FREAX

The Brief History of the Computer Demoscene

Volume 1

CSW|Edition Digitalkultur

German Library cataloguing this publication in the national bibliography.
Detail bibliographical data in the interent at http://dnb.dd.de

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or used in any from or by any means - grafic, electronic, or mechanical
including photocopying, or information storage-and-retrieval
systems – without the prior permission of the publisher.

2. edition, august 2008

© 2008 by CSW-Verlag
Hauffstr. 10, 71364 Winnenden, Germany
www.csw-verlag.com

AuthorTamásPolgár
Cover design TamásPolgár and redtrump.weimar
Design and Typographyredtrump.weimar
Font Thesis byLucasFonts

ISBN 978-3-9810494-0-4

freak: 1a: a sudden and odd or seemingly pointless idea or turn of the mind; b: a seemingly capricious action or event; 2: one that is markedly unusual or abnormal

– Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Foreword

Scattered everywhere in the world there are many people using their computers for artistic purposes. Some do it as a commercial activity, like game developers, or movie studios, others for fun, as a hobby, or to test their abilities. Electronic art is divided to several branches today: music, graphics, and programming, and these can be subdivided even further, as, for example, webdesign is a quite different area of computer graphics from 3 D animation.

Almost all modern art genres have an underground stream that can not be found anywhere, or bought in shops, and only insiders know of its existence. The same goes for computing. This book tells about the history of underground computer arts, or, as insiders know it, the demoscene. It covers from the rise of the home computer to our present day. As we discuss underground, we do not talk about hackers in the classic meaning, as people breaching network security, but the creative offshoot of the hacker culture, which, at least today, has an almost nonexistent connection to the illegal underground.

So who, might you ask, is likely to read this book? Those who are already familiar with and have experience with the scene. For them this book is a collection of memories which they can show to their grandchildren someday: see, this is how a computer looked like in our time, and this is how lived back then. It is also recommended to computer literate people who might have heard of the spectacular demos, the great demoparties, but never experienced them. Also for those, who wish they were members of the great family we call the scene, but were never able to see its birth, as they probably were not even born yet during the beginnings. To really enjoy this book, a certain level of computer education is required, which surpasses the usage of a word processor.

Freax is a result of more than six years of research. Several hands helped me collecting and arranging the vast amount of information, and hereby I would like to acknowledge and say thank you to them all.

Aboy of D-Eyes, Abyss of Future Crew, Akira of Pulse,Alex Ziegelmayr, amd, AMB of The Blasters, Andy Davis, Antitrack of F4CG, Anton of Zerius Development, Atx of Shock, Atko, Aurum, Azzaro of Madwizards, B1B of ABC, BBT of Breeze, Bigfoot of Breeze, Bird of ALL, BoyC of Conspiracy, Celebrandil of Phenomena, Chaos of Farbrausch, Charlie of Inquisition, Christer Gundersen, Christian Janoff, Ciccileju of Apocalypse Design, Cody of Zerius Development, Cranx of Rhyme, CreamD, Curlin of Hitmen, Cyclone of X-Troll, Daniel Hansson, Dan Wright of Fusecon, Dale of Resource, DNS of Hooligans Crew, Danko of Censor, Darkness of Imphobia, Deekay of Crest, Defjam of Checkpoint, Dipswitch of Black Maiden, DFJ of Dinasty, Ed Thelen, Edhellon of Resource, Enok of Chrome, Factor6 of Phantasy & K3L & Reason, Feather of TPOLM, Flapjack Gandalf of Pulse, Ghandy of Vantage, Gaf of Controlled Dreams, Gargaj of Conspiracy, Geert Poels, Gemini of Rebels, Generic of Beep, GFXZone Team, Gitane of Controlled Dreams, Glenn Lunder, Graham of Crest, Grendel of Byterapers, Gore of Future Crew, Gunnlaugur Jonsson, Helfrich Máté, Hoild of Enhanced Newcomer Crew, Insider, Immortal Rat of Greenroom, Intel Microcomputer Museum, Jazzcat of Pic Saint Loup, Jean of Chromance, Kilroy of Breeze, kreestaj/skrju, Krister Walfridsson, Lay of Crimson Jihad, Lavina of GotU, Laxity of Kefrens, Lettique of Haujobb, Lion of Chromance, Linus of Mono211, Lorenzo of Darkside, Lotek Style, Luca Bisti, Marc-Jano MJK Knopp, Melan of Astroidea, Mezei László, Midfit of Legend, Moondog of The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, Mötley of F4CG, MWS of Radwar, Nagz of Greenroom, NewMode of Delta Force, Nicolas Bergeret, Niels de Koning, Pallbearer of Toxic Zombies, Pandur of Black Maiden, Phoenix of Hornet, Pink of Reservoir Gods, Pixman, Pyromaniac of Beyond, Qvas of Atomik, Rachel Stewart, Raw Style of Lego, Ratman of Crimson Jihad, Ratt of Grif, Raymond Day, RCL of Double Plus, Rendall of Impulse, Reptile of Astroidea, Reward of Komplex, Sander of Focus, Scintillation, Sensor, Slayer of Faculty, Starcsevics Gábor, Stellan of Enhet & Bypass, Steve of RSI, Synergy of Nitrogen, Szudi János, Tarkus of Mortal Compact, Teasy, Téli Sándor, Teo of Kangoroo, TeXeL of Elerium Core, Thierry Schembri, Thomas Michaël “SoLO”, TMB of Scoopex, TomCat of Abaddon, Tony Diaz, Trixter of Hornet, Trajic of Rhyme, Tyrant of Therapy, Ulf Svensson, Varga Viktor, Vention of Kefrens, Virgill of Haujobb, Waryou of Nightbreed, Weasel of F4CG, Zdenek Eisenhammer, Zeg, Zike of FairLight, Zola of Controlled Dreams.

I simply can’t list all the people and companies whose websites I visited during my research: thanks to all of you. I would also like to thank those, whose demo screenshots I used as illustrations, and I apologize to those who I wasn’t able to reach for permissions. Among my best sources, I’d like to emphasize the usefulness of the Scenery demoscene history chronology, assembled and maintained by Glenn Lunder, and In Medias Res by Zike of FairLight, which both helped a lot to reveal the history of the C64 and Amiga scene. Thanks for the help for the folks on the IRC channels #c-64, #amigascne, #amigahu, #atariscne, #atari8, #pixel and #thescene, who gave a really friendly hand during my fumbling exploration in the world of unknown domains of the scene. Their support helped me to understand things that I have never experienced myself. Special thanks to Stefan Walgenbach, the owner of a marvelous old computer collection, who altruistically gave free run of his rare computers’ photos. Thanks to Deadbeat of The Sharks for the all night long discussions, which greatly helped me understanding the old times which I myself have never experienced.

Despite the wealth of source materials, and the rigorous verification of details from various sources, flaws might still persists, as nobody is infallible, and much research also is taken from decade-old articles and memories. For this reason I apologize to my readers in advance for the possible errors, and hereby ask you to tell me about any serious mistakes so I can correct them in future editions of this book. Also I am sorry if a few groups or their productions are not mentioned despite of their importance, as it is impossible to mention everybody who contributed to the numerous demoscene productions over the years.

This book is divided to six major parts and two volumes. The first part introduces the scene to the general readers and then gives a glance of the history of computer music and graphics. The second, third and fourth parts tell the story of the scene’s three largest computer platforms: the Commodore 64, the Amiga and the PC. The first volume ends with the history of the Amiga, and the second one begins with the PC. The fifth part contains shorter chapters introducing the less known or less widespread computers and scene life surrounding them. The sixth part is an art gallery, containing the best screen drawn pictures of over the past two decades.

I hope this book will give you as much enjoyment as I had in it’s creation. And for those once active sceners I present you with this trip down memory lane. Our history will not be forgotten.

Happy reading!

Tamás Polgár
a.k.a. Tomcat of Madwizards

part 1

the basics …

Ultimately, a demo(nstration) in a demoscene sense, is a piece of free software that shows realtime rendered graphics while playing music. Often, the music is tightly connected/synced to the visuals. Modern PC demos run linear from start to finish and are non-interactive. There is no what-so-ever rule what a demo must/can show. The creator is free to decide whether he wants to show stylish and/or impressive effects, an epic story, funny/bizzare/ satirical audiovisual artwork or a distorted mindfuck. A scene demo is not a try-out version of a commercial application or game.

– PC Demoscene FAQ by Thomas “Tomaes” Gruetzmacher

Yeah … The Horizon parties … Venlo, Diskswapping, phonecalls from people from a far country. Then you had people to look up to … Groups like 1001 Crew, Horizon, Bones, BlackMail, Ash&Dave … People like Jeroen Tel and JCH … Calling with a 1,200 baud modem to boards … When cracking and demo-making went hand in hand … Real fights at parties! (Tear gas!!), Anti Demo’s … The stripteases at the Silicon Ltd. Parties … The PC scene is TOO professional. Everybody makes hi-tech 3 D engines, hoping to sell it to a software company and make big money. Back then demo-making was a big adventure. Even coding and typing the text for a scroller was big fun! You were doing things that ‘normal’ people could not understand. Remember the feeling when you finished a demo, and spread it by mail? Watching endless scrolltexts, hoping you would be greeted?

– Scout of Success

1. What is the scene?

Many have tried to answer this question, with more or less success. Of course I also tried and completed an entire chapter about it but scraped my results in favor of an old article by Jean of Chromance, published in 1992 in the yearbook of Commodore Világ, (Commodore World) a legendary Hungarian computer magazine. So, what did Jean write about the meanings of the words scene and demo?

We have already met demo-sections or articles about demos, but no such article has ever appeared on the pages of CoV before. Certainly it’s an innovation, so we’re eager if you, the readers, desire such articles. This time we will give you a glance of what happened in the recent year on the really fertile demoscene … For those not really experts on this field, let us have a little historical overview. Maybe we can start with explaining what is a demo. Upon hearing this word, many can’t really grasp it. Is it a demonstration version of some game, or some utility? Certainly there are also such demos, but this is a different matter. The word in fact derives from demonstration. This might give a clue that this is something spectacular to see. Graphics, music, scrollers, programming tricks and knacks, but what is the point? Many computer users are simply untouched by this branch of programming, mainly those PC users, who never surpassed database management during their careers. To better understand the term, let’s travel back in time.

The first well playable games on the Commodore 64 appeared around 1983–1984. Everybody was happy to see that, but nobody was able to figure the short intros before the games, or rather few cared. Of course those were the illegally cracked stuffs. So, shorter or longer routines were running before the programs, which were not placed there by the developer company. The few cracker groups appeared – a group of people spreading cracked software, like Section 8 or Crackman – with the single goal to gain quick fame by their activity. Years passed, and around 1985–1986 it just wasn’t enough to simply change the screen color or show a few miserable graphical sprites. So the first quality intros appeared. The word intro refers to introduction. The contemporary celebrities (Dynamic Duo, 1001 Crew, Ikari, FairLight, Hotline, Triad and Eagle Soft Inc. in the United States) were not content with the obsolete, boring screen tricks, but looked for new ideas. This was the time to see the first worthwhile scrollers, rasterbars, logos, and as a very important element, music has appeared! So a group’s fame was not only built by the amount of the programs they cracked, but also the quality of their often really beautiful intros. But for the beginners, we have to clear a few expressions. The word scroll refers to a rolled piece of paper or parchment, but in this case it means a rolling text running across the screen. Later many innovative variants appeared: little scroller, big scroller, waving, bouncing, flashing scrollers, and so on. More meanings appear in the case of games, since any object moving onto the screen, and exiting later, can be considered a scroller. The word logo is widespread in everyday life: the depiction of a name, like a company logo, or in this case, the logo of a specific group. It’s usually a colorful, still picture, but not necessarily. As intros developed, logos started to move sideways, later also up and down. By applying rasterbars or stripes, varying the screen color or other color registers by screen lines, they were able to further enhance the spectacle of the introduction programs.

It was an important moment when the different groups learned about each other’s existence. They were bound together by an invisible force, which was already called the scene. They greeted each other in their intros, and organized meetings, so-called copyparties. As the number of C64 owners grew, more and more programmers wanted to scrape their voices, but as they didn’t have access to fresh programs to crack, so they had to find an alternative way.

Soon the intros were not bound to an illegally copied software any more, but they started to spread detachedly, and were called demos. The first legal groups appeared (Zetrex, Dexion, Triangle, Beyond Force, Fire Eagle, Contex, Super Swap Sweden, later called Horizon, etc.) The first demos were just resembling intros, but as sophisticated compression routines appeared and spread, more data was stuffed into the memory, and this led to the development of much more serious programs. Demo programming slowly evolved into a form of art, and the groups introduced new ideas. A lot of undocumented features of the C64 were revealed, so it became possible to remove the screen border, shaking the screen up and down, using a fourth, undocumented digital sound channel, and many more solutions appeared, which were previously considered impossible. Multiplexed sprites extended the basic sprite set of 8, first only with a few, but later democoders pushed the limit to the possible maximum (60–70). The programs slowly grew over the 64 kilobyte limit, and overlaying was introduced, giving birth to a new genre called the megademo. The first overlay routines worked the most obvious way, while an effect was shown on the screen, the next one was already loading. This was quickly dropped, as disk operations consumed a lot of resources, on the expense of visual effects. Demo parts were linked together with loader routines, and this method still goes by on the C64, for want of better.

The next great achievement of the scene was the advent of diskmagazines, like Sex’n’Crime, Mamba, or the Hungarian Fölény (Superiority). These magazines, consisted of news, demo reviews, charts and copyparties informed everybody about everything, and soon the scene developed into a serious organization.

But soon (1986) the Amiga was introduced, and many groups changed to the new system, which particularly supported visual effect programming. It didn’t take a long time for an Amiga scene to emerge, serious cracker groups were already active around 1988 (Bamiga Sector One & Kent Team, Tristar, Quartex, World of Wonders, Ackerlight, Spreadpoint, Paranoimia, later Skid Row), but also the first demogroups were around (Wild Copper, Triangle, Fair-Light & Northstar, Piranhas, Phenomena, Red Sector, Brainstorm, Scoopex). Two streams were formed, still holding their fields nowadays. The first is the so- called DOS programs, while the other is the school of trackload stuffs. The latter is a subject of our particular inspection. The Amiga demos first followed the old C64 suit: several parts chained to each other with a loader routine. Often these parts showed no coherence, and even the demo didn’t have a specific title, it was simply called Megademo. The great breakthrough came with a gentleman called Slayer, who was a reputed coder of the Finnish group Scoopex that time. The revolutionary idea was to drop the loader part, and let the parts follow each other dynamically. We don’t even realise when disk operations are running, as the pace of the program enchants the viewer. Different effects are only shown for seconds, and the entire program forms a complete whole, along with the unique design and one single music. It is to be noted that some groups (Origo, FairLight) tried to introduce the same style on the C64, with more or less success, but long loading sessions on this computer make the demo a bit languid. Back to the Amiga, several styles appeared during the times. Besides of demos, we can find slideshows, musicdisks and diskmags. A slideshow is a collection of graphics, while a musicdisk is a collection of music. The quality of Amiga diskmags is uncomparable to their C64 forerunners. Most of them are coming out every one or two months, often with several hundred pages of footage (Zine, McDisk, ICE, Raw, Hack-Mag, Top Secret).

Demoroutines were mostly based on two basic abilities of the computer. First, thanks to the blitter, a graphical coprocessor, the programming of polygon based objects became fast and easy, and second, the copper, another coprocessor supported creating raster effects and plasmas.

The newly appeared PC scene is worth a side note. This platform always suffered from the drawback of huge diversity of configurations, which made it almost impossible to create demos that are running on every machine. However, today a 286-based PC, with a VGA monitor and a Sound Blaster can be considered something like a minimal standard, and some demos already take advantage of it. PC groups are slowly mushrooming, among them a few oldies (Tristar & Red Sector, FairLight, Skid Row), but also some new talents (Spacepigs, Ultraforce, and, but not last, our country’s leading group, Twin Sectors).

In these days the demos have already reached a really high, professional level, requiring months of studious work to finish a quality production. This progress is greatly endorsed by the fat, often several thousand dollars worth prizes at the demo contests of the greatest copyparties. For example the total prizing of the Hurricane-Brutal party, held in Denmark this summer, was 20,000 dollars!

Thus your introduction to the demo scene, from more than ten years ago, but Jean’s precise description fits even nowadays. Demogroups operate worldwide today, in 2004, and still release breathtakingly spectacular visual programs we call demos. Sure, the PC has “grown up for the task” during the decade that passed since the above article, and most demos and intros are already written for them, but the two old platforms mentioned in the article, the Amiga and the Commodore 64 still stoutly hold up, and there are several more, less known computers, with hundreds of enthusiasts. The ultimate goal of this book is to display the history of the demo creators and their productions. From the first pioneers to our present day.

