A "demo" is a demonstration of the multimedia capabilities of a computer (or more to the point, a demonstration of the skill of the demo's constructors). There was intense rivalry during the 1990s among the best programmers, graphic artists and computer musicians to continually outdo each other's demos. Since the Amiga's hardware was more or less fixed (unlike today's PC industry, where arbitrary combinations of hardware can be put together), there was competition to test the limits of that hardware and perform theoretically "impossible" feats by refactoring the problem at hand. In Europe the Amiga was the undisputed leader of mainstream multimedia computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, though it was eventually overtaken by PC architecture.
Some Amiga demos, such as the RSI Megademo, Kefrens Megademo VIII or Crionics & The Silents "Hardwired" are considered seminal works in the demo field.[citation needed] New Amiga demos are released even today, although the demo scene has firmly moved onto PC hardware. Many Amiga game developers were active in the demo scene.
The demo scene spearheaded development in multimedia programming techniques for the Amiga, such that it was de rigueur for the latest visual tricks, soundtrackers and 3D algorithms from the demo scene to end up being used in computer game development.
Demo software
Most demos were written in 68000assembly language, although a few were written in C and other languages. To utilize full hardware performance, Amiga demos were optimized and written entirely for one purpose in assembly (avoiding generic and portable code). Additional performance was achieved by utilizing several coprocessors, including a blitter, in parallel with the 68000. Most demos bypassed the operating system and addressed the hardware directly.
First bigger demos were released in 1987, one of them was "Tech Tech" by Sodan & Magician 42, it was released in November 1987 and is considered a classic by many.[who?]
Eric Schwartz produced a series of animated demos that ran with MoviePlayer, an animation software package similar to Toon Boom. The animated demos drew heavily on the whimsy and graphic style of comic strips.
Red Sector Incorporated produced a piece of software called the RSI Demomaker, which allowed users to script their own demos, replete with scrolltext, vectorballs, plasma screens, etc.
Full demos range from under 128 KB to several megabytes. There have been several thousand demos produced in many countries. Some active demo countries were Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK, Poland and others.
Intros
Smaller demos are often known as intros. They are typically limited to between 4 and 64KB in size. Intros were originally used as tags by cracking groups on computer games and other software. The purpose of the intro was to advertise cracking and distribution skill of a particular group. Later it developed into a stand-alone art form. Many demo and intro groups disassociated themselves from the cracking and copying scene, although the same people could still be involved in it.
Ripping
The Amiga thrived on public domain, freeware and other not-for-profit development. The architecture provided no substantial mechanism for protecting software from inspection. In order to read the memory one simply performed a hot reset (which preserved the contents of RAM) and then booted to a dedicated floppy disk that could inspect and dump the memory's contents. It was therefore common for developers and hackers to "rip" music, graphics and code and then reuse it in their own productions. This led to intense competition in certain fields, for example, in the development of sound tracking software and Tetris clones, with each group of developers trying to outdo the current state of the art. In fact, some demos even featured their source code as part of the executable to save hackers the trouble of disassembly, though it came strewn with incendiary comments for those who would seek to improve on it.
Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 16/32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphics and audio compared to previous 8-bit systems. These systems include the Atari ST—released earlier the same year—as well as the Macintosh and Acorn Archimedes. Based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, the Amiga differs from its contemporaries through the inclusion of custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites and a blitter, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaOS.
AMOS BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language for the Amiga computer. Following on from the successful STOS BASIC for the Atari ST, AMOS BASIC was written for the Amiga by François Lionet with Constantin Sotiropoulos and published by Europress Software in 1990.
A crack intro, also known as a cracktro, loader, or just intro, is a small introduction sequence added to cracked software. It aims to inform the user which "cracking crew" or individual cracker removed the software's copy protection and distributed the crack.
Demogroups are teams of demosceners, who make computer based audio-visual works of art known as demos. Demogroups form a subculture collectively known as the demoscene.
The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills. Demos and other demoscene productions are shared, voted on and released online at festivals known as demoparties.
Future Crew was a Finnish demogroup that created PC demos and software, active mostly between 1987 and 1994.
The Assembly demoparty is a demoscene and gaming event in Finland. It is the biggest demoscene party. The main organizers of the event are Pekka Aakko and Jussi Laakkonen. The Summer event takes place every year between late July and early August, and lasts three to four days, and the Winter event is held in January or February. Edition 2020 was online. The most recent Assembly was held from 3 to 6 of August 2023 at Messukeskus in Helsinki.
The Commodore 64 (C64) demos are demonstrations of what can be done to push the limits of the Commodore 64 computer, made by programmers, musicians and artists.
Tristar and Red Sector Incorporated (TRSI) is a demogroup which formed in 1990. It came about from the longest-running cooperation in scene history. RSI existed from 1985, before being joined by the "T" later on. Evolving from the Commodore 64 to the Amiga and later to PC and various game console platforms - like the PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo - and set-ups like Arduino, Android or Blu-ray, TRSI released a number of digital productions, dedicated to experimenting in phreaking or network alteration. Its members were spread around the world and still contribute to computer scene art and code after more than 27 years of history.
The Humble Guys (THG) were a cracking group for the IBM PC during the late 1980s founded by two friends known by the pseudonyms Candyman and Fabulous Furlough. The group was also noticed in the demoscene for some of their cracktros.
The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is a worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups specializing in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media for free before their official sale date. The Scene distributes all forms of digital media, including computer games, movies, TV shows, music, and pornography. The Scene is meant to be hidden from the public, only being shared with those within the community. However, as files were commonly leaked outside the community and their popularity grew, some individuals from The Scene began leaking files and uploading them to filehosts, torrents and ed2k.
STOS BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language for the Atari ST personal computer. It was designed for creating games, but the set of high-level graphics and sound commands it offers is suitable for developing multimedia software without knowledge of the internals of the Atari ST.
Phase5 Digital Products is a defunct German computer hardware manufacturer that developed third-party hardware primarily for the Amiga platform. Their most popular products included CPU upgrade boards, SCSI controllers and graphics cards.
The demo effect is a name for computer-based real-time visual effects found in demos created by the demoscene.
Emerald Software was a video game publisher founded in 1988 by two UK entertainment executives – David Martin of Martech, and Mike Dixon who previously worked with EMI and worked as the company CEO.
WarpOS is a multitasking kernel for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture central processing unit (CPU) developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It runs on PowerUP accelerator boards developed by phase5 which contains both a Motorola 68000 series CPU and a PowerPC CPU with shared address space. WarpOS runs alongside the 68k-based AmigaOS, which can use the PowerPC as a coprocessor. Despite its name, it is not an operating system (OS), but a kernel; it supplies a limited set of functions similar to those in AmigaOS for using the PowerPC. When released, its original name was WarpUP, but was changed to reflect its greater feature set, and possibly to avoid comparison with its competitor, PowerUP.
The Amiga 1200, or A1200, is a personal computer in the Amiga computer family released by Commodore International, aimed at the home computer market. It was launched on October 21, 1992, at a base price of £399 in the United Kingdom and $599 in the United States.
Razor 1911 (RZR) is a warez and demogroup founded in Norway, 1985. It was the first ever such group to be initially founded exclusively as a demogroup, before moving into warez in 1987. According to the US Justice Department, Razor 1911 is the oldest software cracking group that is still active on the internet. Razor 1911 ran the diskmag 'Propaganda' until 1995.
Phenomena (PHA) was a Swedish Demogroup making Amiga demos that was productive during the formative years of the Amiga Demoscene founded in 1987.
The Exceptions were a German demo group formed in the 1980s. They were early pioneers writing demos for the Atari ST platform.
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