A couple of days ago, Backtothecode (please check out his blog here) pointed me towards a demo that was made for the Amstrad CPC. The demo is called Batman Forever and was made by Batman Group. I was completely amazed when I saw it for the first time, so I felt I had to share it with you as soon as possible. This production was released at the Forever 2011 demo party. Thanks to Backtothecode for the tip!
The requirements for this demo is an Amstrad CPC with 128 KB of memory and a floppy drive.
A video of the demo running is available on YouTube, but I’ve embedded it below for you. Enjoy the show!
Hope you all are enjoying the time of Christmas and that your preparations for Christmas Eve is going as planned.
Today I want to share another demo with you. Remember the one I wrote about a while ago that is called Future 1999 from Pers’ Wastaiset Produktiot (PwP)? If you enjoyed that one, you’re probably going to like this one too. It’s just as surreal and spooky..
Chances are that you’ll get a new perspective on Chess after watching the demo..
I’ve embedded a video from YouTube below, so that you can check it out for yourself. Enjoy the show! Hope to hear what you all think about this particular demo.
Miracle by IRIS in all its glory. Here is the main menu. Stylish and elegant interface (screenshot done by Old School Game Blog for Classicamiga.com)
Review of Miracle by IRIS for Amiga 1200/4000
Miracle was created by IRIS, a group with a long history on the Amiga. The crew came to life in the 1980′s and continued their activities up until the year 2009. They have been quiet since, but one never knows if they suddenly pops into the spotlight again with a new demo or not.
This diskmag, Miracle, was released in the year of 1996. The main editor of the magazine was MJ of IRIS, who had been active as a swapper for many years. It is therefore not strange that Miracle was aimed at this particular group of people, namely swappers. If we look at the content, it is clear that a lot of the stuff is of particular interest to that group. Still, it is an interesting read for everyone, as there is a wide variety of articles available for reading.
A ranking of the best swappers! (screenshot by Old School Game Blog for Classicamiga.com)
When looking at this magazine today, I’m amazed by the vast amount of swapper adverts and regular news that was included in the magazine. Hundreds and hundreds of people are present and this really shows how active the Scene was back in the middle of the 90′s. The section covering recent news about groups on the Scene is gigantic and it can be interesting to browse through to get a glimpse of what was going on back then. For those interested in the history of this sub-culture, you’ll find a ton of helpful information there. I enjoy browsing these sections for that, but also for nostalgic reasons.
The magazine does also contains charts/rankings of the best swappers at that time. People could send in votes and place their vote on their favorites.
As for the design of the magazine, I think it is quite nice. The panel/interface is both functional and good-looking. That makes it easy for the user to browse through the different sections and articles. The music playing in the background is atmospheric and cosy and fits the “image” of the magazine well. Not much can be said about the coding from a users standpoint, other than that the engine seems to be working as it should, and that is of course the most important thing.
Party report from The Gathering 1996 in Norway (screenshot by Old School Game Blog for Classicamiga.com)
All in all Miracle brings you back in time to the days where Amiga still was the most popular machine on the Scene. It has a lot of content which is fun to browse through, and the production is also stylish and elegant. It’s a shame IRIS never managed to release more issues of this mag. I remember there were plans for a second edition and that they worked their fingers to the bone to get it released. Sadly, issue two never saw the light of day. If it ever hits the street, it would be a miracle for sure.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day! You’ll find the download-link below.
Amiga music for headphones (screenshot by Old School Game Blog)
Good evening,
Must of us love music and we listen to various songs and tunes every day. It often happens that we have to listen through our headphones, for example at work or at home, so that we don’t disturb others. This is where Mr. Kuokka77’s YouTube channel comes in as a great alternative.
Kuokka77 has done a wonderful job of optimizing a vast amount of Amiga music (also C64 and PC) for use with headphones. When I first tried to listen to one of the tunes with my headset, I was hooked at once – the sound was so much better than normal! If I use the PC I very often visit his channel and select video of Hired Guns (legendary Amiga game). Please have a look at it below (and please use headphones!):
Wasn’t it great? Brings back memories? :)
If you take a look at his channel, you will find tunes from games like Flashback, Turrican, Beverly Hills Cop, Body Blows, Zool, Lotus, Super Cars and many, many more. He has also done demos as well, for example State of the Art from Spaceballs.
Kuokka77 states on his about-page that he takes requests, so if you have a suggestion he might be interested.
What do you think of this YouTube channel and of the music present there? I certainly love it. Perfect for those times I need to use my headset (which is very often).
I know I write a lot about the Amiga, but sometimes I like to make a post about something different, for example the excellent SNES game console!