Artistic floppy disk cover from 1988, by Hobbit of Fairlight.

First let’s begin with the origins of the technologies applied during the creation of demos, intros and other spectacular computer programs today.

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

– Popular Mechanics Magazine, 1949

2. The beginnings of computer graphics

Human creativity is one of the keystones of civilization. This quality created the computer itself, an invention only comparable to the steam engine. I won’t go into details on the fact that the first electronic computer was the American ENIAC in 1946, firstly because amost everyone has learned about this in school, secondly because it is not true. Konrad Zuse, the German scientist, deceased in December 1995, had already built electronic computers, similar to the ENIAC in 1944, the Z-2, Z-3 and Z-4. Hence the computer is not an American invention, despite all the hype surrounding the fiftieth anniversary ENIAC.

Konrad Zuse’s Z-3 computer in the Deutsches Museum of Munich

Computer imaging was not born with the computer itself. More than ten years passed before the first monitor appeared which was only able to display characters. But if we really want to see the beginnings of computer graphics, we have to travel back to the end of the forties with our imaginary time machine, when Jay Forrester, a young engineer at Massachussets Institute of Technology was assigned a task by the American government. He was to form a research team and design a device to help train fighter pilots and develop new airframes. They decided to use the newest achievement of technology, a digital computer. Their first computer was baptised Whirlwind. Then their attention was turned towards a computer controlled radar system. They found that a Whirlwind, connected to a radar station, was able to precisely and quickly calculate and display the distance, height and speed of incoming aircraft. The system was presented to the representatives of the US armed forces on the 20th of April, 1951, was met with success, and immediately accepted. From its introduction in 1958, it was kept in service until 1983 as an important part of the American strategic air defense system. This was the first practical use of computer graphics.

Civilian scientists were also not indolent. During the fifties the Americans, pioneering electronics, revolutionized some “marginal” fields of mathematics like data processing. The first graphical computer, meaning a machine equipped with a monitor, that is able to do more than displaying mere characters, was the LDS-1, Line Drawing System in 1954. As its name implies it was a vector display system. The electron beam was not drawing pixels on the screen but straight lines.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was founded in 1957, in Maynard. Later they became known as a manufacturer of high performance Alpha RISC chips, today they’re a subsidiary of Compaq. Back then, DEC only had three employees in an old mill. In November 1960 they introduced the first relatively small – under eight tons – graphical computer, which was also the first to boast a color raster screen. The computer was marked PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor). It was an 18-bit machine. More than forty years later, DEC had over 124,000 employees, and a 12.9 billion dollars yearly income.

The first person using a computer for artistic purposes, was John Whitney, an abstract movie maker. He started his experiments in 1958, with a computer marked M-5, originally used as a machine gun targeting device for the B-29 Superfortress bombers, and created a short animation film. This clip was later featured in the movie Vertigo by Hitchcock. Whitney later created his own film titled Catalog, which he finished in 1961, and another one, Lapis in 1966, together with his brother. These movies were the first computer animations. The second pioneer with artistic intentions, but with a particular knowledge of hardware tinkering, was Ivan Sutherland, a student of Massachussets Institute of Technology. He created the first drawing program, Sketch-Pad in 1961, and lacking the appropriate input device, he was also forced to invent the light pen. The light pen was the forerunner of the mouse, a pencil-shaped device, which the user held in his hand like a conventional pencil. The tip of the pencil was a photoelectric cell, which, when touched to the screen, was hit by the cathode ray. The other end of the pencil was connected to the computer with a cable, and it determined where the pencil tip was touching the screen. Hence, just like with a normal pencil, the user could draw on the screen. Some of the basic ideas of SketchPad are still used in modern graphics programs. For example it already featured a rectangle drawing function. The user did not need to draw a rectangle painstakingly pixel by pixel, but it was enough to pick the two of its opposite corners, and the program did the rest. Further developments included functions like edge blurring or sharpening, and other features, which later became essential in modern drawing software.

The DEC PDP-1. The typewriter-like device is a card puncher. Photo courtesy of The Computer Museum History Center, Moffett Federal Airfield, Mountain View, California

At the rise of the sixties there were already some computers with color graphics monitors and high performance processors, however, these were typically only found at the largest universities in the world. Here the history of underground started, when students, learning to code discovered these computers. The playful men, the homo ludens immediately tried to create something for their own entertainment. This is how the first game programs were born. An early experiment with games first saw the light in 1958, in the nuclear research center of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton. William A. Higinbotham, nuclear physicist, a former participant of the first nuclear experiment in Alamogordo, wished the visitors of the institute to see more than boring electric boxes, switches and flashing screens. Using an analogue computer, originally used to calculate projectile trajectories, he created a simple computer game, titled Tennis Two. In this game, two players were bouncing a bright dot to and fro on a phosphorescent, five inch oscilloscope screen, just like in tennis. The game was very popular, visitor groups often stopped for hours at the tiny screen. This was the first try, but the world’s first real computer game was undoubtedly Star Trek, or, according to other sources, Spacewar, which first appeared on a PDP-1 computer at the Massachussets Institute of Technology. The game was programmed by graduate students and teachers, based on the idea of Steve “Slug” Russel. Today it looks quite primitive, but still entertaining, and it can be recreated by anyone with minimal programming knowledge. In the original version, two spaceships, a Klingon Warbird, and the famous Enterprise from the Star Trek series fought on the circular screen. There is a planet in the middle of the screen whose gravity attracts both ships. If the ships – both controlled by an individual player – don’t want to crash into the planet, they can keep distance by boosting their engines. They can fire missiles at each other which is also deflected by the planet’s gravity. This was the basic idea of Spacewar. Of course it can be complicated, as many were during the years. Game programs soon ended being restricted entertainment at universities, and since people were already copying software that time, and there were no FBI raids to stop them, Spacewar soon appeared on all DEC PDP-1 machines worldwide. Even DEC used it as a final test program to check their newly assembled machines. Most of the first game cabinets, which appeared in the seventies, offered this game to try for a quarter.

Ivan Sutherland demonstrates SketchPad.

Old computers displayed in an American high sschool. On the left there is Dr. Higinbothan’s computer, which ran Tennis Two on the little circular screen..

The first home game console, that was connected to a TV set, appeared in the stores in 1966. It was designed by Ralph Baer, an engineer of Sanders Associates, who sold the patent to Magnavox, and the machine was introduced as Odyssey. One can imagine how primitive it was, as there were no microprocessors yet.

Soon also scientists started to play with the newest wonders of electronics. Their games were not exactly toys, as the students’ funny little tidbits. They studied the new branches of mathematics. One of these was fractals. Incredibly beautiful computer-generated images based on complex numerical operations. In the sixties, when they first experimented with iterative manipulation of complex numbers the first tangible result of fractal science was an algorithm that plotted Great Britain’s shoreline on the screen in 1968. The vast possibilities of fractals were already obvious, but the picture was finally cleared by Benoit B. Mandelbrot, head of IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. His program generated the first image of the shape that was later called the Mandelbrot-fractal. This was the first of those beautiful fractals, which we still see in demos and intros.

Mandebrot-fractal and magnified detail.

What is a fractal? It derives from a series of operations with complex numbers. Complex numbers have a real and an imaginary value, for example: 4 + 3i. In this case, 4 is the real, and 3i is the imaginary value. Actually this is all the math that is needed to understand fractals Along with some coordinate geometry. Our screen is a flat surface, and each pixel has an X and an Y coordinate. The origin is the top left corner of the screen, different from the conventional Descartes coordinate system. The fractal plotter algorithm is a simple iteration – sometimes more iterations, nested – which paints the pixels given by the real (X coordinate) and imaginary (Y coordinate) parts of the complex number that’s being iterated.

The real beauty of fractals – especially the Mandelbrot-fractal – is actually the fact that we can magnify any part of it, and we’ll get more and more, always varying, beautiful shapes. This can be done again and again, ad infinitum, or to the performance limit of the computer’s processor.

There is a lot more that can be done with fractals, as discovered by Benoit B. Mandelbrot and published in his book titled The Fractal Geometry of Nature in 1978. His discovery proved that it is possible to generate incredibly lifelike mountain landscapes by fractal algorithms. They can even be photorealistic, depending on the complexity of the drawing algorithms. Later, in 1980, Loren Carpenter, working for Boeing’s computer graphics division, revised and perfected Mandelbrot’s landscape theory, resulting in even more realistic pictures. There are thousands more fractals besides of Mandelbrot’s discoveries, like Dragon, Julia, Mandeljulia, Lyapunov, just to name a few.

The first spectacular application of fractal technology, probably already seen by everyone, was in Star Wars (1977). At the end of the movie, during the battle of Yavin, when the Rebels fly their X-wing fighters in the trench of the Death Star, the texture on the walls of the trench were fractals, generated and animated with computers. The starfighters were models and laser beams were painstakingly painted on the film by hand. Fractals also made their appearance in Alien where the planet’s surface was a fractal landscape during the starship’s landing scene. The mountains were randomly placed by the program created by Alan Sutcliffe, working for Systems Simulation Ltd. in London.

This is a valley, as a computer and the Vista Pro landscape generator program “imagines”. Created by Gaf of Controlled Dreams in 1996

Other scientists created another game: Life was it was simpler than fractals, but just as interesting. It was invented by John Horton Conway, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge in 1968, and was enhanced in the seventies by Carter Bays, a programmer mathematician at South Carolina University. Life is a simple math game. There is a grid, each square meaning a place for a cell. Some squares are filled, those are living cells, others are empty, there are no cells. A clock is ticking. At each tick, some cells die, others survive. If a cell has 2 or less neighbors, it will die, because it can’t multiply. If there are 4 or more, it dies due to overcrowding. A new cell born in an empty square, if it has at least 2, but at most 3 neighbors. These parameters can be freely modified. To save them, Bays introduced a code that’s called Bays-code ever since. In this example, it is 2423. As it’s easy to figure, the first two digits mean the fate of living cells at each tick, the last two control the birth of new cells. This basic version of Life can be enhanced many ways. It is a simple programming challenge which anyone with basic programming knowledge can write. Even the basic version is very interesting to watch running, not to mention the three dimension version created by Carter Bays.

Computers and spatial imagery opened new perspectives for engineering: three dimensional, virtual object design. The key was vector geometry, a mathematical method to represent solid objects in a coordinate system. Such vector objects are easy to create with a computer, and it can also rotate or move the object. Computers are perfect tools to design machine parts, bearings, and model their working states.

Computer vector graphics is coeval with computer graphics, as the first cathode ray displays were developed exactly for this purpose, at the beginning of the fifties. For the early sixties, spatial object display became a fulfilled dream. To replace the uneasy LDS-1, IBM and General Motors designed and built DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computers) in 1959, along with the first CAD software, a 3 D design program of real practical use. The machine was first displayed at the Joint Computer Conference in Detroit, 1964. It had a vector monitor, but soon it was found that high resolution raster screens can achieve as good image quality as the best vector displays. The demand for raster graphics was first created by the IBM 2250 terminal, which became the first commercially available graphical computer in 1965.

Filled vector. Spaceships travel on the sky of a vector city in the Finnish 64 K intro titled Airframe (Prime, 1994)

Spatial vector graphics soon went through a breathtaking advancement. The first major achievement was to hide masked surfaces. It was a serious problem that all 3 D graphics programs displayed all the edges of the object, so a more complex object looked like a chaos of lines. The new method, developed by a research team at Utah University, supervised by Edwin Catmull, made it possible to find the lines covered by surfaces, so they weren’t drawn any more. This not only enhanced the stereophony of the image, but opened the way to new advancements. As a “byproduct” of this technology, they found the way to paint the surfaces of an object, achieving a better illusion of a solid material. This rendering method is called filled vector.

A combination of Gouraud shading and texture mapping in the French demo titled Aquaphobia by Realtech. The rough edges of te vector objects can be observed, their surface has a smooth illusion.

It only took one more step to develop flat shading. They set a point of light in the virtual 3 D space, and the surfaces of the rotating object were painted a brighter or darker color depending on their angle towards this specific point. This was sufficient for flat, angular objects. Filled vector technology also brought the approach of building 3 D objects from triangular polygons, which is still followed nowadays. Instead of drawing all the lines of the object, which required difficult programming, all surfaces were divided to triangles, and these were put next to each other. Any flat surface can be divided to triangles, and the more such polygons an object contains, the more small details, smooth curves it can feature.

SketchPad’s developer, Ivan Sutherland meanwhile invented the thing we call VR helmet today. A computer monitor that can be worn on the head like a helmet so it displays the picture right front of the two eyes. Sutherland’s goal was to create a fake spatial stereography, by deceiving the human eye. After receiving his degree, Sutherland became head of the information systems development section at Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), where also ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet was developed. Later he became a professor of Harvard University. He also participated in the work of Ed Catmull’s team, where he perfected his VR helmet.

As every technology, flat shading also had its limitations. It wasn’t suitable to properly shade a complex, curved surface. Such vector objects – like a sphere – looked angular and rough. More polygons smoothed the surface, but it was not possible to create a more lifelike look, even by exploiting processor power to the limits. A new shading method was required. The problem was solved by the French mathematician at University of Utah, Henri Gouraud in 1971. He implemented a simple method, which was later called Gouraud shading. This method, instead of painting each polygon with a solid color, interpolates the difference between the color of individual surfaces, and creates a smooth, shiny illusion. The idea worked, and since it only required slightly more processing power than flat shading, it soon superseded it. Its only drawback was that the contour of the object was still angular, as the edge polygons had no neighbors, and so it was not possible to entirely smooth them.

Ed Catmull, still not satisfied with all what he did for computer science, wrote his Ph. D. thesis about texture mapping in 1974. It was a new technology which practically united bitmap and vector graphics. The new method enabled to fix a bitmap image – a drawing, a pattern or even a digitized photograph – onto the surface of a vectorgraphic surface, like on the side of a cube. It was now possible to display objects in more than one color. The thesis also described z-buffer technology. This was a novelty on the field of spatial modeling. It reformed the method of removing invisible surfaces by not simply storing and calculating the depth of individual pixels by their brightness, but instead calculating their actual spatial depth along the z axis of the coordinate system. This is why it was called z-buffer. This innovation enabled 3 D objects to intersect each other. Previously it was not possible, because the polygons at the point of intersection disappeared, resulting in a hole on both objects. Catmull, later launched the world’s first computer animation course and became a founder of Pixar Animation Studios. He also took part in the creation of the world’s first computer animated movie, Toy Story.

In 1971, a Vietnamese mathematician arrived to University of Utah, Bui-Tuong Phong. The scientist, who has fled from his homeland, studied Gouraud’s shading method, and a few faults caught his eye. For example, Gouraud’s algorithm sometimes miscalculated the colors at the polygon edges, so the polygons sometimes blinked, or became transparent, making the other side of the object visible. Phong perfected Gouraud’s method in 1974, and published his discoveries in his work titled Illumination for Computer Generated Pictures. His shading method is nowadays called Phong shading. Its greatest advantage, exploited by many 3 D accelerator cards, is that it can be greatly sped up by hardware means. But even Phong shading did not solve the problem of angular object contours, and unfortunately it was much slower than Gouraud shading, consuming much more processor time. For this reason even to our present days, both shading algorithms are used and flat shading didn’t disappear either as it’s still the best method to render simple objects. Phong later became a professor of Stanford University until his death in 1975.

Phong shading and texture mapping in Maximum Realtity 4K intro by Microgenious (1996)

Catmull’s texture mapping was not improved till 1976, when James Blinn, a programmer of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena cooked up an interesting idea. The original technology just fixed the bitmap texture on the flat surface. Blinn developed a method to imitate pits and swells on the surface with colors and shading. He called the algorythm bump mapping, and there are barely any demos today without it. A new element was added to spatial imagery, which was used to render bumpy, rough surfaces.

Metal shading, again from Bomb. the lower number of polygons enable us to see the edge of them, where the difference between their brightness is interpolated.

Blinn’s other useful invention was environment mapping, or envmap for short. An envmapped object reflects its environment, by a projection from six directions – bottom, top, front, back, left and right – are applied to it as a blended texture. Finally, based on Phong’s works, he improved Gouraud and Phong shading, creating blinn shading. Blinn shading is somewhat faster than Phong, and unlike its forerunner, it does not create sharp light spots on the object’s surface, but instead a softer glow, which doesn’t exude on the smoothed edges.

Two dimensional bump mapping in Pure Spirit, a 4K intro of Hugo Habets of Spirit New Style. The simulated bumpy pattern can be fitted on a vector object, mimicking an uneven surface. the second picture, taken from the Solstice demo from Valhalla, shows this effect.

