Some of you visiting here will have no idea of the complications and limitations of computers during the late 80s and early 90s. You have grown up in an environment where everything seems possible. 2D graphics are the stuff of legend, 3D is the only way.
I am grateful that I grew up during what would now be deemed the simpler times. You can throw modern game after game at me, modern music video after music video and modern film after film. But in the era of Playstations and Xboxes, CGI movies where everything is now possible in pretty much realistic graphical and artist form, the age of sheer amazement is long gone.
The Amiga lived during a time before the internet was even known to exist, a time when BBS systems were the way that Public Domain software and Shareware were distributed. When PD librairies were places that you could order from if you didn't have access to a modem or the finances to pay by the minute for that modem connection. During the Amiga era a large following of talented programmers, musicians and artists learnt the ins and outs of the hardware to exploit it.
The Amiga hardware lasted a long time, it didn't last 6-12 months before it was updated, we are talking almost a decade without a major overhaul. The demo scene was really a bragging rights movement from various crews, who would put together what are effectively music videos. The difference with these is that they were all real time, the routines you see were not pre-rendered animations, the processor and sound chips were doing all the work as you see it on-screen.
Over the coming weeks I will be racking my brain to remember the names of the best demos that came from that scene and present them here. The ones that were most impressive and even have a lasting effect on me today. So here is the demo that got me thinking. State of the Art from the Spaceballs wouldn't have been out of place on MTV in the early 90s. The graphics and the music were and still are amazing. Being a fellow Soundtracker and OctaMED musician myself I can respect the work that must have gone into the music. So without further delay, head below to see what all the fuss was about when this little baby came along.
Visit here for the next entry in the Amiga demo scene selection.
Saturday, 28 June 2008
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8 comments:
Brings back some brilliant memories of that time and the Amiga demo scene.
It's still around by the looks of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W8VLNMr50o&feature=related
Released in '06
Obtain this DVD.
http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
I don't know what the intent of this article is, or who the target audience is, but perhaps you should do a bit more research. first, it would give you a bigger, better article with more links to more demos, but it would hopefully also correct the fallacy that Amiga hardware lasted a decade with no major overhaul. Yes the Amiga 500 was still for sale for a decade, but the 2000, 3000, 4000's and the 600/1200's all introduced new CPUs, new memory limits, new core chipsets, new ROMs including several OS revisions.
Maybe you're thinking of the C64 which stayed static for a decade?
respect for mentioning the amiga, but I don't know what you're trying to tell us.
I love the idea that you believe no major overhaul of the Amiga hardware is a fallacy. The basic chipset that made the Amiga the Amiga can be defined by OCS, ECS and AGA. We are not talking memory or processors, memory and the 68000 series processors were available in other systems besides the Amiga.
It was the Amiga chipset that made the Amiga the Amiga and what it was capable of. The AAA chipset that would have been the major overhaul of the system was cancelled and never arrived. AGA was described as an incremental upgrade and hardly the major overall the AAA would have provided.
The fact also remains that the A500 was the most successful Amiga. It was the machine that had to be developed for near enough a decade. Most of the Demos that came during the actual life of the Amiga before the demise of Commodore in 1994 was based around support for the older systems too. It was Commodore's failure to deliver the ground breaking advancement to the Amiga hardware that ultimately ended in their liquidation. Instead they decided to risk it all on the CD32 and look how that turned out.
And while we are on the subject, even Paula the soundchip fell behind the times, with it's 4 channels and 8bit sound, 14 if you ran with just two channels and software mixing. The PCs had 16bit soundcards.
So do you still think the Amiga hardware had a major overhaul?
Awesome, keep the suggestions coming please. I know tekhammer seems to have taken great offence to the article, but I wanted to get some suggestions and will be providing some of my own favourites over the coming weeks. State of the Art was just the first of many to come.
Kefrens - Desert Dreams.
Oh god yes, Kefrens - Desert Dreams is certainly one on my list.
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