Most people think of the SNES as a games console, which is true in every sense, but did you know that there are people creating digital art for this device? Just like on the Commodore 64, Amiga or ZX Spectrum, extremely talented and skilled programmers create all sorts of effects on these old machines. They combine this eye-candy with other bits of graphics and music, which in the end becomes a demo.
A demo group called Elix released two VERY cool (in my opinion) productions in 2014. I have embedded them below for you to see. Prepare for something different from Mario and Donkey Kong on the SNES! ;)
Hope you will like these releases as much as I did. :) Isn’t it incredible what these people can get out of old computers and consoles?
First one up is called “Smash It” – Ranked 1 at TRSAC in Denmark 2014
Yesterday I ordered a Gotek device for my Amiga 1200. It will make floppies redundant on my Amiga 1200 and it’ll make playing games and watching old demos much easier. Here’s a video from It’s a Pixel THING giving you an insight look into the Gotek and its performance. Enjoy! ;) I’ll write a review about it when I have it installed.
My old demo group Void is back, kind of. We’ve at least set up a simple homepage (work in progress) and will start planning some releases. Please have a look here:
You will find an updated memberlist, some releases and not least the story of how Void started in the United Kingdom in 1995. More info will be added in the future and hopefully some new productions as well. With so many old groups making comebacks, why not Void as well?
For those who don’t know, Void is Amiga demo group.
Today I attempted, for the first time, to record a video from WinUAE. I thought it went reasonably well, but I’ll have to dive into things to learn more about it, since the quality of this video is so-so.
Nevertheless, thought you’d might be interested in watching a few minutes of an old music disk I programmed and made graphics for. Yes, that’s right. I do some of this stuff from time to time. The music was done by Jeano/Void, who also lives here in Norway.
Here’s another video I recorded through WinUAE. Scroller seems to be a bit shaky compared to running it on a real Amiga. Guess settings must be checked.
This demo was released on the 31st of December 2005. It was coded by Rumrunner/Void. Graphics was made by Malmis/Void, whilst the music was done by Maze/Apathy. It is an Amiga demo that works on a stock Amiga 500.
Just watched an enjoyable old school dentro released this year by Rebels & Neural. It contains many cool 90’s effects, like glenz vectors, plasmas and starfields. I’ve embedded a video of it below in case you’d like to have a look. Have fun!
You can find more info on the production over at Pouet.net. Good to see that Rebels is still alive in 2016.
My Amiga group, Void, released a small 64KB intro at the Solskogen party in Norway this summer. You can get it from Aminet.net by clicking here. Below you’ll find a YouTube video of the intro from the actual competition at the party place.
If you are interested in the world of demos, you might be thrilled to hear that Spaceballs is out with the second issue of their minimalistic diskmag Irregular Review.
The mag should work on all classic Amiga systems. You can find the download here:
First of all, thanks for visiting Old School Game Blog. Glad you stopped by!
The demo event Silly Venture was held from the 11th to the 13th of November 2016. This is an Atari party and needless to say a lot of cool stuff was released there for the ST, 2600 and so forth.
There is one demo I’d really like to share though and that is Chiphead by Altair for the Atari 2600. It’s really nice, so please have a look at the video below. Listen to the music and how well it goes with what is on the screen! It’s great to see activity on these old machines.
What do you think? Did you like it?
Thanks again for reading and hope to see you soon!
A new Amiga intro has been released this month. It is called Robot Gang and was coded by Skynet. God made the visuals, while Neuroflip was responsible for the music.
The intro needs AGA, 68020 or better, FPU and fast-RAM. 68060 is recommended.
As some of you know, the Amiga demo scene is very much alive these days. It’s been a while since we’ve seen so many releases coming out every month.
This weekend the demo party Compushere is currently being held in Sweden. It started on the 25th of November and will end today on the 27th of November. The party is therefore not over yet, but some Amiga productions have already been uploaded onto Pouet.net and more will hopefully come. As is usual these days, people upload videos of their demos to YouTube, so that everyone can watch them. This is great for those not having an Amiga, C64 or some other old computer.
Compusphere has a great tradition of organizing demoscene partying, fierce competitions and love for the community, with a history going back to 1993. Organizers, locations and amount of participants have varied over the years, but the focus has been the same: To deliver the best demoparty experience in Western Sweden.
As some of you might know, we’re currently gathering votes for our upcoming Amiga demo chart (Versus).
Just wanted you to know that the deadline for voting is Sunday this weekend, so this is your last chance to submit votes for the upcoming issue. We need all the support we can get, so even if you can just fill in a few categories, it’ll help a lot.
Hope you’ll spend 10 minutes or less filling out the votesheet here:
A new pack has been released for the Atari ST. It’s incredible that we in 2017 have groups still making packs – I love it! This one was made by NoExtra and contains previously unseen intros from groups like TCB, Next, Fuzion and Aenigmatica.