The fifth shading method was introduced in 1977, when Rob Cook, a student of Cornell University – after reading Don Greenberg’s works about refraction and surface shininess of different materials – started to think wonder why all computer generated objects look like polished plastic. He figured that lights have to be treated another way, and that by taking the energy of a light source into consideration, instead of its strength, the result will be a metallic, shiny surface. This way metal shading was born. Countless more shading methods had been introduced ever since, which were all offsprings of Phong and Gouraud shading.

Another new light treatment method was discovered in 1980 by Turner Whitted. It is called raytracing. Whitted’s idea was to quit simply checking which side of a virtual object looks towards the light source, but instead, as in real life, let light rays radiate from the source, and calculate their course in virtual space. The light rays are reflected from surfaces they hit, and again from the next one, and so on, till they either hit a non-reflecting surface, or leave the virtual space. The drawback of this new technology was the high processor power it required, but the result was previously unseen picture quality.

A few years later, in 1984, Cindy Goral, a reasearcher at Cornell University invented radiosity. It further enhanced the lifelikeness of raytraced pictures, by not only following the course of light rays, but even calculating the behavior of individual light particles, photons. She based her studies on the works of Parry Moon and Eberle Spencer, mathematician-researchers of MIT in the fourties, who published their thesis about light rays reflected from an empty room’s walls in 1940. Real radiosity calculation requires tremendous computing resources, even today it’s only possible on supercomputers. But Moon and Spencer already plotted a radiosity picture in 1948 by hand. A very long and tedious process that would have required a lot of patience.

As a matter of fact, Paul Heckbert mathematician, also a researcher of radiosity, has discovered a thesis on photometry in 1991, which was written by Yamauti Ziro, Japanese scientist in 1926. This paper describes a calculation method that is identical the basics of radiosity as we know today. Yamauti’s research was focused on reflection and illumination of different surfaces.

What is the state of computer graphics today, and where will it go? This is easy to answer in that all one needs to do is visit the nearest cinema or playe the latest video game. When I started this book – 1996 – photorealistic computer images were a novelty and this was shortly after the premiere of Toy Story and Apollo 13. Seven years passed since then and computer graphics (CG) is common place everywhere. Eye candy movies like Final Fantasy, Lord of the Rings and Shrek all show the triumph of this young branch of mathematical science. This rapid advancement also left its footprint on the demoscene as you will soon find out.

Raytraced robot, Karter’s picture from 1996.

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

– Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the US Patent Office, 1899

3. Music for our ears

Electronic music. The first thing that comes to mind, for most people, is perhaps the beeping of a quartz watch, or some cacophonic machine music. This stereotype is incorrect. However, several decads ago, this was electronic music.

What is sound? It’s an oscillation of pressure in the transmitting agent – air – spreading as a wave. Our ears process this wave as neural signals, and our brains decide whether this sound is pleasant or not. Since sound is a wave, it can be represented with a numeric value, the hertz, meaning the number of oscillations per second. The longer the distance between the travelling waves, the lower the sound is. Human ears can sense sound in the spectrum between 20 Hz and 20 kHz; under this range is the infrasonic, beyond it is the ultrasonic spectrum. The normal middle A sound is 440 hertz.

The simplest electronic sound device is a speaker, which beeps upon receiving a certain electric pulse or tension. The amount of tension controls the pitch of the sound. Such primitive “synthesizers” can be used, for example, in quartz watches, or medical devices. The emitted sound can be plotted as a curve: a simple beeping draws a regular sine wave on the screen of the oscillator. But if we continuously alternate the electric tension, synchronized to the air pressure oscillation of the original sound, we can almost entirely reproduce the original sound, like human speech. This was already discovered by Thomas Edison Alva, the inventor of the phonograph (1878) and telephones, also took advantage of this fact. The phonograph, and its successor, the gramophone recorded the vibration of air on wax drums or ceramic discs, by an analogue method. Magnetic sound recording was first achieved in 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen, Danish engineer, who later also constructed the first radio transmitter which was capable of broadcasting music. There were no digital sound recording means until the advent of computers, but all the methods and techniques we nowadays use in our computers, were already around decades earlier. It only took a sensible step to unify these methods under digital control, and replace some of them by digital means.

Pierre Boulez, French composer and conductor first presented his composition, Répons in 1981, in Donauschweig, West Germany. Two special computers took place among the musicians, equipped with conventional instruments. This is the computer marked 4X, which had eight independent, programmable digital sound channels. It was designed by Pierre Boulez and Andrew

The basic principles of sound sampling and storage were laid in 1948 by Claude E. Shannon, American physicist at Bell Research Laboratories. According to this axiom, any complex wave, consisting of several components of different frequency, can be unequivocally represented with a single line of numbers. These numbers specify either the amplitude values of the wave in a given band, or the series of subfrequencies. (This is what they specify in hertz.) Sampling frequency should be twice as much as the wave’s bandwidth. We use this principle every time when we record a sound sample with our computer, but also compact discs couldn’t exist without Shannon’s thesis.

CDs also store the sound by digital means, converted to numbers, which are stored as microscopic pits on their surface. The pits fall in a spiral line on the entire surface of the round disc, almost five kilometers long. Not only music, but any other digital signal can be stored this way, even computer data, programs, like on CD-ROM discs.

During electronic sound processing, digital signals have to be converted to analogue to play them, but also conversely, sound to be recorded has to be made digital. Two simple devices serve for these tasks in computers: the AD (Analogue-Digital) converter, which interprets the analogue electric signal as a set of numbers, and the DA converter, which is responsible for the opposite operation.

Special musical computer in the eighties, in the laboratory of professor Max V. Matthews. The device consisted of a custom built sensor, a regular personal computer and a digital synthesizer. The sensor is the rectangular surface. Hitting the surface with the drumstick, the place and strength of the beat controlled the strength and the spatial ilusion of the sound..

The DA converter creates a series of electric impulses from the amplitude samples. Often it’s also enhanced with a special filter, converting it into a continuous wave before bringing out the sound. The digital signal is stored in binary, in 16 or 8-bit format. CD quality is achieved by 16-bit storage, as 15 bit sound depth is already noiseless for the average human hearing. But as Max V. Matthews and John R. Pierce, electronic instrument researchers at Bell Institute wrote for Scientific American in 1988: “16-bit sound recording is still not sufficient to perfectly and noiselessly reproduce neither rock, nor symphonic music, but the sound quality is substantially better than that of the conventional magnetophones or records.” DA and AD converters were a development of Bell Laboratories, at the beginnings of the sixties.

As we see, electronic sound recording has reached its today form, as everyday users see, decades ago. But sound synthesis, computer imitation of sounds is still in its infancy. Theoretically we can say that if the computer can generate the necessary series of numbers, any sound, even a never heard one, can be created. This theory is correct, but nobody actually knows, what numbers and how should we combine to create a pleasant sound. Most sounds, when converted into digital form, result a totally chaotic sequence of numbers, not reproducible by any mathematical means. According to the transformation theory of the famous 19th century French physicist, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, any complex sound can be broken down to sine waves, but the number of these waves might be infinite. This theory can be harnessed when modifying the pitch of a sound: the wave can be “disassembled” into sine components, decrease or increase the frequency of these sines, and then “reassemble” the sound. This is called the Fourier-transformation.

The physics of sound of conventional instruments was not discussed by science till the invention of electronic sound experiments, and its literature was very limited. The researchers had little help. For example, for a while they believed that to define a musical sound, it’s enough to record the stationary points of the wave, but later they found that the attack and decay phase is much more important.

If we connect the peak points of a sound graph, we get a sack-like shape, which represents the tone of the sound. This is the envelope. A suddenly advancing and slowly flattening envelope results in a sharp, striking sound with a long falloff, regardless of the wave oscillation inside the envelope. The sound is characterized by the envelope itself. Many simple sound generator chips – like the SID in the Commodore 64 – use envelope generators to modify the generated sound.

Most musical chips can create four different waveforms. The simple sine wave generates the “classic” beeping. (The Commodore 64 SID is not a good example, as it can’t create a sine, but, for example, Yamaha OPL chips can.) Triangle waves, which appear as a zigzag, appear as a harmonic, pleasant sound, similar to a flute. Sawtooth waves create a resonant, rich and clear strain, similar to a cello or a concertina. Square waves are somewhat like an “angular sinus”, emitting a pulsating sound. Such simple sound generation methods are already the past, however, sometimes they are still used in cellular phones and cheap quartz watches.

No serious improvements were achieved on the field of sound synthesis till 1965, the studies of the French musician and physicist, Claude Risset. During his work with the devices of Bell Institute, Risset discovered how can he create and analyze well sounding, lifelike electronic instrument voices. First he experimented with brass. He coded a program that generated a numeric sequence, which he believed to be close to the amplitude peaks of a trumpet. But the sound it produced did not even resemble it. Then Risset recorded the sound of a real trumpet, and analyzed its spectrum. He observed that the timbre changed during the sound: high frequency overtones were much stronger, had a higher amplitude in the middle of the wave, than at the beginning. Now, when he produced a sound with the computer, with its high frequency overtones intensifying, reaching the acme in the middle, he received a very accurate sound, which an average listener was unable to tell from a real trumpet. So, Risset discovered that the stationary frequency spectrum is not enough to precisely describe the tone. To synthesize a given sound, one also has to know how the timbre is changing during playing, how different overtones run up and fall off. He found that overtones are sounded for different times, and this is of capital importance. Risset’s studies founded the science of artificial sound generation.

The most common method of sound synthesis is the so-called additive synthesis. By this technique, also invented by Claude Risset, first they create the overtones one by one, enabling them to have their own, unique frequency and envelope, and then add them up, this way getting the synthetic sound. This is a very efficient method, it is possible to generate the non-hamonic overtones of a piano, or the typical sound of church bells by it. But it is a very expensive and slow method, and this is why we will probably never see additive sound cards in computer shops. Tones contain a lot of overtones, and it takes a lot of time to calculate them all. However, there is a simpler, hence less efficient method of additive synthesis, invented by John M. Chowning, researcher of Stanford University. It is called frequency modulation synthesis, or FM for short. Despite it’s a simpler method, it’s somewhat sounds more complicated. This method requires at least two oscillators, operating simultaneously. One generates the so-called carrier wave, while the other the modulator wave. Usually these are both sines, and their attack and decay is controlled by envelope generators. The frequency of the carrier wave is continously shifted by the value given by the amplitude of the modulator wave. Accordingly, the carrier’s frequency is not constant, but the addition of the average frequency of itself, and the modulator’s outgoing signal. By increasing the modulator signal’s amplitude, the number and strength of high frequency overtones also increase.

The MAtrix 32, the other computer of Boulez and Gerzso. It transmitted high frequency signals, coming from the soloists, to the 4X, and from there to the speakers

For example, if the envelope of the modulator attacks slower than the carrier’s, then the high frequency overtones reach their stationary amplitude values near the peak slower, and this results in a sound very similar to brass instruments. If we tried to synthesize the same sound with simple wave generators, we needed ten individual oscillators and envelope generators, instead of two. That’s why FM synthesis costs a fraction of any other method, and this is why it was initially applied in cheap computer sound cards in the early computing days. The first commercially available FM synthesizer was the IBM Music Feature card for the PC, sporting a Yamaha OPL-1 chip. The Yamaha OPL-2 was used in its successor, the Adlib, which later Creative Labs enhanced with a DA/AD converter, and introduced as the Sound Blaster. After so many years of advancement, FM is still around.

Wavetable synthesis was meant to be a successor of FM. It was a somewhat makeshift solution, which actually created really lifelike sounds. Some synthesizer manufacturers, taking advantage of the fall of memory module prices in the middle of the eighties, started building synthesizers that stored short sound samples of actual instruments, and assembled the music by playing these samples with a variating pitch. For each instrument they also saved the sound’s envelope. This proved to be much better than FM, however, it still did not produce perfect sound. Most likely we will not see a method for generating lifelike artificial music anytime soon, if ever. Wavetable synthesis was widely used by PC sound cards for a while. The best example is probably the Gravis Ultrasound from Advanced Gravis, Canada, which was the number one sound board of the PC scene for years.

Today’s computer sound, which we hear day by day, like the music and effects of computer games, are all digitized samples. Arranged and played back by the sound cards DA converter. Most programs don’t generate artificial sound any more, but simply play recorded sound. It is much easier to handle, as it has no restrictions for the programmers. , And since the upper limit of data storage is practically unlimited it is not a problem to store the tremendous amount of sampled sound data. For this reason, sound cards that are capable of sound generation are already fading out of fashion – often we can’t find neither FM chips, nor wavetable generators on today’s sound boards – and only digital recording and replaying matters. Today only a few computer musicians take advantage of sound generators, but often even they don’t use special hardware., Most of today’s computers can generate those sounds by software means which required special chips a few years ago. However, professional musicians still claim that only hardware generated music sounds clear, and software is for wimps.

While we are on the subject of computer music, let’s not forget the MIDI standard which was defined at the beginning of the eighties in Japan. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was originally introduced to standardize data traffic between different digital synthesizers. But as computers advanced, and their music capabilities grew, especially with the mass proliferation of sound cards at the beginning of the nineties, the MIDI standard was extended to incorporate data communication between computers and synthesizers. By connecting a computer and a synthesizer, what we get is an intelligent instrument, which can store and modify the sequence of key presses – that is, music itself. In fact, most synthesizers can do it without computers nowadays, but computers still offer valuable help on many fields and can solve a couple of tasks that would require expensive studio equipment or more instruments.

part 2

the C64

“… hacking AT&T cards and PBX’s to make these expensive calls for free … cheating with stamps so you could use them over and over and over again for your swapping. Opening the borders … what a hack … the guy that came up with that has deserved my infinite respect. Same thing with FLD, FLI … doing stuff with that machine that even the C64 engineers never thought were possible. Groups with these incredibly arrogant attitudes: Censor, Legend, you gotta hate them … but now they’re gone and I miss them. Do you remember that demo, where you had to rub a wet finger against the joystick port? Geez … imagine that on a PC. Cutting open disks that were folded double in the mail, stuffing them in your abused diskdrive … and they’d still work … Beeing disappointed, if you got wares that were released more than 3 days ago. ”

– Deiy/Itsari

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.

- Ken Olson, Chairman and Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977

1. The “Commy” and her great family

It all started in the late forties, when a young Polish man, Idek Tramielski, survivor of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp, emigrated to the United States. In his new homeland he changed his name to Jack Tramiel. As he had no profession and no job, he volunteered with the US Army at the beginning of the fifties, where he received mechanical repairman training, which included general knowledge of repairing typewriters. Soon Tramiel became the general man of all work of Fort Dix, he quickly and skilfully repaired all kinds of jammed office equipment. Later in the civilian life he made good use of this knowledge, when he opened his own typewriter repair workshop in Bronx, New York. He spent all the day in the workshop, and during the night he worked as a cab driver. Later he moved to Canada, and signed a contract which led to assembling Czech typewriters in large quantities. He expanded his little Bronx workshop to a larger company by setting up a manufacturing plant in Toronto. This new company became known as: Commodore International. He picked Commodore because he wanted the company to be named after a high military rank, but General, Admiral and all such names were already taken.

Tramiel is remembered as a very aggressive businessman. Soon Commodore International typewriters were leading the market. Tramiel recognized the great business opportunity, and soon he started to design and build machines on his own, for which he acquired another manufacturing plant in Berlin. These were the times when the cheap Japanese adding machines were introduced, and Tramiel found new possibilities in this field. He immediately started to design the first adding machines on his own, but an unexpected event proved to be a large obstacle. A member of the management and banker of the company, already called Commodore Business Machines, C. Powell Morgan forgot to pay five million dollars of outstanding debt. He died just a few days before the court hearing of leukemia, so he avoided the consequences, but it wasn’t to the advantage of Commodore or Jack Tramiel. The company’s incomes decreased, and the views of Tramiel started to turn dark.

