Amiga, what I loved the most was the music!! that Enigma megademo wow so punchy. First demo we got was Red Sector demos, check them out!
Its always nice to see the amiga still getting leases of life even to this day, as a developer on many platforms back in the day with both Atari ST and AMIGA being my favorites' but I cannot help but include the 8 bit era mainly the 6502 based Commodore 64 which had a lot to offer the demo scene back then too .. I was lucky enough to own amiga's and STs back then as I was programming for software houses back in the day.. long live 8 & 16 bit .. A lot of programmers made it rich through there skills on these systems.. made then what they are today.. Ive not wrote code on 16 bit machines since 2000s but can still have a lot of good memories on how far we could push the hardware back then especially the graphics and audio chips, now they can push the limits even further with raspberry pi and extender boards that just blow my mind on what I could do with these systems today.. The stuff we could do now .. i wish i could take back to that time.. My first Amiga cost me £499.99 with 1MB ram .. oh what fun..
The Tech Tech Demo really set the scene back in '87 (?) for me - "THE" iconic multipart "Megademo" (way before we called it like that) impressed the teenager that I was so profoundly that I also started coding in assembler shortly after. I never reached the heights of Spaceballs / TRSI / Kefrens / The Silents / Melon and left the scene shortly after Desert Dream was released to "earn money" with what I've learned by then, but as was quoted in your video: You never leave, you're just on stand by :) Still lots of fond memories of that time!!! Demo or die!
Quite a few goosebump moments for nostalgia hits. Born in 1975, might explain it 😍
Cracking video as usual Gemma, still to this day I put Jesus on E's on my Amiga when I tidy the bedroom it's a great tune also 242 by Fairlight & Virtual Dreams is another great demo
Sadly, no Amiga here anymore, but I still occasionally bung on Jesus on E’s on UA-cam. Absolute classic!
It truly amazes me what the demoscene is capable of. Great video!
How can you skim over the surface without mentioning the duo, Kaktus & Mahoney? From the C64 scene, hit the Amiga with storm. Their productions had a very unique sense of humour and style that set them apart and I believe Mahoney is still active to this day.
They had some fame for their music & noisetracker, but were not really known for Amiga demos...
never thought, i had the chance to see the original footage for this demo, just wow and thx for the sharing
unfortunately I was in the rival "ST" camp but the ST demo that blew me away was Mindbomb
Nice Video. I like that you included also newer Demos not only the Classics.
State of The Art and 9 Fingers look so early 90s😄Never seen any of this before. Am I not the only one thinking some of these demos remind me of the old Windows PC screensavers? As I've said in the past, I'm learning so much from these Amiga videos
Wow, this video brought back a tons of childhood memories! I was part of the C64/Amiga demo/party scene. I haven’t seen these demos since then but all the parts and logos came back instantly. Great work, keep it up!!
Scotex/Trias
Desert Dream, a trully masterpiece! Budbrains Megademo is awesome!
I remember seeing these for the first time in the early 90s. And I still have State of the Art, 9 Fingers and Phenomena on working floppies copied 30 years ago.
i ran an amiga bulletin board for a few years called skullmonkey bbs , great fun still have the files etc some where
Pure Retro! I love everything about this video!!
Thanks Reecey ⭐️❤️
Extension by Pygmy Projects was the first demo I was given for my A600 and I was hooked. Following that CU Amiga CD Roms gave many hours of demo fun later on when I upgraded to a A1200!
My friend played an Ace of Base 'All That She Wants' demo for me. I still haven't forgotten how jealous I was. Even though I have the mother of all recording studios now. There was something so magical and mysterious about it. Cue the effects that try to emulate the Amiga's chip. This was fun.
Kefren's Desert Dream had a homage to the Ace of Base song I think.
You don't happen to mean the effects that try to emulate the C64 SID chip?
We have soooo much power now, all the soft synths, the DAW advancements, yet there's something about these 90s years which was so incredible. Those limitations, iconic sound quality...it feels like something was lost.
The "Nicelady" demo was something and definitely memorable.
At the beginning, there was the Amiga, then came Second Reality from Future Crew and the DEMO scene switched to the PC.
Back in Christmas 1989 the boing ball demo convinced me to buy an Amiga 500 and not an Atari ST. 4 months later I bought my Rock Lobster 🙂
I don't mean to be too critical of your video, but it's obvious that you don't really 'get' the demo scene at all. It was about reputation.
I was a demo scene coder and did intros, cracktros and demos, quite a few of which you can find on here. It was about friendly competition and meeting other sceners. Unless you went to parties like I did, you'll never remember the joy of lugging a TV/Monitor around. From 1991, it was Anarchy and Digital parties, then The Party and The Gathering etc. Won a competition or two, got owned at others. In fact, I remember winning one party and was so glad that this other group didn't finish their demo in time because it was SO much better than mine.