One of my old swap-disks – Signed by Flava, Leprechaun, Firestarter, Chriz, Puni (me!), Fugazi. Photo by me, Puni/Void (Old School Game Blog)
Hi folks,
This post is actually based on an old article I wrote for Classicamiga.com over 10(!) years ago. For me, personally, it is a very interesting topic, since I was a swapper for many years on the Amiga demoscene. At the most I had between 100-150 contacts and received perhaps 3-5 packages a day with stuff in the post. I had friends in Australia, Spain, Germany, Greece, Sweden, UK, Poland, Czech Republic, Serbia and more! Very cool! Keep in mind that we did not swap games and programs (for the most part), but mostly demos, intros, slideshows and packs. I’ve re-written the text and hope you’ll find this piece of Amiga history interesting. Thanks for reading.
Introduction
The Internet is something most of us take for granted today. Our societies have grown dependent on the constant flow and exchange of information through and it is safe to say that our communities and economy would enter a crisis situation if it suddenly was gone. It wouldn’t just be a catastrophe for businesses, but also for ordinary people, everyone would be affected! Facebook has over 1 billion users, isn’t that crazy?
With this in mind, it is certainly strange to think about how things were like 15 to 25 years ago. The Internet was not a widespread phenomenon and most people didn’t have a clue about what it was. Things were different back then. If you had a bill to pay, you went to the bank. If you wanted to buy a game, you called up a mail-order company, read catalogues, or you just went to a nearby store. If you had an assignment at school, you couldn’t just use Google to find all the necessary information. You had to go the library, find the relevant material, and then sort everything out without help from fancy computers or search engines. It took a lot of time, but it worked, and people learned from it. Of course, those things could be done faster and easier with the help of the Internet, and that is probably exactly why we use it today.
Anyway, I feel like I’m going way off topic here. Let’s get back on track. Having no Internet to speak of, people belonging to the Cracking- or Demoscene had to trade their stuff in alternative ways. Most of you have probably read, used or heard about what is called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), but that is not what I’m thinking about right now. What I’m thinking of is swapping, or mail-trading if you like. This was a very popular and common alternative to exchanging bits and bytes through a phone line. Snail-mail was for the most part cheap and reliable and accessible to everyone.
So, what was swapping like? What made it so interesting for those that was involved, and why isn’t it an activity performed today? The last question is probably the easiest one to answer, since we’ve already taken a look at the Internet. But when it comes to the other questions, we will investigate them to see if we can come up with some answers.
16-bit Memories by Tom Bratincevic – This picture gives you some of the atmosphere I remember sitting up in the evenings writing letters to contacts all over the world, watching, demos, playing games. Good times.
Swapping – Snail-mail exchange
The general idea behind swapping was straight-forward. Two people established contact with each other with the purpose of exchanging software through ordinary mail. It was actually as simple as that. Although such a description doesn’t sound particularly interesting, there is much more to it than the usual exchange of software. To find out what, we will have to take a glance behind the curtains.
Value for Money – Fiddling with the Postage
As you can imagine, sending for example 50 packages with disks a week could be expensive. Most people were young and they didn’t have an income matching those of adults. To get around this money barrier, certain tricks of the trade were utilized.
The first method was called stamp-faking. It was not like you produced fake stamps in your basement, but something a little more innocent. I’ll try to give a brief description of how it worked. Person A was going to send a few disks to person B. On the stamps on the envelope, person A used transparent glue on the top of the stamp. When person B received the package, he returns the glued stamps back to A. Mr. A then wipes off the glue with some liquid of his choice, and voila, the stamp can be used again. The stamp-mark would disappear with the glue, so the stamp looked more or less like new. This method was highly dangerous though, as it was reckoned a criminal offence. It still is, so don’t get any ideas now… Many people got caught, and had to cut down on their swapping activities because of it.
My Amiga 1200 – This is the computer I own today and which I used for the last of my swapping activities in the early years of 2000 (photo by Old School Game Blog).
The second method was widely known as low-paying. It was a bit safer than stamp-faking. What you did was just to put on fewer stamps than was necessary to post the package. The packatge would get through the post like 99% of the time, so you could save some serious cash this way.
Friendship, Elite
To be known as a swapper on the Demoscene, you needed to have a network of contacts. Some people could for example have 15 contacts, while others could have something like 200. Some people enjoyed having a lot of contacts, as they would get more hot stuff. On the other hand, there were swappers who were satisfied with a lower amount of contacts. They preferred to call themselves friendship orientated swappers. A dividing line was established between so called elite swappers and those who focused primarily on friendship. There were also combinations involved where some guys had a lot of contacts, but despite all the work that took, also focused on the friendship part.