The company was saved by a Canadian investor, Irving Gould, who purchased a major percentage of Commodore for a membership in the board of directors. The new management, now led by Tramiel and Gould tried to penetrate the market of adding machines. But they didn’t stand much chance against the overwhelming Japanese competition. As a last ditch effort, Gould recommended Tramiel to travel to Japan for a field trip. Tramiel did so, and it worth the try. He saw a great novelty in Japan, the first electronic calculator. Commodore responded quickly, and they introduced their calculators before the Japanese. These machines were so perfect that it took years until Sir Clive Sinclair, later the designer of the ZX Spectrum microcomputer, first found a way to perfect the construction by making the calculator smaller. The first Commodore calculators used Bowmar light emitting diode displays and Texas Instruments integrated circuits. But soon Texas Instruments recognized the success of these calculators, and put the same machines in production for half the price of Commodore since they could utilize their own chips in the design. TI won the price race, the price of calculators fell and it caused almost a fifty million dollars loss for Commodore who had storages racks from floor to ceiling with these high priced calculators. This lesson taught Tramiel and Gould an important lesson about ordering key components from potential competitors. Gould saved the company once more with three million dollars worth of stock offering which enabled Commodore to buy Metal Oxyde Semiconductor Technology (MOS or MosTek). MOS was a chip and semiconductor manufacturing company in 1976. In addition to MOS, Commodre also acquired some other smaller companies, like the Los Angeles microprocessor plant named Frontier and a manufacturer of liquid crystal displays called MDSA, But MOS was the most important of all, especially their research department, MosTek, and the yet unknown, but brilliant chip engineer, Chuck Peddle. This same year Tramiel liquidated their plant in Toronto and moved it to the Bahamas where lower local taxes made decreasing prices possible. What we might consider the early days of off shoring.

Commodore had a wide product palette of almost everything running on electric power. On this picture we can see two Commodore walkie-talkies, two calculators, a military radio and two electric adding machines. Photo: George Page

One year before Commodore acquiring MosTek, Peddle and his team were working on enhancements of the Motorola 6800 processor. The first result was the MOS 6501 chip, which was fully compatible with the 6800, even its pin layout was identical. Motorola successfully sued the small company for violating the industrial form protection of their chip. Now MOS was to pay 100,000 dollars of compensation, and was just about to run bankrupt. Tramiel’s Commodore buyout of MOS had arrived at the right time. MOS continued their research and finished a new chip in 1976 which was named the MOS 6502. Later this became one of the most successful chips of computer history. Peddle immediately found it possible for Commodore to build a computer driven by this chip. According to the legend, Peddle met Tramiel on a corridor of the company headquarters and briefly told him about the idea. Tramiel didn’t even stop, he just passed by, and said: “Build it!” These words signed the beginning of the history of Commodore computers.

Different Commodore PET models on the exhibition of an American vintage computer collector club. In the foreground there is a Commodore 64 CMB-64-2 and a SX-64. Photo: George Page

At the time there were no cheap computers on the market. Tramiel invented a simple, but effective slogan for the introduction of the new PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) computer: Computers for the masses, not the classes! The first PET, equipped with 8K of memory, was quickly crafted to be displayed on the 1977 Chicago Consumer Electronics Show. Chuck Peddle worked on the prototype for three days without rest before the exhibition. The new computer immediately scored new merchandising records. The next day after the show, Commodore received over fifty large quantity orders and PET became the first widespread personal computer. If you were watching the TV show “Dallas” back then you could see a PET computer in Jockey’s office. The PET looked somewhat like an 80’s PC or a terminal of that time. It had a built-in black and white cathode ray monitor and keyboard. It had no sound, and used a built-in magnetic tape unit. At the introduction it was priced 795 dollars, which was quite expensive, but as later Apple and Tandy engaged Commodore in a price race, the price of PET’s decreased to around 200 dollars.

There were a number of different PET versions which would require a long list go cover them all. Since this computer never played a role in the history of demoscene, we’ve decided to skip the details. It is the next generation of Commodore computer that played an important role in what became Commodore the compuer company and the history of home computing.

During the late seventies, the demand for cheap home computers was increasing worldwide. There was a certain need for low cost, easy to use machines, which still provided features to enjoyable to the user. There were already some such computers on the drawing boards in Japan. But Jack Tramiel suddenly slammed his fist to the table on a management conference of Commodore, and cried out: “The Japanese is coming, so we must become the Japanese!” The result of this battle cry was the VIC20 computer inroduced in 1981. This was the predecessor of the Commodore 64. The name VIC designated the Video Interface Chip, a newly developed graphics processor (the 6560/61), which was the video controller of Commodore computers.

The first version of the VIC20, and the VIC10001, designed for Japanese export, supporting kanji characters. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

The VIC20 was a simple little machine. As you can see on the picture, it was shaped like a portable typewriter. Its operating system and BASIC interpreter, just like in every CBM 8-bit computer, was stored in the ROM. It had a clock speed of 1.1 MHz, which really can’t be considered lightning fast nowadays, but actually it performed better than Intel’s 4 MHz 8088 because the MOS 6502 was able to execute more than one instruction in a processor cycle. The computer had different graphical and text video modes. In text mode the screen was displaying 22 × 23 characters, in graphics mode it had a 176 × 184 pixel resolution. It was even able to generate sound and music by three independent sound channels, one of which was a white noise channel. Its optional storage device was the VIC-1540 floppy drive. A 300 baud modem and a matrix printer were also available. To make the produce available to the masses it sold for a mere 300 dollars upon introduction. Cheap enough for the masses. Soon after its introduction Commodore building 9,000 VIC20’s a day.

The computer was renamed to VC20 in Germany. Officially this was an abbreviation for Volkscomputer, or people’s computer, just like Volkswagen. But unofficially some it said that it was the German language that forced them to change the name. The original name, VIC was to be pronounced as fick, in Germany, which is not accidentally so similar to the English fuck. This was not the first such problem of Commodore, they faced the same with PETs in France, because pêt in French means fart. As for the VIC20, there was an idea to call it Commodore Spirit, but they dropped it for the sake of the Japanese customers. The word spirit has a different meaning in Japan, then in the Western culture where it means a haunting ghost, which is terrifying for the Japanese. In the end it was decided to call the new computer VIC, and Michael Tomczyk, Jack Tramiel’s personal assistant, added “20”, because, as he said, the name VIC “sounds like a truck driver’s name”.

Production of the VIC20 lasted until 1985. There were slightly different models of the machine, but the only model making a true difference to the original VIC20 1 was the VIC20 4 which was built with the keyboard of the old PET 2001 model. This model, also referred as VIC10, was sold in Japan. During the first year, till the end of 1982 the VIC20 brought 305 million dollars in sales for Jack Tramiel’s company.

A little known fact that is Commodore wanted to launch a new series of PET computers after 1982 called the SuperPET. Had this been done we probably would have never seen the legendary Commodore 64 or the future CBM microcomputers. These computers, also called CBM-II models, were planned to be introduced in two versions: the B (Business) for the office, and the P (Private) for home use. The development of these computers didn’t run smoothly, and serious errors in the ROM-based operating system brought the project to a standstill. Meanwhile VIC20 and the Commodore 64 stole the wind from the sail of the CBM-II and so the project was abandoned. If this had not happen we’d likely have a different home computer history.

The VIC20 was a true world success and it didn’t need much development to introduce its successor, the Commodore 64 in 1982. And this machine became most successful computer in history. It did for computers like what Volkswagen Bug did for the car market. This new machine was small, comfortable, cheap, and did everything one could possibly expect. The Commodore 64 was built exclusively from parts developed and manufactured by Commodore Business Machines. Its main development engineer was Shiraz B. Shivji. The prototype was originally called the VIC30, but it was changed as they didn’t want the customers to believe it’s just a new version of the VIC20, which was already widely considered obsolete due to aggressive TV commercials from rival Texas Instruments touting its TRS-80 (often known as Trash 80) home computer.

The first C64’s casing and keyboard were identical to the VIC20’s. It was driviven by the MOS 6510 CPU with almost 1 MHz clock speed. The little computer had 64 kilobyte of memory, of which BASIC programs could use 38k which was a lot at the time. The C64 also incorporated the new SID (Sound Interface Device) sound chip developed by Bob Yannes. This was the first true musical chip developed for home computers. It handled three independent sound channels, and since it took the job of handling all sound related calculations, it relieved the CPU for general calculations. Later they discovered a fourth, non-documented sound channel, which was capable of generating white noise. This was used by several famous game programs, including one of the most successful of all times, Impossible Mission from Epyx.

The first version of the Commodore 64. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

The C64 screen had 40x25 character resolution in text mode, and 320x200 pixels in graphics mode, both with 16 colors. The new VIC-II chip supported many great features on hardware level, among them handling sprites, scrolling the graphical screen, and so on. But there was a problem with the difference between the European and American television standards. PAL was used in Europe and NTSC in the US. and for this reason Commodore was forced to equip the Commodore 64s sold in Europe with a different VIC. This led to incompatibility between American and European Commodore 64s, a program written for one version of C64 did not run properly on the other if at all. Later we’ll see how this difference influenced the development of the scene.

The C64 had almost unlimited expansion capabilities. It used two basic storage units: the so-called Datassette, a magnetic tape unit using everyday tape cassettes – also used by the VIC20 – and the Commodore 1541 intelligent floppy drive, using 5.25" floppy disks. A few years later Commodore also developed a modified 1541-II version. Both models were single-sided drives, so the disks were to be formatted on both sides, and if the running program reached the end of the data stored on a side, the user had to flip the disk manually. The main advantage of the 1541 was that it had its own intelligent controlling circuitry with a MOS 6502 chip so it was able to work independently of the CPU. The programmer only needed to send the appropriate instructions to the drive and it automatically performed the necessary tasks, like formatting a disk, without slowing the computer itself down. Unfortunately the price for this flexibility was that Commodore had to ignore all industrial standards and develop a nonstandard connection between the C64 and the 1541, which made data transfer very slow.

Manuals of the most common Commodore 64 storage units. Just like the comuter itself, these units were also made in many different versions.

This intelligent and independent unit was inspiring users to try several interesting programming tricks. One of them exploited the possibility of driving the electric stepper motor of the read-write head track by track. The head gave a different pitched crack over every track, and it had a different sound during reading and writing. By dragging the head with a program, it was possible to compose primitive music. Some programmers even tried to make the SID’s sound stereo by using this as a “fifth sound channel”.

Programs were sold not only on tape cassette and floppy disks, but also on ROM expansion cards called cartridges. They were tiny circuit panels in plastic casing, which the user had to plug into the computer’s special expansion port. Technically it was not exactly a program, but a hardware expansion. The user, however, saw the same thing on the screen, as if he loaded a program from a conventional storage unit. Mostly system utilities, file managers, machine code monitors were sold on cartridges, and some games, because cartridges did not have a long loading time, they started immediately, as the user plugged them in, and turned on the computer. More often than not the serious C64 gamers had an EPYX or similar, Fastloader cartridge plugged into their expansion slot to speed up the floppy drive load time.

The good old startup screen.

The C64 had an RS-232 serial port, a composite video signal out for the monitor, but one could also connect it to a television instead, just like its ancestor. It also had a so-called user port, where advanced users could connect their own designed hardware units. Two digital joystick ports were found on the right side of the case. Its operating system incorporated a BASIC 2.0 interpreter which was developed by Microsoft. It was also possible to connect a 2,400 baud modem, a green or a color monitor, and a dot matrix printer.

According to nonofficial sources, Commodore sold 17 million Commodore 64’s, when considering all models, but other sources have suggested that figure is closer to 22 million. These sales led Commodore to earn over 700 million dollars in 1983 which resulted in 88 million dollars in profits. Commodore has never officially confirmed these numbers. The very successful C64 computer was developed further resulting in several different models. The following versions entered production:

CBM-64 1 – This was the original version. It looked like a VIC20, with beige casing and keys.

CBM-64 2 – The “classic” C64, with brown casing and black keys. It was identical to the first version in other aspects.

CBM-64 3 – The keyboard was modified to make it more comfortable by making the keys’ surface concave.

CBM-64 4 – Was built with a microswitch keyboard for Japanese export. Some sources say this model was identical with the C64 Max model.

Commodore SX-64. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

C64 Aldi – This was a rare version. It was only sold in Germany, and there only in the “Aldi” supermarkets, under the name Commodore 64 Game Systembut this model was not the “real” Commodore 64 Game System. The computer was all beige, like the VIC20, and the keys where white. Sometimes the label on the bottom of the case read “Commodore 16”, which was a failed Commodore computer introduced years later but the C16s were never beige but dark brown and black. The C64 Aldi version had the MOS 8500 processor, which was later built into the CBM64C-1 and the C128. The user port of the Aldi models were usually faulty, most likely that’s why they only marketed it for the gaming oriented customers, who surely never tried to use this port.

Commodore C64 C-2. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

SX-64 – This was a completely redesigned Commodore 64, also referred as the “portable Commodore”. It wasn’t built into the usual plastic casing, but a larger, suitcase-like box. It had a detached keyboard, a built-in 1541 drive, and 5" wide color monitor. It was even possible to install a second 1541. The model containing two drives by default was introduced as the DX-64, but never sold. The SX model was sold in large quantities as a business computer. The model name SX refers to “Single-Drive Executive”. There was another version called the SX-100, but it was extremely rare. It was identical to the SX-64, but had a black and white screen, and had its cartridge port on its top, and not its backside. A double drive version was also planned, designated DX-100, but not even a prototype was built. The SX-100 was meant as a cheaper version of the SX-64.

CBM-64C1 – When the Commodore 128 was introduced the old C64 also got a new casing. The old “breadbox” design was replaced with a new one, somewhat similar to the C128. The SID chip was slightly modified, and the MOS 6510 CPU was replaced with the fully compatible MOS 8500.

Commodore C64G. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

CBM-64C 2 – The graphical characters which were printed to the side of the keys now got on the top of them.

Educator 64 1 – This model was very rare, as there wasn’t too much demand for it. It was built into the old PET 64’s casing and it was identical to the CBM-64C 1. It was used as a school computer. The internals were actually warrantyrepaired C64 mainboards, and the cases were the leftovers of the old PET parts stock. The Educator was not a big market hit, but it wasn’t the goal anyway. These machines were blown out for the American schools on a dumping price, so the company got rid of the repaired motherboards and empty PET cases without financial loss. There is an explanation for why did they use PET cases. It was recommended by the Ministry of Education of New York State, because the students often stole the conventional C64S from the schools, since they fit into their backpacks. Educator’s dimensions solved the problem.

Commodore C64 Max. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

Educator 64 2 – A redesigned model. Now the Educators were built into the newer PET 4000 casing, and came with a built-in green CRT monitor. Some functions were disabled, but it was identical to its predecessor.

C64G – G stands for Game. This model entered the market in 1989, as the Commodore 64 Supergame System, with a simple joystick and a quite boring game cartridge bundled. It had a grey “breadbox” casing, and it was actually a CBM64-C. This was the only C64 model that had a green power LED, all the others had red.

C64 Max – It appeared in 1982. It was built for Japanese export, so it only had an NTSC version. Its memory management scheme was different from the original. It had a membrane keyboard. This model was also known as Ultimax, Vickie, or VC10. The Max was a flop, only a few thousand were sold, hence it’s one of the rarest models. According to the original plans, it was to include four built-in utility programs, a word processor, a spreadsheet utility, a database manager and a drawing utility, plus a talking dictionary with 256 words. Finally only the prototype had these specialities, retail ones didn’t. The idea of built-in programs was later brought out again with the Plus/4.

Commodore C64GS. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

CBM C64GS – The game console version of the Commodore 64, which appeared at the end of the eighties. It had 16 kilobyte of memory, and had no BASIC interpreter, keyboard or expansion ports, except for a cartridge bay and a TV out connector. GS refers to Game System. This was another tremendous flop: 80,000 units were built, but only a quarter of them were sold. The rest were disassembled, and their parts were used in C64G machines. There was also a version marked CGS, only sold in Ireland. This also had a keyboard, the standard connectors, and even the BASIC compiler, which displayed V4 version number upon booting. It’s unclear what C in in CGS was supposed to mean, probably it stood for Computer.

The Commodore 64 naturally wasn’t the last Commodore machine. After its overwhelming success Commodore kept creating new microcomputers before their new gem, the 16-bit Amiga computer took the lead. The later 8-bit Commodore models did not attract serious scene activities, but still we have to discuss some of them. Many feel nostalgic thinking back to their old computers which they had decades ago. Nowadays, when gigahertzes and 64 bit multimedia supercomputers are everyday, many wish the good old C64, Plus/4, ZX Spectrum were back, depending who remembers which as “the” computer of their childhood.

The immediate successor of the Commodore 64 was the Commodore 128. It was compatible with the Commodore 64, and even worked in C64 mode if one typed the command GO64. It had 128 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 640K. It never reached the success of its predecessor. The C128 had more memory and faster download buffering and this made it superior to the 64 in the role of a modem computer. Its operating system had a V7 BASIC interpreter, its text screen was able to use 80 × 25 character resolution. There was even a Commodore 128D version, a so-called “diesel”, which had built-in floppy drive and detached keyboard. A metal cased version of this, equipped with a cooling fan was introduced as the C128DCR. The C128 was not using the 1541 floppy drive any more but the new 1571, which was able to emulate 1541 mode even though on occasion this emulation was not perfect. The unique feature of this floppy drive is it was a double-sided drive which meant the user did not needed to flip the disk so long as the disk was formatted by or for the 1571 as a double sided disk. Single sided floppies (e.g. 1541 floppies) still needed to be flipped to read data on the opposite side of the floppy.