You showed State Of The Art and 9 Fingers, both of which are very reasonable demos, but you missed out on real classics. Digital Innovation, Punisher, Nexus 7, Day Of Reckoning, Cebit 90, Full Moon, Love, Boggledop, 242 and so many other scene defining demos.
It's a good try, but it's hard to make a video about the scene and demos when you weren't part of the scene and didn't know what a party was like.
Oh this video brought back a LOT of memories. Thank you 🙏 ❤
I still remember the first A500 demos I saw and that I still love. Red Sector made some pretty awesome stuff. Anyone know „Megademo“? Decades later I even met one of their members at a retrocomputer party.
Loved the demoscene and how it progressed from the A500 through to AGA on the A1200.
The visual art always amazed me.
There was a little program which non coders could use to create simple demos called RSI Demomaker...oh the memories.
Hats off to those who could code, especially in Assembler...
The modern Demo scene on and off the Amiga still produces some amazing art work.
I had quite forgotten about these. Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Well done!!
I was at the Party in 1992 with two friends of mine. I was very impressed by this demo. But not everyone liked it. The code was dissassembled and analyzed, and some thought it was 'too simplistic' to actually have a go at winning such a huge demo competition; What they missed to complement was it's genius visuals that was almost like a music video from MTV.
Good times!
.. this brings back memories of nights fueled by caffeine, things that were Still Legal Back Then, and assembly.
Nova party is still very active in South Devon and the big Revision is still happening. Groups like our SWAG is active with coders, artists and sound wizards, the Amiga is right back to where it was in 1990s
So did I miss it ... or did this video not actually talk about the two women who changed the Amiga demoscene? Who were these women, what did they do? Is she talking about the two dancers on Spaceballs?
thank you so, so much for drawing attention to them 🙏🙇 people have no idea that some of the most significant and influential people in computing history were women. From Lovelace to Rutkowska, from admiral Hopper to Hamilton, and these four are only the ones whose names i remember. True, true, very few are _interested_ in the whole "business" of programming... but these few that do... goddamn they're terrifyingly good
In those days everyone was not afraid to let their hair down and get sweaty. Ravers where awesome!
Few classics for me... the original Red Sector Incorporated Mega Demo - a truly great multipart demo... Rebels with their "Mega Competition Demo" - I particularly loved the part called "Subway" and was novel in having a menu to select the different parts... Scoopex Mental Hangover - great music IMHO... Silents/Crionics Hardwired - Nice design...
Think I was too young to really witness the demoscene. I remember getting a disc from The Works called "Mega Demos", thinking it was another great shareware compilation. Couldn't get any of the "games" to run XD. There was a picture of a rollercoaster demo on the back, which I believe was Toasted by Cubic Team.
Great tune for your credits roll! All the best
I remember the first cracktro I saw on my Amiga 1000 ... I don’t even know what game it was attached to, but It was a simple hacked image of the Kickstart hand by BAmiga / The Kent Team playing a digitized loop of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law”. I’ve never seen that intro ever again, but it floored me back in 86.
I remember some 64k intro. It was very cool. Consisting horizontal and vertical blue lines crossing each other to make bright lights.
Fun fact: Paul/Lone Starr's vectorising algorithm was used to create the graphics for the SNES game Winter Gold developed by Funcom in 1994.
State of the art is my all time favourite Amiga demo and I remember downloading it from a BBS in the US with a US Robotics modem. I do miss the good old BBS times.
I danced a lot during the making of this video 😃
@@TheGebs24 Totally understandable., my feet starts moving every time I hear it. 😂
I still remember how State Of The Art demo was a good test for speed of calculation between diffrent Amigas, and as i moved from A600 to A600 with upgrade card and later A1200 later turned into A1200 Power PC it was always the best visible on State Of The Art demo.
I have been an ATARI fanboy since 1990 and a member of the demoscene since 1994 and while AMIGA and ATARI used to be rivals back then today I enjoy watching new demos on both platforms or even older machines as the root of the demoscene lies in the motto "breaking the limits".
bless those 2 women... without them we would not have even known about the Amiga demo-scene
The title is a bit misleading, this is a retrospective about Amiga demos in general, not about two democoder women in particular.
You read the title and made your own decision. I think with my heart Jim. It’s nostalgic ❤️
Haha wondeful. And a quote by Torben, now he will never shut up! Greetings from Dominei/Spaceballs.
Me and a friend sat and made a demo in demomaker that his brother who was older and worked at a local electronics shop had running on one of their televisions during business hours. It felt so cool seeing our own demo running even if it was just locally.
Other than that, I was more into gaming on the Amiga rather than demos but i dabbled a little bit
I just love TBL - EON, I can watch it again, and again, and again with my A500. The art, music, and it's all made on a machine which was released in 1985. At the time I was using MSX, and later PC with MDA -> Hercules -> CGA...