Tagging the Disks
As mentioned before, people used disks to exchange stuff. A funny thing to note is that most swappers tagged their handle on the disks. As the floppies were spread around from country to country, you could end up having 8 or perhaps as many as 10 signatures on them. One could notice how active certain swappers was this way, as one often got disks with their signature on. Some guys did also have special stickers with their handle and address on, which probably brought them some new contacts as well.
Here are two pictures from my collection of old disks. Will upload more later to the blog.
One of my old swap disks (photo by Puni/Void – Old School Game Blog)One of my old swap disks (photo by Puni/Void – Old School Game Blog)
Here you see the various people the disks have passed through; Disk 1: Azzaro/MAWI, Dimer, Protas/Nah-Kolor, Tom/NNG, Puni (me!), Toxic – Disk 2: Jim/Sector 5, Dr. Szach/Dinx Project, Exor/High Voltage, Puni (me!), Renton (the worlds best swapper in the 90’s, member of Nah-Kolor and Floppy, formerly known as Blaze), Splatterhead/Scoopex,
Advertising
Another interesting question is how swappers managed to get in touch with new contacts. Where did they look? Packs and diskmags was the two main areas that the swappers could utilize for this purpose. Most packs and diskmags had what was called an advert section. Here you could find as many as over hundred adverts from people around the globe.
The adverts were often stylish with fancy ascii-logos, so that it would gain the attention of the reader. Adverts also appeared as standalone textfiles, often bundled with a demo.
Against the Stream – Boycotting the Eurochart!
Swapping was the main way of exchanging stuff for many, many years. When things started to go downhill during the last years of the 90’s, swappers didn’t go down without a fight. Despite the Internet and BBS’s, they kept on doing what they loved. It might seem strange today, but for those that were involved, swapping was a tradition like no other.
There is especially one moment in the history of the Amiga Scene that deserves to be mentioned. Let us travel back a few years in time.
In 1997 The Official Eurochart decided to drop what they called The Best Swapper chart. The Eurochart depended heavily on swappers collecting vote sheets for the charts though. Without the votes they collected, a real chart wouldn’t have been possible to create. Still, they chose to close the swapper chart.
What happened is quite unique. A lot of swappers, several of them official spreaders and collectors of the production, decided to launch a boycott. The support they got was extensive and things looked dark for The Eurochart. One swapper from Sweden, I think it was Hawk of Giants, actually burned a whole lot of vote sheets until there was nothing but ashes and dust left of the pile. He showed a kind of true dedication to the old-school tradition he was part of. Others just stopped collecting and sending votes to the people behind the chart. They knew that without such support, the production couldn’t be made.
After some time, the boycott totally crippled The Eurochart, and the authors had to go back on their decision. The swapper chart was re-introduced and the Sceners (swappers and others) lived happily ever after. The boycott had worked and the swappers had showed that they still was a force to be reckoned with.
In the latest issues of The Eurochart, there is actually not a chart for swappers included. The reason for that is that there is not any swappers left, or if it is, it is only handful left. If any swappers out there read this and believe I’m wrong, please give me a sign, and I will correct what I have written. Nothing would please me more than to see that there are still people today, in the world of electronic communication, doing stuff the good old fashioned way.
This leads us over to the current state of swapping.
The Situation Today
As we already know, the Internet is the main of area of file exchange these days. Because of the Internet becoming so widespread, swapping has more or less died out. It has become a thing of the past on the Demoscene and therefore a part of its history.
Last Words
I could write much, much more about swapping – intrigues between groups and sceners, funny stories, busts, you name it, but those are topics for future posts I think.
Versus is a brand new Demoscene chart for the Amiga, but it does not contain a swapper-chart for obvious reasons. Source: Old School Game Blog
Right now I’m happy the Demoscene is alive and well in 2017 with my old group Void still being active. I’m not a swapper anymore, but I still maintain some of the friendships I got back in the 90’s, so many years ago.
I’d like to use the opportunity to send out greetings to all of my old contacts back in the days.
Thanks for reading this looooong post and hope you enjoyed it.
Second Reality by Future Crew, the winner of the PC demo competition at the Assembly 1993. A legendary production that is still great to watch today. Most of us interested in demos have watched it, but have you seen the behind the scenes video?
(screenshot taken from http://download.chip.eu/en/Unreal2-Second-Reality_131591.html)
There is a video called Making of Second Reality on YouTube that gives you footage of the devs in action. I’ve embedded it below and hope you’ll have fun watching it. It is like a trip back in time! No ipads, no mobiles, sketches on paper… Love it!
Interested in download the demo itself? Please head on over to Pouet.net:
Please have a look here:
The music was done by Jeano/
Most of us interested in demos have watched it, but have you seen the behind the scenes video?