The Commodore 128 had a hidden message inside, a so-called easter egg. This message appeared for the SYS 32800,123,45,6 command. It displayed six names, the developers of the computer, and an anti-war slogan: Link arms, don’t make them.

The C128 scored a fantastic world record on the graphics field although this was not an achievement of Commodore but rather a Swiss hardware developer company, Combo AG. By using their hardware expansion named Graphic Booster, the C128 was capable of handling 720 × 720 pixel resolution with 65,000 colors – and this was back in 1984!

During 1984 Irving Gould and Jack Tramiel had a dispute about the future of Commodore. They never told what the quarrel was about, but finally Gould, as the main shareholder, removed Tramiel from the presidential chair of the company. Years later Tramiel only said that he wanted to expand the company’s activities, and Gould did not. Tramiel left the company on Friday the 13th in January 1984.

The Commodore 128 and 128D. The DCR looked exactly like the D, except for missing a cooler grate on the backside. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

The next Commodore computer, the Plus/4, originally called the C-264, was not a great success. This one had 64 kilobytes of memory, of which BASIC programs could use 60. It was capable of handling 128 colors in graphics mode, which consided of 16 colors on 8 intensity levels each. Actually this was only 121 colors, because one of these 16 was black, and it was black on all intensities. The CPU was the MOS 7501 and 8501 in later versions. These chips were fully 6502/6510 compatible. The sound chip was integrated into this CPU, but was weaker than the famous C64 SID, it handled only two sound channels and one white noise channel. The BASIC interpreter was largely enhanced, it already handled graphical commands, windowing, and contained a machine code monitor called TEDmon. The TED stood for Text Editing Device, it was a ROM-based software bundle, containing four simple, but quite unusable utilities: a word processor, a spreadsheet, a drawing program and a file manager, or in some versions a database software. Although many customers liked the Plus/4, it was a failure in the market. The older Commodore 64 was it’s deadly competition. It barely sold in the United States and Western Europe although it was very successful in some Eastern European socialist countries like Hungary.

Commodore Plus/4. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

The rarest Commodore microcomputer, almost unknown for even collectors and hardware gurus is the Commodore LCD. Some also call it the Commodore 64 Laptop, but that’s wrong since this computer has nothing to do with the C64. Only five of these computers were built and these were never sold in stores. Not even a photo was taken of it, except for a few released for the press by Commodore. Only one single unit survived to our present days, which is now owned by Bil Herd, former lead engineer of Commodore.

The CBM LCD was introduced on the Las Vegas Computer Electronics Show in 1985. It was a portable laptop computer, powered by either the main power supply or an 1.5 V nickel-cadmium battery. Its processor was the Rockwell 65C102 with 32 KB of RAM. The flip-top display was a monochrome LCD panel capable of 480 × 128 pixels graphical and 80 × 16 characters text mode resolution. Actually the text mode screen was 25 lines high so the user had to scroll the contents to see everything. It also had 96K of CMOS ROM which contained a text editor, a spreadsheet software, an address book, an agenda, a calculator, a file manager, a 3.6 version BASIC interpreter, a machine code monitor and a terminal emulator. Its keyboard had 72 keys, different from the original C64s. A 300 baud modem was built in. The connection interfaces list was the following: a Commodore serial port, an RS-232 serial port, a Centronics printer port, expansion port, Hewlett-Packard compatible barcode reader interface, and the modem’s telephone interface. The planned price of the laptop was 1300 dollars, but for some reason it never made it to production. Commodore decided to manufactured the C64 SX instead. An external 3.5“ floppy drive, the 1561 was also displayed at the show.

The Commodore LCD was first introduced in Commodore Microcomputers Magazine, in March/April 1985. Picture courtesy of Cameron Kaiser and Anthony Beckett, Secret Weapons of Commodore.

The line of Commodore’s 8-bit computers ended with the C364, better known as the C16, a simplified version of the Plus/4. It was a dead born design, with only 16K memory and no expansion possibilities at all. It was sold as an office computer, but utterly failed. The C16 was shaped similar to the old Commodore 64 models with dark brown casing and grey keys. The more advanced and smaller C116 was introduced, but sold in very little amounts. This shaped the Plus/4, but was smaller. No further 8-bit computers were introduced by Commodore after this.

However, there was the very interesting plan of the Commodore 65. The C65 was never sold in shops and only a small series were ever built. These computers existed only in storage until the liquidation of Commodore Business Machines when they were taken away. It was most likely the the acquisition and release of the Amiga 1000 which ended the career of this promising computer. The C65 was a machine with 128 KB of RAM, expandable to 8 MB, with a built-in 3.5“ MFM drive, but it was able to handle both the 1541 and the 1571. The CPU was the MOS 4510, a successor of the 8510, which was a 8-bit chip, but able to handle some 16-bit instructions and variable types, like double word. The new VIC-III video chip was capable of 320, 640 or 1280 pixels horizontal and 200 or 400 pixels vertical resolution, with 8, 16 or 256 colors. The new, stereo SID was already capable of digital sound recording, along with four synthetic music channels. The BASIC compiler version was 10.0, and the computer itself was planned to be completely C64 compatible. This compatibility was something that didn’t work. Most of the few C65s still work nowadays and are owned by vintage computer collectors.

The Commodore 16 and the Commodore 116. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

The Commodore models displayed on these pages do not cover the entire, huge product range of the once glorious company. Each Commodore model had numerous versions, modifications, and dozens of interesting prototypes have never entered production. A separate book could be written about all of these but this book is about the history of the scene, so we’ll move on.

Our main topic is the Commodore 64, the best selling computer ever. Its history – although some would bury it already – still hasn’t ended An estimated 10–13 million C64s are still operating in the world. Countless ardent individuals built custom expansions for their favourite machines, and there are a good number of small workshops still developing this and that. An example is the expansion unit called SuperCPU, which turns the C64 into a 16-bit, 20 MHz computer, with 16 megabytes of RAM. Although not cheap: SCPUs were sold for 375 German marks at the end of 1996. The Swedish company Elektron introduced a music synthesizer called SIDStation in 1996, incorporating an array of MOS 6581 SID chips. They actually saved the chips for the first units from broken Commodore 64 computers. This synthesizer was made memorable by the German electro band Welle Erdball. Obsessed C64 fans might also know about Final Ethernet. A device that enables network connectivity, or IDE64, the hard disk and CD-ROM interface for the 64.

Commodore 65. Photo: Stefan Walgenbach

An operational C-One at Commodore Expo 2002, and a closeup on the mainboard itself. The C64 standing right from it is measuring the C-One’s speed. Behind this one, next to the power supply unit, the grey box is a SuperCPU. Photo: Raymond Day

The most interesting modern C64 development is the C-One, designed by the American engineer girl Jeri Ellsworth. Jeri’s ultimate goal was to build a modern 8-bit computer that is compatible with the C64, and on the other hand, it is powerful enough to meet the demands of the millennium. The prototype was completed in 2002, despite that the first one was once stolen along with Jeri’s car, and she had to start over.

The C-One is actually a kit, which can be built into an ATX PC case, and can be used with a regular PC keyboard, mouse and monitor. The main CPU is a 65c816 chip, compatible with the MOS 6502. Actually it’s a MOS 6502, enhanced with a new, 24 bit instruction set, the same that can be found in the SuperCPU. The machine’s bus clock runs on 50 MHz. Video is controlled by the 24 bit SuperVIC chip, which is naturally also compatible with the old VIC. It has 16 megabytes of video memory, it’s maximum resolution is 1280 × 1024 pixels with 256 colors. Screen management is aided by blitter (memory area copier) and a copper (coprocessor). The sound chip is called MonsterSID, compatible with its ancestor, but boasting 16 synthetic and 8 digital stereo sound channels. By default, the C-One has 32 MB RAM. The entire computer would be similar to an Amiga crossbred with a Commodore 64. The suggested retail price is $ 200, and is already available at some American and European vendors by the time this book is released.

Some screenshots of the Contiki GUI: the desktop and the web browser, showing Google.

Another very interesting Commodore 64 project is the Contiki operating system, a development of Adam Dunkels, researcher of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science at Kista, Sweden. It was first presented on the 10th of March 2003. Contiki is nothing but an 8-bit multitasking operating system, consisting of the following main parts: non-preemptive multitasking kernel, window oriented, programmable graphical user interface, customizable with predefined color schemes. It has a TCP/IP network management which means Internet connection through either FinalEthernet or the built-in serial port and a modem. In addition there is a telnet client, the world’s smallest web browser, and finally some screen savers. The entire system consumes 42 kilobytes of the 64 that’s available. It doesn’t use any storage unit, and it doesn’t use virtual memory (swap) so we don’t need a floppy drive to use it. The software can even be loaded from a datassette! If there are any working ones available. Let’s add that Contiki is portable can be recompiled on any computer and even while I’m writing this a set of new versions exist, or are being developed for different computers: Nintendo Entertainment System, PCEngine, Gameboy, Atari XL/XE, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, Apple II, VIC20, Commodore PET, Commodore Plus/4, Tandy CoCo, Sharp Wizard, Casio PocketViewer, Sega Dream-Cast and Sony Playstation. We can just hope that some software moguls will soon start to rethink if their bloated operating systems, which can only solve these tasks by consuming gigahertz and gigabytes. After spending billions of dollars on development are really as good as they can be?

While researching the history of Commodore machines, one can encounter dozens of enthusiastic developers, similarly oriented tech historians, hardware and software gurus. I first came across the name of Bil Herd while searching for the lost Commodore LCD machines which actually count as the Holy Grail among hardware collectors. Bil Herd was an engineer of Commodore and participated in the development of many legendary computers. One of the lost LCD machines is still collecting the dust in his basement. During an interview he revealed to us the world of the long abandoned laboratories of Commodore where some of the world’s finest computers were created.

When did you start working for Commodore?

I started working, for Commodore, around 1981 or 1982, somewhere in that timeframe. I started with the Commodore 64’s VIC chip, working on the fifth revision. Soon the seventh revision has just come out. I remember that, because everybody kept stealing everybody’s VIC chips in the lab, right out of the prototypes and such stuff, until I finally set out a tube of VIC chips.

Have you met the founding fathers, Jack Tramiel, David Gould, or the heroes of the company like Chuck Peddle, Bob Yannis? What was your personal impression about them?

I am not sure if Jack Tramiel has actually ever known my name, or that I worked for him. We had this thing called “Jack-attack”, that basically made all the middle management just disappear in a bloodbath. It was like an axe would come swinging around at a certain height, and few were just under that height, who worked effectively enough.

I remember, once it happened we were in a room with Jack, and he looked at the original TED, which we came to call the 116, or some other horrible thing. He said: “Eh, ten chips, I don’t like it, make it nine!” And I was the guy slipping out in the back of the room, to go implement whatever was he said to do. Even with the C128, he would be in the room, and he’d ask a question, you’d hear a voice from, from behind him, and that voice would be me going: “No, it works this way!” You know, but the managers would then kind of put a spin on it, and stuff, trying to turn it into English. So, you know, I knew Tramiel really well, there are all kinds of stories with him. And I also knew Irving Gould, because I was one of the guys who actually told him when something sucked. You know, I’ve been actually using language like that.

But when I really first talked with Jack Tramiel, it was after he left Commodore, and was already the CEO of Atari. We were at the CDL Show, a computer exhibition, and somebody called our booth on the phone, which I answered. There was a guy on the other end, one of our marketing people, and said: “Go over to the Atari booth, I want you to check something out!” “Do you know who you’re talking to? I don’t think I can really do that” – I replied. You know, the company had a rule against it, if you went there, you could lose your job, because there were a lot of people trying to switch companies at that time. But the guy on the phone seemed really stubborn. “Look, I don’t think this is too much to ask for, you go over and do what I said!” Well, OK, I don’t care, I thought, so I walked over to Atari, and I immediately got attracted to the crowd. There were all those people who used to run Commodore, now running Atari. The managers all came to me, including Jack Tramiel, and basically I got a job offer on the spot, to join Atari. Later my friend, Freddy Bowen said, this would have been when one would reach into the jacket and pull the pin on the grenade, a nice opportunity to get rid of all the management of the competition, sacrificing only one of us.

And did you switch?

No, I was not interested. I was pretty much the single guy, who was making consumer computers at Commodore.

But someday you just left Commodore.

Hidden message in the Commodore 128. The 1581 floppy drive also contained such an easter egg. Sending some undocumented commands to the unit returned special error messages, displayed the names of the drive’s designers, Greg Berlin and David Siracusa. Another commanc displayed a message from David Siracusa, dedicating his work to his wife, Lisa.

Yes. When I left Commodore, I was convinced that the writing was on the wall, and it pretty much was, it just took seven years to die – you know, five years after I left. The Amiga was coming out, but they had hacked a bunch of our research development, we couldn’t get anything done, and someone had made me an offer to be a director of a company doing machine vision systems. Later I found out how good Commodore really was, because we were a small group, but we had the power of this billion dollar company behind us. I called us a “little big company”. because, for example, the C128 was designed by four people. I did the hardware design, Dave Haynie and Frank Palaia did the chip design, while Fred Bowen and Terry Ryan wrote the kernel and the BASIC. We shared a couple of people working for us at various times, but the initial design came from four people. And so you start to think that you can do that, but when you get out to the real world, and you find that, you know, you can’t have chips made just because you’re a clever designer. We had a whole chip company at our disposal, anything we can think of! We could get anything designed if we made the right pitch for it.

So, it was a very craftily arranged, powerful design team.

Yes. Good people migrated to the top. You know who the good people were, because they were the guys who grabbed projects by the horns and run them through. Commodore was a tough place to work, if you had enough testosterone. You know, you got picked on, you got kind of pushed to the side, and you could either fight, or get out of the way. That environment created very good project leaders. I’ve never been to a college, I was only 23 when I started, but I knew how to fight, how to get things done my way or the other way. Now that I am older and wiser, I realize that I must’ve been wasting at least eighty percent of my energy by doing things inefficiently, compared to what I know today.

Do you think today’s young engineers will find such great teams? Do they have a future like you had?

I don’t think we’ll see another day when people will need to design new computers. Remember, we were designing the hardware of computers, all on our own. There wasn’t a standard. The only standard we had laying around was the Commodore 64 standard. We made the 128 compatible just to shut people up. But so, we were creating … Nowadays there are amazing things you can do with hardware. Lately in a three months time I could do what once took two years. Those were like the pioneer days of computers, and I don’t think that today’s beginners find that, they will not just sit down and design computers and release them to the world as we did back then.

So, is it forever lost?

I think so, however, someday there might be new things that I can’t predict. Nowadays, if you come up with a problem, you’ll write, and not solder an answer to it.

Were you like – let’s use this comparison – the first pilots of the jet age? Was it like, breaching the sonic barrier, but with computers?

Yeah, I think so. It is funny, because when I spoke at the Commodore Expo two years ago, I also compared ourselves to pilot jocks. You know, we had a kind of cocky attitude, but it was an attitude born of that we needed some confidence, or we’d freak out. In the hardware design area we were all very confident, cocky bunch of guys. Nowadays everything is a variation on a PC. It is not to say you can’t make a clever MP3 player or something, but you won’t design a computer you turn out to sell a million, for people to have it their homes.

Which projects have you been involved in?

Which projects? Well … I’ll try to give some chronological order here. When I first got to Commodore, I helped with some of the production problems of the Commodore 64. I kind of did that through out my career there. After the original C64 team was gone, there were some problems there, so I was helping with timing issues, DRAM issues. Literally on my first week I was helping to solve a DRAM issue. Then I got onto what was called the TED, which was our answer to the Sinclair. It later spawned into the 116, the 264 – the Plus/4 – and the 364 – C16 – computers. After that I designed the LCD machine’s original architecture. However, I didn’t see that one through, I handed that one to Jeff Porter, because I jumped over to the Commodore 128.

Here is the story behind the Plus/4. At the beginning it was supposed to be a low cost computer, and Jack Tramiel had said: “Let’s only have nine chips on it!” It turned out that the 116 actually had ten chips. I said: “You can tell Jack”, I said, “I put the tenth on it, because I needed a reset chip.” Before they put that real bad software in it, the Plus/4 was supposed to cost 99 dollars. After Jack left the company, all kind of funny things started to happen to the project. For example, the plastic was supposed to be flameproof, or, a round connector got turned into a square connector, and so on. Finally they came up with that Plus/4 software, and said, sell the machine $ 249. I said: “Wait a minute! It was designed to sell for $ 99!” But they said: “No, no! We want to sell this as a business machine!” Sure enough, it didn’t sell very well. In fact they basically only sold the Commodore badge. It would’ve been an outlet for $ 99, but they wanted to sell 40,000–50,000 pieces in nothing flat. If they’ve sold it as what it was meant to be, a low-cost computer, I think it would’ve done OK. It wasn’t Commodore 64 compatible, but it wasn’t meant to be. The TED chip was not meant to be a game machine, but a word processor chip. And you know, 121 colors, say, you can draw things, but it wasn’t meant to handle sprites, or be very good with sound, because it wasn’t a game machine. By the way, did you know there is an easter egg buried in the Plus/4? If you do a SYS to the hex value of CDAB, you’ll find a list coming up with our names, but there were no funny messages this time.