Nice! You should do a mod music review too: Beyond Music by Captain immediately comes to mind as one of my favorites.
2 unlimited tribal dance, now youre talking, i miss the clothes of the 90s. So much denim lol. wicked video though, pure nostalgic rave vibes
Tech Tech demo was the fist one on the Amiga I saw, also, DOC Demons Are Forever demo, etc etc. Still enjoy it all now, but remember all the BBS'ses, trading, swapping etc. Went to the Quartex Slipstream Mathem party in 1990? Happy days, and they still are. It's great that you find some of your own releases in the TOSEC set etc.
I remember this demo like it was released yesterday and really miss those old days. Trading disk in the mail with new fresh demos and games on it.
Turrican/LSD/Addonic
Thank You for bringing back memories :) ❤
Ah, I remember all those demos, and so miss the 90s. I sold my Amiga 1200 in the late 90s too, biggest mistake I made back in the day as they are so hard to get gold of now. I've been considering getting an A1200 again, but the prices are crazy today.
Super video though.
A1200 now around 200 Euro for a good function one. You might wanna recap it when it comes in though just to be certain which will add about another 50 Euro. Try getting an A4000. Now that are crazy prices.
Luckily I did not sell my Amiga's and are the proud owner of an A1200 in original state, an A2000 in original state bridged with a 486 Cyrix and a pimped A2000 (PPC accelerated) which is about 80 times faster than stock but not AGA compatible (that will be the next hurdle to take).
Wild Copper was my all time favorite. Love the video!
wow I never knew that my fave amiga demo of all time, the brilliant Enigma demo by Phenomena was released on my birthday kewl. still own 4 amigas to this day.
Im an Atari demo guy (Im still active) but if we are talking Amiga, Enigma ofc, but a few of the bigger one's for me was Tecnological death from Mad Elks and Human target from Melon. Inspired me in my future works and it can be seen in the productions im involved in. Design over techinques every time. :) The lines between diffrent computers have sort of blurred and many people do demos for whatever oldschool platform holds their fancy at the moment.
Great channel, great video :) I was democene coder and little of swapper at Amiga in years 1993-199 (Kors/Blast/Alex of Obsession), mosty disk magaizne and intros... This time - was the best time of my life. To be true - I left all of this because I couldn't find girlfriend (I was probably pretty boring for them this days and also for my male friends - talking about scroll on Blitter that I did day before)... I still regret leaving demoscene and the way I did it (just left without any explanation and disc back to my swap friends)...
Great video - was also part of the Amiga scene coding many demoes ....
Very impressive what they've managed to do with Amiga on those demos! Unfortunately never have had any Amiga demos like these myself.
I watched demos on my Amiga 500 with GVP HD8+ sidecar and Commodore 1084S monitor. It was an amazing system at the time, and I really miss it. I eventually sold it to buy a 486 PC.
the first demo that made me say WOW was Scoopex Mental Hangover,, Friends back in the day with ST's just couldn't argue the ST was still the daddy.
State of the Art. Stellar Darkroom and TBL Captured Dreams. those sticks hard to my brain even today .( as for games I must say cannon fodder , syndicate war and the Settlers) I'm so glad I got to experience the Amiga scene, and ( allthough only 1 time ) went to the gathering ( 97)
They have done a great job and it was absolutely stunning 🥰 I was there at „the party 2“ back in 1992 and felt it and may be the original disk is still working 😊but they did not really changed the Amiga Demoscene. IMHO the switch from mega-demo style to the sophisticated designed multi-part demos changed the entire style of the demos. How ever, thanks for your contribution that keeps Demoscene alive. 👍
Impressive stuff all of it, made me remember everything about my teenage years! Something I do not remember is who made the chip cracktro tune for Pinball Dreams (I think), probably Fairlight something, and my best friend had ripped it and called it Hyper Pinknukepale, but I dont it was the actual name of the song. Its the crack where you can add unlimited balls and no drain in the game, if you remember (Hard to guess 🙂)
Thank you SO SO MUCH. I've been trying to find the module I loved back in the day ( from Human Target demo ). It was in my early days of owning my a1200. I've been looking for this for 20 years! :) EDIT haha, I nicked some of these samples for my own work :) I clearly remember some of them!
It was basically an Amiga versio of Do That Dance by The Project.
I never knew that, superb thanks.@@tubeMonger
Remember the party enigma was released at. I’m the rules it was stated that there would not be any trackloaded entries. Just single file demos. In the end Phenomena convinced the judges to allow their entry and they won. Our demo came second place, but it was of course a single file demo. So I think morally we still won lol ;)
Hmmm, Budbrain demos. Kaos (BB1) and It Began in Africa (BB2).
Compré esa demo cuando tenía 14 años... Esto me inició en el techno! Me tiraba horas viendo demos y escuchando el flipante sonido de mi Amiga 500... Ahora 30 años después escribo esto... ❤❤❤🎉