Which was your most interesting project, and the greatest success for your carreer?

Well, I am mostly known for the 128. The 128 did a couple things, besides of the Commodore 64 functionality. We were going to the Amiga, but nobody knew when we’d get there, and we needed to extend the 8-bit life a little bit. We built one of the first dual-processor machines, you know, there was a Z80 and a 6502 built into it. It handled 80 column and a 40 column resolution display simultaneously. We broke a lot of new ground. We actually made DRAMs working correctly for the first time, at least in Commodore’s history, where they were really soundly used. We designed a lot of custom ICs in a very short period of time. From the beginning to the end, the C128 took about 6 or 8 months. It had four or five custom ICs. And there was a lot of political battles that were fought in addition to the technical ones. So there was just a lot of ruffle about everything.

Commodore had numerous failed or cancelled projects, producing little known computers, the so-called “secret weapons of Commodore”. Could you tell us about the more unknown prototypes, including the Commodore LCD of course?

Oh, the LCD! It was really cool. You know, when Jeff Porter took it over, he was on to become the VP of engineering. He was the only guy among us who knew how to tie a tie, or wore a tie, so he was the perfect fit for a vice president. He talked to the managers, and did the best job anybody could, trying to get the thing to life. Him and another guy did the hardware, Hadley Davis did some devious software, and a number of other people – I remember Caroline and Andy Finkel – were working on it. But Jeff took it a bit … hmm … politicized. Well, he got it accepted by a lot of these different branch managers, he met with people, here and there, arranging like forty and fifty thousand of these things. And finally, it all got cancelled. There is a story behind that. I actually have an article hanging out on my office wall about it. Commodore’s current CEO, Marshall F. Smith met with the head of Tandy Computers. The article on my wall is about the release of Tandy’s LCD computer. The guy from Tandy told Marshall that there was no future in LCD machines. Hearing this, Marshall, whose claim was he’d been the famous president of US Deal, or something like that, cancelled the thing, in spite of Jeff Porter’s best efforts! Soon after the decision, that article came out, describing Tandy’s new LCD machine as the highest selling single product ever in Tandy’s history. The moral of the story was: why would you listen to your competitor?

Now, I remember, that time we were the only company that made LCD glass. We made our own screens, there was no other American LCD glass to be had out there. And it was pretty good, it actually had the highest density and resolution. The little blue and gold Tandy thing had like 32 columns by 24 text resolution, or something, we had 40 columns by 29 or something. This was in 1984. So I had the article sticked outside in my office, so everybody could see that. We had given up the LCD computer based on Tandy’s president, and theirs was their single best selling item. So, the story of the LCD was a real shame.

There was a project that has never even made it off the drawing board. We were a million years ahead of the current scene. We designed a device called the CD-ROM, which nobody has heard about yet. That time I talked about it with the guy from Mitsumi and then Sony actually came out with it.

Have you read the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? We were going get a couple of that LCD glass, and I wanted to build something like that Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, which we called a PIM, a Personal Information Manager. Of course, that would be a PDA today, but look how many years it took for the PDA to get accepted. We were trying to do that in 1984! About six years ago I was going to reuse some flip-wing binders. I wanted to use the label on the binder, I flipped it over, and on the back it was written PIM. So, there was my proof that twenty years ago we’ve tried to make this, like, design this thing for Commodore. So, there were some interesting things back then.

/ guess the LCD was the project you most regret never finishing.

Yes. Actually it was finished. The design was done, all we had to do was to make it. We had the prototypes.

Do you know what happened to the prototypes? One is with yo, but where are the other four?

I couldn’t tell. At the time I rescued mine from a junk pile. And that was a kind of common, see, things getting laid on the side. I might say Jeff has one, I would imagine Freddy Bowen got another. I am just guessing. Greg Berlin might also have one.

Did you know that these machines are now the most sought vintage computers in the world? There’s only one picture known about this machine, published on a flyer that Commodore sent to some user clubs.

If you look at that picture, by the way, you can see that the paint is peeling off at the mouse cable. You have to look at very closely. The reason is that we haven’t yet made a mouse of that color, and so we spray-painted the mouse. Of course the spray paint didn’t stick to the rubber coating of the mouse cable too well. So we had to place the mouse very carefully, and the paint was peeling even for the short time it took to shoot the picture. And if you take a look at that picture, you might even see that the corner of the LCD case has a little dying. The plastic was not injected in the final color, so again we painted it. You can see the real color, that’s like transparent, getting uncovered. I remember that picture now, they tried to touch it up a lot.

Did Commodore know about the European C64 demoscene, the world of underground computer arts? Did you know that there are people pushing your products well beyond the limits?

Yeah, it surprised us. You know, this first started with the PET. I was watching a science show, in which they were doing wind tunnel tests for racing cars. A PET was running a tunnel. The Commodore Germany engineers, who were very clever guys, have turned the PET into a vector drawer by putting a circuit board on the yoke. And so we started finding extensions, coming out of the back of the C64 and the 128. These were the days when 1 MHz was not a bad speed for a processor. I was always amazed of what people were doing to make it faster.

One of the things we found that the VIC chip had some of the modes, which it didn’t like to be switched on the fly, among them, multicolor character mode. Dave Biorio went through the VIC chip used in the 128, and he made the transistors bigger, so that it would actually switch in time to be useful on the next line. So, for example, you could actually switch between NTSC and PAL mode on the fly. This allowed people to do more clever things without crashing the computer, because of the too fast mode switching would start to heat the DRAMs and such kind of bad things could happen.

Back to the Plus/4, when you talk about hacking. You know, we put a disassembly monitor into the Plus/4, as part of the TED. You could escape the running program to the ROM monitor, and change the code on the fly, for trouble-shooting or so. What a wonderful tool! Later it got out that we were leaving it in there. When the Plus/4 got released, the head of Commodore UK, Gell Wellington wrote a telex, saying: “You have now invented the perfect machine for pirating software.” And I telexed back just one word: “Thanks!”

Let’s go on with Commodore. What are you doing nowadays, and where are the other Commodore engineers?

Well, I own my own business. Basically I was a hardware engineer up till 1995, and just said, I’ve bled for everybody else, now it’s my turn. So we started a networking company, where I am the president/CEO. I actually settled down, and finally have a kid, he’s four years old now. Surprisingly enough, we are still in touch with the other guys. We tend to get together once a year at Dave Haynie’s place. People like Bob Russel, who wrote BASIC for the old VIC20, Greg Berlin, Fred Bowen, Dave Haynie, we are all getting together. They all work in the area. You can find them at a lot of multimedia companies. Because, let’s face it, in the eighties, we were in multimedia, we were in the trade of making color and sound on your computer. It’s still hard to explain to somebody, to a kid these days, who have never heard the word Commodore, that we actually made computers to be hooked up to your TV set. He’d just ask: “Why?” And the answer: “Because there were no monitors!”

What does the name Commodore mean for you today, two decades later?

Computer pioneering!

Just two words?

Yes, I made this in two words. That’s what we were: pioneers. You know, today only Apple and PC people left, but I think we were the people who started the entire home computer thing.

Do you still have a Commodore 64?

Yes, I have couple in the basement.

I mean working ones, are you using them?

No, I don’t, I don’t use it in fact. When people tell me that they’re still using their old Commodores, I’d ask them, why in the world would they do that? Remember, I am an engineer, my whole thing is to make it as fast as you need it, and as careful as you need it, and there’s no reason to do it without. But I am sure some people do. I was impressed when I went to the Commodore Expo, and I asked all the people there, why are they still using them? They said, it’s retro. And I said, oh, that I understand. I first thought they are people got stuck on the very first computer they got, and wondered why web browsers aren’t very good for them. But I got it now, that’s a culture, a retro, and now I can live with that.

What do you think of today’s Commodore projects, like the C-One?

Jeri and me were changing e-mails about that a lot, and I think that’s really interesting. It’s kind of tongue and cheek, and it’s interesting she still doesn’t know how many people would buy them – you know, as a businessman, I have to ask that. But she certainly found an area where there’s a lot of room for exploration, because nobody else had taken the time to do.

Why do you think there’s so much hype around old machines, Commodores, Ataris and so, and why not around the PC?

The names of the creators hidden in a Plus/4 computer. Terry Ryan’s name was flashing.

The PC was made by a big name, a corporation. There is a huge difference between my design and the PC. Mine had some twenty-some chips, and was designed by four people. The PC was designed by a committee, had 188 chips, and weighted like 30 or 40 pounds. And it shows, you can tell it was designed by a committee, there was just no elegance in it, compared to the stuff we did. We literally designed from our hearts. It sounds corny, but we literally did. The thing was, it had a thing of beauty inside.

Another visitor. Stay awhile. Stay forever!

Impossible Mission

2. The beginnings

The first computer with reasonable scene activity was the Commodore 64. The reason for the popularity of these microcomputers was the great number of games published for them. The Commodore 64 matched the quality of game hall arcades on the field of sound and music, but it also beat the game consoles of the time, which were not user programmable and more importantly, console games were not easily copied. Of course, everyday people could not afford buying a dozen of games every week, just to shortly get bored of them and go back to the shop for new ones. It’s hard to understand why software houses expect us to do this nowadays. When one purchases a software – be it a utility or a game program – we can only see the beautiful, shiny box, which promises eternal fun for the customer’s money, but the real thing only comes to light at home, when we find the expensive software unusable or the game boring and ugly.

Eternal games of old times: Choplifter, Impossible Mission, Barbarian, Space Taxi. These simple games sometimes gave us a lot more fun than those six-CD multimedia wonders of the nineties.

Returning to back the history of games. At the beginning of the eighties it was completely acceptable to use pirated software. When someone purchased a game on floppy disk or cassette, he copied it for his friends, just like a regular audio cassette or record. The only difference was that the software did not lose its quality after each copying, so one copier could spread a program widely. At the dawn of the microcomputer age, when people first started computer clubs, they all copied the newest games for each other. These clubs saw the first hackers, advanced users creating software on their own, like games, utilities, first in BASIC, later, when documentations became available, in machine code language. Machine code, or assembly greatly increased the speed of the program, as the code was not running with the help of the slow BASIC interpreter, but directly accessed the computer’s processors. An assembly code on the Commodore 64 ran around thirty times faster than a BASIC program, not mentioning that many functions, like those dealing with graphics, were inaccessible from BASIC. Soon the society of hackers was born. A group of people who solved tasks on their computers which required very sophisticated programming knowledge. Sometimes these people discovered new solutions for even impossible tasks by finding undocumented functions.

The history of the scene started when someone went to a hacker in a club and said: “Excuse me, I heard you’re very good in programming. I can’t complete the 34th level of this game, because there is a red monster that always kills me. Can’t you do something and remove that monster?”The hacker shrugged his shoulders, disassembled the game and removed the obstacle. The gamer was happy he could complete the level and by the way, the term cheater was born by him. The hacker became a cracker, and he regularly started to modify games brought to him. Soon he even started disassembling programs for his own fun, cracking as they named it, and soon the clubs saw some games starting with questions like “Do you want unlimited lives?” Not meaning that the crackers even found the secret of eternal life, but if the player wishes to keep playing the game when dies, without seeing the annoying Game Over all the time. These modifications were later named trainers. When there was no need for such an option, still the cracker found it funny to decompile the code, just to write “Cracked by XY” or similar on the startup screen. Soon this became a fashionable in the cracking scene. Games appeared with such short messages in increasing numbers. This soon made some companies worried about perhaps losing millions on these crackers, and called for the law to end this movement once for all. By the middle of the eighties law banned disassembly, modification and duplication of commercial software in Western Europe and the United States. But the crackers knew from the beginning that someone someday will surely not like what they’re doing, and hide behind nicknames. This is the origin of the usage of English or English sounding handle names on today’s scene. In the beginning most members of the scene chose a three letter name, as the high score table of most game arcades of the time was only capable of storing three letters.

Another heritage of the eighties’ scene today is the so-called elite scripting. When the American crackers started to use legal informatics systems for their communication, such as modems, networks and telephone lines, naturally FBI immediately tried to track their traffic and find the software pirates. This was because some cracker groups already discovered the great opportunity to make easy money with cracked software, and committed true computer crimes. These hackers found a very easy way to beat FBI’s filters. As the listening computers were looking for certain words, expressions among the electronic traffic, crackers simply stopped using suspicious words. For example they never wrote the word wares, which was a term for pirated software, but wrote warez instead. On this pattern they changed a lot of other dangerous words, usually changing every s to z, or kz to x, o to o (zero), and soon even warez became w4r3z. They almost never used the same word twice in the same form, and soon they did not even change letters to similarly pronounced ones, but even added characters that were not Latin letters, just shaped them. For example, A was replaced with 4, or Ä,Ã, or anything similar. Sometimes the word was so distorted that it wasn’t even similar to the original. Like hacker became haxxor, or h4xxor, elite became eleet, eleete, even 313373, and it’s really a cool computer or smart FBI agent who can recognize this. This traditional elite scripting, the electronic argot is still being used nowadays, even by people who were never involved in any illegal activities. If it’s not yet clear, this book is titled Freax for the same reason.

Who was the first cracker? This story outdates even game programs, as it happened in 1975, in the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club, in California. This club is of special importance not only because Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs first introduced the prototype of the Apple-I computer here, but that it was a preferred meeting place of hackers and phreakers of the time. The world’s first software piracy act was committed by the members of this club in June 1975. The software was a BASIC compiler for the Altair 8800 computer. A club member brought the source code of the program in printed form from Model Instrumentation Telemetry Systems, the manufacturer of the Altair computers.

Altair 8800

The author of this BASIC compiler happened to be a 19 years old young man, named Bill Gates. He immediately broke out in fury when he learned about someone copying his software, and immediately sent a furious reader’s letter to many computer magazines and other forums. He called for the trade’s disregard of illegal software duplication, demanding it to be declared a crime, thievery by law. No one took the ridiculous kid serious. The letter was barely published anywhere, and some magazines who did, all commented it in a vitreous mood. A couple of years had to pass until they really criminalized software duplication and modification. We have to add that Bill Gates has been very angry with hackers ever since, and as he’s the richest person of the world. Nowadays he puts great efforts in trying to make hobby computing disappear. For example in 2000, now as the chairman of Microsoft Corporation, he addressed the American government to declare hobby programming and studying of computer sciences illegal, because it risks the interests of software companies. Perhaps this is what they call unassimilated teenage frustration. As a matter of fact, Bill Gates himself admitted that he needed a psychiatric therapy during his teens. Even nowadays he is a typical nerd, who knows a lot about computers, but nothing about life. Those who know him personally describe him as an anxious, paranoid person, who handles others conceitedly, giving the cold shower on them. As George Grayson, founder of Micrografx said: “I half-jokingly say there is only one person with fewer friends than Saddam Hussein. And that’s Bill Gates.”

One thing to mention about the Altair 8800 itself is that most likely it was the first computer ever running a demo. For our today’s eye it’s an incredibly primitive machine, it didn’t even have a monitor, only a few lines of blinking LEDs, which gave feedback about the status of the running program. How could they possibly write anything like a demo for that? Someone found that the working computer generates an electromagnetic field that interferes with radio communications. So he placed a pocket radio on the top of the machine, and started to display different numeric values with the LEDs. At each number the electromagnetic field changed, so the pitch of the radio’s noise did alike. By blinking the LEDs with a certain speed and order, the computer and the radio produced primitive music.

Now let’s return to the Commodore 64. This computer happened to be very popular in the eighties, and spread across the globe very fast. Soon a huge amount of games were available, and many were cracking and copying these. MWS, member of the cracker group Radwar Enterprises wrote these lines in 1988, in the 30th issue of the regularly published underground fanzine, titled Illegal.

Think back! What was the very first game you ever saw on your 64? Probably Commodore Soccer, which was cracked by a German guy called 1103, who also cracked other Commodore modules. Or M. U.L.E. from Electronic Arts cracked by Oleander? Or Hard Hat Mack by OTD? Or Summer Games by JEDI? Something like that, right?

Well, JEDI consisted of nobody less than 1103, Oleander, OTD and KBR (Kotzbrocken), all from Germany and they were one of the first who formed the cracking with cracks like Mr. Robot, Quickcopy V2.0, Sentinel and others …

This all happened around 1982, other famous groups at this point of time were Antiram who cracked games like Dallas Quest, Pogo Joe, Miner 2049’er, Raid over Moscow … or the first ‘cracking service’, namely the German Cracking Service, who released games like Activision’s H.E.R.O. or Saxxon, Slamball and Flight Simulator II. These groups formed cracking around 1982 and 1983.

An early cracker’s fingerprint on the high score table of Wizard of War.

Beginning 1984 lots of new groups raised their power, some of which were TBC who cracked Kennedy Approach or Crackman Crew with F-Copy III, Heart of Africa, and they were the first who fixed American games to the European PAL system, among them Ballblazer.

The first English groups were Yak Society, who cracked almost every Elite game (remember Frank Bruno’s Boxing) and Teeside Cracking Service.

BERT’s intro from 1985. It looks very primitive compared to later intros, but it was a serious achievement in its time. The four letters, individual sprites each, moved in from the top of the screen, sliding on each other, giving a slight illusion of a 3 D rotating text. Then the letters stopped, text was displayed under them and the screen border was suddently engulfed in colorful noise.

1985 was the year of Section 8, who cracked almost every game that was released (e.g. G.I. Joe, Airwolf, Archon II), but so did ABC (e.g. Mr. Do! and The Hobbit II), both from Germany. PAL fixes were done by Indiana Jones, who also cracked every single Broderbund game (Champ, Loderunner, Heart of Africa, Racing Destr. Set …) (…)

The first big importer and spreader was a guy named Ali, groups like Flash Cracking Group with games like Hyper Sports, Tour de France or RMS Titanic, Megabyte with Castle of Terror or their tape transfer disks, or the first Dutch group, the Federation Against Copyright, with releases like Space Station, 2010 Professional with Beach Head II were other groups of that time. (…)

1103 has now an own company, working with PCs and bigger machines, but he also converted Quiwi by Kingsoft on the Atari ST. Oleander works also on PCs, OTD developed the ProLogic DOS and all together developed the F-Copy III. F16 from Section 8 made the F-Load 3.0 and Copy+, and works now for Discovery Software.

The first cracker group’s name, JEDI was an abbreviation from the members’ names: Oliver Joppich (OJO), Oliver Eikemer (1103), Oliver-Thomas Dietz (OTD), and I stood for Inc. Other crackers worked alone, like E.C.A. 1998, but just like the members of JEDI, he also worked on legal projects, like development of games and user software. E.C.A. was the cracker who invented the term release, as he was the first who distributed – released – his cracks nicely packed, with trainer attached, under his own cracker handle.

The letters GCS were animated in this early intro of German Cracking Service.

Kotzbrocken was actually two persons: Karsten Schramm and Boris Schneider. Schneider’s name might be familiar for some, as he wrote the most detailed book about the programming of the Commodore 1541 floppy drive. Another ancient group, which MWS also mentions above, was Antiram, who were already on the scene in 1983. This group consisted of several independent members, led by Andreas Arens, who later created a lot of games and utilities as a programmer of Kingsoft, a German software company.

Cracktro for Nobby the Aardvark from Illusion. It’s a typical scroller cracktro. The two Illusion logos are scrolling infinitely looped, like the red and the blue bars are “swinging", and the text in the middle is a scroller text.

Today these first crackers almost all work in the computer industry. They displayed so high a level of technical knowledge during their cracking activities that they vastly outmatched the experience of most companies programmers. Maybe it’s enough that the game software company Epyx was officially selling the version of their famous Summer Games in Europe which Jedi converted from NTSC to PAL.

The cracker scene was flourishing around 1985. New groups were formed worldwide. A kind of competition arose: who can crack a game faster, who can display his name more beautiful to the title screen? This competition soon led to these names disappearing from the games themselves and they created individual programs, which ran first before the game was executed. These programs displayed the cracking group’s name with spectacular graphical effects and music. These were the cracker intros, also referred as cracktros. They were mostly alike, as they were all made for the same purpose. They weren’t yet made for an artistic purpose but just wanted to tell the world that someone was here and cracked the program. The strengthening competition led to better and better cracktros with smarter effects and more stylish music. The general cracktro format was the following. The group’s name or logo was standing in the middle of the screen or sometimes waving, bouncing, rotating, etc. Under, over, behind or somewhere there is a scrolling text running, sometimes also not simply running, but twisting, waving, sometimes mirrored on the other end of the screen. This tells the history and date of the crack, and then comes the obligate greetings to other teams. Sometimes the contact address of the cracker was also in the scroller, but not for long, as not only the police could read it, but also little kids whining for free games. Instead they would usually hide the address inside the intro, which was only accessible by disassembling the code, meaning that only another cracker was able to read it.

The first cracker groups making intros were German Cracking Service (GCS), ABC and Bert from the Netherlands and Danish Crackers. GCS was the first to employ moving sprites in their intros and BERT was the first to add sprite animation.

By 1985, the cutting edge of the scene consisted of 5–6 German, 2–3 Danish and 3–4 Holland groups. Cracking games was not too difficult yet, as most of them had no protection at all. It was only a matter of saving the contents of a game cartridge to disk or tape. A program called ISEPIC was a widely used tool for this purpose. Later freezers appeared, devices which were used to save the running program from the memory to disk. If the freezed program was reloaded from the disk, the program continued running from the point where it was frozen.

Some crackers were disassembling games in order to save the music as individual programs, making them playable without the game. They were called musicrippers. It wasn’t an easy task, since the music was not stored as files, easy to locate, but were part of the programs, being routines themselves. The first musicripper was TMC, Charles Deenen, who later became founder of the famous musicgroup, Manics of Noise, and even later the audio director of Interplay. Non-Stop Cracker from Germany were also ripping music.

Making cracker intros soon turned into a form of art. More and more advanced intros were made, and the first, primitive sprite animations were bypassed by lightyears by the end of 1986. Quality intros became a question of prestige and no elite groups were to allow poor ones any more for bad intros would ruin their reputation. But there was another field of competition. All groups were rushing to crack new programs as soon as possible, equip them with trainers, and spread the warez. The term of o-day warez was introduced, meaning a piece of software that was cracked right on its release day. This required the crackers to acquire new programs fast. Fortunately there were plenty of companies throughout Europe, who delivered fresh games right on the first day with express courier. These companies were called suppliers. They usually did not know that a cracker group is receiving their parcels. Often members of different cracker groups got a job at these companies, to speed up their operations even more.

Game developers soon got fed up with everybody copying their games indiscriminately, and added technical protection besides of the already existing legal one. For example, upon launching the program, a message appeared, asking for some information contained in the game’s user manual. If the player was not able to answer, meaning that he didn’t have the original manual, the program halted. Often they also made it impossible to copy the original disk. These protections were also removed by the crackers, and actually this circumvention of protection systems is what they call real cracking.

The beginnings of the real cracker scene can be dated around the end of 1986. The first great groups were formed this time, wide communication between these groups was started, and elitism, the high quality standards of the underground subculture has appeared. Cracker groups became the cutting edge of the scene for plenty of years. Every little kid wanted to become a cracker someday, and literally hundreds of thousands knew and respected the greatest groups, the best known crackers. Let’s see how they were favoured by fortune.

Artistic floppy disk cover from 1988, by Hobbit of Fairlight.

Never let quantity rule over quality. One of the most famous FairLight slogans says it all: FairLight – Quality, Tradition, Pride …

Strider of FairLight

3. The life of a cracker

Only a cracker can have authentic memories of the cracker scene, the philosophy of the illegal world. I could vainly try to describe it, like how it felt to meet the elite of the underground in the eighties, as I never had the luck to be part of it. Hence an issue of the BRAINfART magazine came really handy. It was placed on my C64 while I was away from it during The Party 1996 in Denmark. In this free magazine I found a very exciting article titled The Good Ol’ Dayz, written by Weasel, a former Avantgarde member from Munich, Germany about his memories during the years he spent on the cracker scene. After some e-mail traffic Weasel agreed to include his article in this book. Here it is.

Exodus’cracktro

Hello everyone out there, this is Weasel writing some words in this free space I got offered in this great edition of BRAINfART. I was thinking a long time about what to write in here and what might be of interest for you reading this article. And so I came finally to the conclusion that writing about The Good Old Days to bring back best old memories to all your minds should be a nice idea.

I got my first real computer back in 1984, which never broke and I still own: a C128, which I used in C64 mode only all the time, as C128 mode was pretty poor on software support. I started – as most of us I guess – with copying games from school mates and other friends who also had a C64. One of my very first games I copied on C64 were Rambo II, Commando, Blue Max, etc. which I liked very much those days as the sounds were great and the games were very nicely designed.

From these days on I kept myself up-to-date with the latest games released from any companies by buying lots of game magazines. I began to collect more and more games, like Jumpman Jr., Pitfall, Pitstop, Rat Race, Boulder Dash, Spy vs. Spy, Kaiser and lots more. After a while I had a real big collection of almost all known titles around. So it happened that people were coming to me now to get the latest game software they were searching for all around. I had them all!

Another thing I was always fascinated by were those great intros from all the groups, like Dynamic Duo, 1001 Crew, Triad, Yeti, Strike Force, Fusion, German Cracking Service (GCS), Papillons (an importer group), Federation Against Copyright (FAC), Elite, Eaglesoft Inc., FairLight, Ikari, Bros, The Wanderer Group (TWG) and lots more, who cracked those games I copied into my collection. I liked watching them and reading all the scrollers till the end. I was pretty amazed that there were people somewhere in the world doing highly illegal things like cracking games – removing the copy-protection from the original software, to be able to copy it to anybody freely without a problem. I got more and more addicted to a certain thought. Once said to myself: “One day I wanna be one of those guys as well. Being part of a group and doing lots of cracks for all the people being in and outside of that so-called scene.” From that time I tried to start learning to code on my C128 running in C64 mode, to be able to use that very nice computer system for much more than just typing a few commands like LOAD"$",8' or RUN. I also took a handle: “Wiesel” ! It came from a sticker of a car-company, pinned on my room door back those days. The slogan was in German: “Schneller als ein Wiesel!”, meaning: Faster than a Weasel!

This eagle, with the floppy disk in its bill, often appeared in the cracktros of the American Eagle Soft Incorprated.

Whenever something didn’t work properly, I tried to find out why that happened and worked hard on fixing the problem. I decoded several programs – at this time a lot of BASIC stuff – and tried to learn how they made different effects and things like that. I was getting better and better in coding little BASIC programs during the days, weeks and months. I already cracked a game at this time: Werner – The Game, although it wasn’t anything special. One day, when my favourite computer magazine, 64’er started programmers’ course titled How To Code Machine Language – For Beginners. I read the first part of that article series and learnt my first few commands in real ML. You can’t imagine how lucky I felt when the first very small ML-routine I did with those commands even worked for the first try!

After the second chapter of that magazine’s course I took several games, intros and demos, and looked inside the ML code. I was now able to understand more. I changed certain routines to examine what would happen to them and how they’d look like after my manipulations, which gave me lots of experience and training. This was the time when I finally started my real scene-life, around 1986, with my first own group which I founded together with a good friend of mine. I gave the group the name The Powersoft Incorporation, or short PSI.

In that group – consisting of only two members, that friend of mine, whose handle was “Yellow” and me – I coded my first cracker-intro for the first real cracks I ever made. Games like Operation Wolf, Spitting Image and Ugh-Lympics. I never spread those versions, so probably only very few people have ever seen them. I copied those versions only to my school mates, and they did the same to other friends of them.

However, one very nice summer day I was going again to a small park where I used to skateboard a lot that time. I never thought that this will be the day in my life, changing my future. On that day it happened that I found some 5.25“ disks laying around on the ground at the top of that skateboard-hill I used to skate down a lot. I tried to find out who the owner of those disks would be. After a while another skater came and picked up those disks, as he wanted to leave home. That was the chance, as I was sitting pretty near to those disks, watching the stunts of other skaters around. I started talking to that guy and asked him what disks those are, and what would be on them. He was very nice and told me about himself being a musician with the handle Havok in a computer group called Frontline on the C64. After a while when I told him a bit about myself, and finally he invited me to come with him to the next weekly meeting of his group. I accepted and thought I must be dreaming and couldn’t believe that such a thing would really happen to me! At the following weekend I met with Havok and drove to the meeting place – a Burger King restaurant – where all the other sceners of Frontline met regularly. I was pretty shy at the beginning so that I was just only watching them, person by person, to get some impressions about those “illegal” guys. On that gathering I also first met the guy with whom I did lots of cracks later: Deejay! When that meeting was over, I held a game in my hands titled Ikari Warriors, which I had to crack till the next meeting to prove that I could really do cracks, and to get accepted to join Frontline. Those guys let me know that the game had a pretty hard protection, and they doubt that I’d be able to crack it anyway. So I was pretty afraid that they might be right as I had never done such a big project before.

So I went home and inserted the disk into my computer to have a look at that game. What I saw first looked like a never-to-be-able-to-crack-that game. So I was almost gave up at the beginning, when I noticed the game loading with a track-sector fastloader. I have never seen anything like that before. But somehow I never really stopped thinking about a way to get into that damn program. I recalled everything I already learned about ML, and tried to find out as most as I could about the loading routine, the protection, the game itself, and how it worked. Finally I found a way to access the game and after a while suddenly I had a working memory backup saved on my disk.

The only advantage I had was that the game was not a multiloader. It had no parts or levels being loaded after the game has started. It was a one-filer split up into several smaller files on the original game disk, which all got loaded into the memory at one time. After I saw that this saved file worked almost without a problem – only a little sound-bug was still left – I got most excited as I knew that this would be my chance to enter the so long awaited and adored scene. I crunched the game and tried to get a very short version out of it. I tried to erase as much garbage code as I could find in the memory to make the version even smaller. And finally I got a very nicely cracked, single file game on my floppy-disk.

With that version I was very proud to appear at the next group-meeting, where I finally presented it. Deejay was the only cracker in that group, and he had to examine my work. I was all agog to his decision, and after looking into my work for a pretty long. He said: “Well, the crack isn’t bad at all, although he hasn’t found out how to fix the little sound-bug. It’s been a nice work though. My decision is to let him join!” That was the beginning of my long and still lasting scene career as a cracker. That was also the day when I changed my handle from “Wiesel” into the English form, Weasel, to give it a “more international touch”, to quote the words of Frontline members. Otherwise they wouldn’t let me join.

Cracktro by Fantastic Four Cracking Group for the game Myth.

After a while Deejay and I became very good friends. I visited him regularly every weekend, and learned a lot from him about cracking, coding, training games and coding intros.

Soon Frontline changed its name to Matrix. This was the time when Deejay and I formed a little sub-label, just for fun. As we cracked more and more games together, we referred to ourselves in our crack-intros like: “Cracked by the unbeatable duo, Deejay and Weasel” or “Cracked by the unbelievable duo, Weasel and Deejay” and similarly. Our cracks spread pretty well, and I also started to trade stuff with several guys all over Europe. At this point I’d like to send some serious greetings to Kristian Rostoen/Full Force, Guido (Goldrush)/Crest and Peter (Tycoon)/Crazy! – one of my very first contacts whom I had lots of fun with, and very nice phone chats all over those years.

When Matrix split up after some time, and when it happened by coincidence that Gotcha of Crazy moved to my town and entered my school class, Deejay and I joined our next group called Crazy. In my opinion this was my best period, when I have been most productive together with Deejay, cracking lots and lots of games. We became more and more well-known in the scene by our work, and by releasing of one of the most well-known and successful diskmags ever, titled Mamba, brought to life by Crazy, who was responsible for the whole group and its members, like Tycoon, Magic Man, Gotcha, Stingray, Martin, Frank, Deff, Deejay, Modern Bob, me and some more I can’t remember yet at this time (Sorry guys! No offense!) to become even more famous in the scene, and to always be remembered in the scene’s history. After another while many of the former Matrix members formed a new group with the name Lotus, which went in co-op with Crazy to form an even more powerful force known as Crazy & Lotus. Deejay left Crazy to join Lotus, while I stayed in Crazy. It didn’t matter as the groups were in co-op anyways. That event also counts to my best memories during my scene-life yet.

A cracktro from Legend, with very demanding graphics.

When Lotus decided to take a break of unknown length, the coop split up and Crazy continued as a single group. And then came the day when Crazy decided to stop activity as well. So the group died. When that happened, I was asked to join Crest together with Deejay. I guess you know this name pretty well, as Crest was and still is one of the best demo-coding groups ever on C64. I was asked to join them as they were planning to start a cracking section back those days. And so we did. There were a few games released under the Crest label by Deejay and I, but it didn’t take long when Deff (ex-Crazy) called me and asked if I’d like to join a new group with many of the old Crazy members, called Enigma. As Crest wasn’t sure about continuing with the cracking section, I decided to accept the offer and joined Enigma. Deejay bought an Amiga at this time, and started a coding on that machine, so he wasn’t interested in joining another group any more and he stayed out.

Enigma also did a great job and released lots of cracks, I myself also had many releases. I wasn’t the only cracker in that group, as Richie of ex-Illusion was also in Enigma that time. When Enigma also died after a long time, I joined Red Sector Inc., and later a smaller group called Legacy. This was where I met Jack Alien first. I really enjoyed those days. Unfortunately I can’t write that much in here, as the article would grow too big if I’d explain everything in detail, and I don’t want to get killed by the magazine editors. I will cut it a bit shorter now, as the most important part was the beginning anyways. After Legacy I was in Pandora for a short time, and after that came another big milestone in scene’s history, when Avantgarde was born. Ok, I admit that I wasn’t doing so much in Avantgarde, because we had a couple of other crackers. One of them had most of the releases of the group: Jack Alien!

I purchased an Amiga, and about one year later I got my own PC, this was back in 1993 if I remember correctly. I didn’t have time to still do a lot on the C64. I also lost motivation when I saw those cheap games being released with no real quality, as companies didn’t care about the quality of C64 games anymore.

Well that is where I am today. As Avantgarde died a few months ago, in Summer 1996, and most members joined Fantastic Four Cracking Group (F4CG). I am typing this article on my PC right now, in the middle of the night, and remember the good all days, when all of this began. All in all I can just say that I really don’t regret any period of my scene career. I always tried to do my best in my work, to supply the best quality in my cracks, and I guess I managed in most of the cases. The positive feedback from most scene-guys should prove that, I guess. I met a lot of cool guys all over the world, and that’s a very cool thing I won’t ever miss. The scene spirit also was and still is a very powerful experience, which showed me that together we are strong, and we can move things the way we want. Just keep all together, and we will be successful. It also taught me to stick to my real friends I made during all these years, and lots of other things I am proud of today.

I hope I was able to show a bit of the way I walked through the years. Maybe some of you saw yourself mirrored in certain situations of my story. Finally I can just tell you to never give up the goals you would like to reach, but try to give your best instead. There are lots situations in life similar to certain scene experiences. It’s all the same and it all works after the same kind of scheme. So if you really want to reach something, always believe in it, and it’ll finally work out some day.

Dytec’s cracktro from the age of cracker dusk

Real pirates never sleep & quit!

BamBam/Quartex

4. The golden age of crackers

As it reads from Weasel’s article, the colorful, spectacular cracktros were quite popular both inside and outside of the scene. Coders were developing their knowledge all the time, creating more and more brilliant effects and routines, and soon some thought about creating such programs l’art pour l’art, just for fun. These became the first demos. At the beginning only a very few people were making demos, but soon complete groups specialized in this field, which even survived the original scene activity of cracking.

The cracker scene was already flourishing during the middle of 1985. New groups were formed worldwide, cracks and other products flooded the swappers. This era was marked by such groups like Dynamic Duo, Newlook or Stars. The German Dynamic Duo was the most active of all. As its name shows, it consisted of two members, namely Robin Wunderlich and Hans-Jürgen Grahl. They cracked almost all new games, like Super Cycle, Ghosts ’n’ Goblins or W.A.R. Headbanger, their main swapper had so many contacts that two other members, Krabat and Syntax 2001 were only kept to copy disks and adress envelopes. The DD died in 1988, when Robin changed to Amiga. In the Amiga cracking scene Robin, along with some others created the game titled Thunder Boy, and continued his cracker activities as a member of Quartex. Hans- Jürgen Grahl founded a software company named Dynatex, which name came from the names of Dynamic Duo and Quartex but unfortunately suffered a serious car accident some years ago and he’s been in coma ever since – a sad loss for the scene.

Newlook first became famous by cracking Bomb Jack, while The Stars from Norwegia made it with Asterix or Magic Cauldron. But we also must not forget the names of Flying Crackers, Doughnut Cracking Service or German Cracking Service.

Dynamic Duo never made intros. Their single one contains the first rasterbar effect, which later becamoe one of the most popular C64 demo routines. The second image shows this one. the color bars behind the name were moving up and down.,

The first issues of the diskmags Sex’n’Crime and Mamba.

In the United States, the No. 1 cracking group was undoubtedly Eagle Soft Incorporated. This group was formed around 1982, and their first cracker was from Singapore. Soon they found their match, when Bencor Brothers was founded. This group mostly cracked Epyx games. Soon they disappeared, and later the group was reorganized in Europe as New Bencor Brothers. Another great American name was the short-lived Untouchable Cracking Force, who cracked Carmen San Diego and Top Gun. Their main cracker, JJ The Breaker soon volunteered to the US Marines, so the group disbanded. From then on, for a certain while ESI was the only worldwide respected American cracker group, until some new names appeared like ATC or North East Crackers. Most American groups were only interested in importing, mainly using modems, which was really disregarded among the European groups, who were mostly using traditional mail swapping. Let’s see what Jeff Smart wrote about this in the Illegal cracker magazine, about which we’ll learn later.

Hi doods! AMERICANS take over! This is the main theme every rational guy in Europe is seriously talking about, first consequences were drawn by Nik of IKARI who said he can’t crack when lots of Americans are calling him and wanting games as fast as possible. Other groups lick the ass of every American calling ‘em for trading, others produce bad quality cracks to be the first in the States, others recrack games and some others again release old games with new titles, ‘cuz Americans do import every game they do not know! Now all rational guys see the big danger in this system and are going to change something if possible!

But the system never changed and it finally caused some trouble, except for a few groups never making it into the top elite, because of releasing poor cracks.

Life has not ended in Europe with the death of Dynamic Duo. The crackers of Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark and Germany were the most active during 1985–1988. These times the first trainers appeared. Not only did groups crack the games but sometimes they placed a menu in them which offered cheat options for an easier play. For example, the player could select to play with unlimited lives, or battle the enemy with infinite ammunition. The first trainers were mainly created by Mr.Z. of Triad. Triad members were also the inventors of the so-called ranked greetings. They did not simply greet other groups in their cracktros, but the names of the groups followed each other in a ranked list in their scrollers. Later this became a common feature, in some time everyone expressed their respect towards others this way.

The cover page of an Illegal issue.

Triad was one of the most active groups ever. Besides of releasing a huge lot of quality cracks – mainly by Mr.Z. and Janitor, their main crackers – they created Illegal, one of Europe’s first, and from the first issue, best cracker magazine. It was a home multiplied paper fanzine, spread by mail. First it was published in German, then from 1987 it became partly, and soon fully English. Its main editor was Jeff Smart – of course this was not his real name – and almost every prominent member of the scene were publishing in it. But of course Illegal was not the only cracker magazine. The one from Zenith, later DCS, titled Iguana was also widely known, or the French Delirious Magazine. Dominators’ mag, Business was also popular, not really because of the articles, but the very high quality graphical quality. The Belgian Pirates, published by The Best Company and NFC was a true opposite: the weak design was balanced with the high quality articles. The first disk magazines were Sex’n’Crime, published by Genesis Project under the label Amok, and the one already mentioned by Weasel, Mamba. As the teenage console cowboys of the time were not experienced journalists, the stylistical quality of these mags’ articles weren’t the highest, except for a few. Most interviews with famous crackers, for example, were based on predefined questions form, which was filled by different persons for each issue.

The idea of the diskmag was not originated from the scene. As an example we can mention the one titled Loadstar, first published in 1984 by the US company Softdisk Publishing Corporation. It was a monthly regular computing magazine. Actually past tense is not fitting here, as Loadstar still exists in the time of writing these lines, 2001, and thus it is the longest surviving diskmag in the history of computing.

Let’s return to the crackers of the era.

The German Radwar Enterprises was founded in November 1985 by MWS, AVH, BKA, Duke and Flash. The idea to found a new group was given, but they hadn’t got a name yet. They decided to follow the uncommon suit of coming up with a good group mnemonic first, and then expand it to some fancy groupname. So Flash got an English pocket dictionary, and started to browse for abbreviations. First they found CIA, which could have been Computer Interested Agency, then DEFCON5, which they found fit, as they had five members anyway. But they dropped this one too for a pacifist reason, as it stood for Defense Condition 5, an alert status of the US armed forces in case of total nuclear war. Finally Flash found RADWAR, an abbreviation of Radiologic Warfare, and that was immediately accepted as a cool name. The three- letter mnemonic was RDW, but they changed it to RWE just two days later, in tribute to Rheinisch-Westfälische Elektrizitätswerke, the Rhein-Westphalia Electric Works, who fed electric power to the group’s computers. From that day the group was called Radwar Enterprises 1941.

The Judges: Think Twice. This group released a lot of demos, all based on the FLD effect.

1001 Crew: Amazing or Borderletter 4, the first program on the C64 without the screen border.

The greatest German cracker group around 1986 was The Light Circle. It was an association of Radwar Enterprises, Association and Cracking Force Berlin, with some additional members like Flash, Mr. Zeropage, Pater Becker, Ede, Duke and many other crackers. Radwar Enterprised cracked for example the games International Karate, Alter Ego and Kettle, Mr. Zeropage stroke Newsroom – this desktop publishing software was used to create several different papermags, among them Illegal – and Turbo Nibbler, while they released Bazooka Bill and Portal under the TLC label. Later Flash founded Flash Cracking Formation with Duke, Irata, Zeron and PBA. TLC also served as a basis to form Red Sector Incorporated or RSI some years later. The greatest cracker group of this era was Ikari, which soon formed a strong cooperation with Talent. Talent & Ikari had a strange spot of color on their palette of members, Derbyshire Ram. This English gentleman was a bit different from the rest of the sceners, as he was over fifty years old, when he retired and bought a Commodore 64 as a retirement hobby. Soon he became one of the most active swappers, and a member of several elite groups, among them, for example, Deadline and F4CG.

How did crackers work? Any way they could, but only true professionals gained fame, using the “proper” way. There were numerous different methods to crack a program. The simplest and most disregarded was the so-called reset-cracking.This needed no equipment at all, except for a reset button. It was an exploit of a known error of the Commodore 64, namely that if they restarted the computer during the execution of a program, some fragments of the code, or sometimes the entire program kept resident in the memory. It was saved to disk, and this was the “crack”. Actually there were a few groups who managed to make quality cracks by this method, like Section 8. Another, similarly primitive method was the freezing. The execution of the program was suspended with a special hardware expansion, the freezer, and the contents of the memory were saved to disk. This one also didn’t need good knowledge. The real cracking was done with machine code monitors, by which the cracker changed the instructions of the running program in real time. Cracks made with this method, and tested from the beginning to the end, were always marked as “100 %” cracks, meaning that the product is completely working.

Pictures of some early Ash & Dave works: left is the demo titled Smooth Criminal, right is the title graphics of FX.

The finished crack was usually also compressed, packed by the cracker. Many groups released compressing utilities for this reason. The 1001 Crew’s Card Cruncher cartridge – a hardware expansion – was widely used, it was a very effective data compressor. A common method of packing was the so-called levelpacking. A levelpacked game meant that the cracker also compressed the different files containing the game levels’ data independently, further reducing the size of the program. This was mainly the European crackers’ way, the Americans rarely levelpacked.

The first demos appeared at these times, for example the ones from the 1001 Crew from the Netherlands. They were the first to discover the way to make the C64’s screen border disappear, which was a few centimetres wide frame around the picture to avoid distortion on television screens.

The Think Twice demo series from The Judges of the Netherlands was also widely known. These demos featured the so-called FLD, Flexible Line Distance for the first time. This meant that the distance between the rows of a text displayed on the screen was changing dynamically, so the rows seemed to be “bouncing” on each other. The entire demo was only 95 blocks long, that was around 25 kilobytes. While discussing early demos, one must not forget mentioning Ian & Mic, the British coder duo, or Ash & Dave, the British brothers, Scoop, which was the demo section of Maniacs of Noise, 711 Crew and Kaktus & Mahoney. These were the first groups to make demos popular and known. In the beginning the demos’ purpose was not some art, but to display some new tricks, technical achievements, graphical routines.

These early products were so-called single part demos, meaning they contained one single effect, routine only. Sometimes the purpose of the demo was to announce something for the public, like a group recruiting a new member, or news about forthcoming, long awaited productions. Soon multipart demos were introduced, containing more than one parts, with longer or shorter loading between two routines.

It was a common method to use game music for a demo, because there were neither music composer programs, nor talented musicians at the time. Often the demos offered some interactivity, like playable, small games, options to change music during viewing, or changing the parameters of the routine running on the screen. Almost all demo parts contained scrolltexts, in which the makers addressed the viewers, told news and stories, and greeted other groups, just like in cracktros.

During 1987–1988 each group had several different activities. Besides of the traditional cracking, there were importer groups and the first demogroups. A certain file naming convention standard was set to describe productions and their features right in the directory list of the disk. The most common markings were the following:

“TRIAD/ AH!” – If the group’s name was at the beginning of the filename, like this, then it was a demo. This made it easy to find a certain group’s demos on a long, printed program list.

“LAST NINJ+/TRIAD” – A crack with one trainer, hence the + mark. The cracker group’s name was always after the filename. This game was Last Ninja.

“BIONIC C++/TRIAD” – A crack with two trainers. (Bionic Commando)

“ALIENS +3/TRIAD” – Three trainers. They were using numbers above two. For three or more trainers they always used the word megatrainer, but originally this meant an interactive trainer, a cheat that was activated any time during the game, like a level skip key. (Aliens)

“ALIEN SY+G/TRIAD” – Gigatrainer. Interactive trainer, as described above. The gigatrainer word came in use after the word megatrainer lost its original meaning. (Alien Syndicate)

“BIONIC C+H/TRIAD” – Highscore-saver. It means that the game originally had no option to save the high scores, but the cracker implemented it.

“RUGRAT /(TRIAD)” – Import. The name in brackets meant that the group is not the original cracker. (Rugrat)

The first parties were organized around 1986. It often happened that cracker groups held some smaller or bigger local meetings, but the real international gatherings were the Venlo Meetings in the city of Venlo, Netherlands. These were completely legal computer user meetings, but since Holland’s laws did not forbide cracking, all the prominent members of the scene visited here. Naturally the dimensions of these meetings were far from the megaparties of our present days with 4,000–5,000 visitors, and also the event itself had a completely different atmosphere. These were copyparties, they only copied the newest releases, cracks to each other, no compos were held. But everyone who counted was there. For example: Ikari, Talent, Hotline, Paramount, Alphaflight, Red Sector, 1001 Crew, Ian and Mic, Ash and Dave, The Judges, Silents, TSK, FairLight and the other great names. These conferences lasted only a few hours during one afternoon.

How was the atmosphere at such an ancient party? In a manner it was similar to today’s parties as it was a friendly meeting just like nowadays with people meeting, building new contacts, competing each other and strengthening the community. The average age is similar to today’s parties – 16–22 years old. But there was not only peace and friendship: the mentality and world of the scene, its unwritten laws were somewhat different from today’s. The cracking scene was different back then. Cracking activity was illegal in most countries, and some even used phreaked phone lines for spreading cracked software. Their main target was AT&T. American crackers often initialized conference calls using their lines and stolen calling codes, chatting all the night with their European pals. The word Internet was not even known These illegal activities meant constant hiding from the law, a kind of doorbell panic, since police could knock on the door at any time. Additionally there came the adrenaline level caused by the close competition between the cracker groups. All this led to tension sometimes – it often happened that a group took revenge for a negative article about them in a magazine with their fists or a some pithless people denouncing a cracker to the police. Nowadays it sounds incredible but back then the scene was the deepest underground. During one of the Venlo Meetings, for example, a member of Alpha Flight tried to query the main editor of Sex’n’Crime, OMG of Genesis Project with a baseball bat, but OMG rejected the questions with the help of a pepper spray can. We can say it was some teeming life.

Crack for Back to the Future eith one trainer, imported by X-Factor. Usually the cracker also changed the directory list of the disk to display a logo or a message when listed – just like this.

Ash, Dave, Ian and Mik’s coop demo, Bla Bla God Knows

Ash, Dave, Ian and Mic’s coop demo, Bla Bla God Knows

Crackers used several tricks during their communication to reduce costs. While US sceners had brilliant ways of phone phreaking, Europeans saved on postage. They usually covered the post stamps with wax or transparent tape, so they were reusable after postage. Another widespread method was to cheat with coin-operated stamp machines at major post offices. They simply used foreign countries’ coins to purchase stamps, which of course had a much smaller value than the one the machine expected, but the same weight and size. For example, the Germans used the Portuguese 2.5 escudo to replace the 50 pfennig coin, or the English 5 penny instead of 1 mark, the Swiss used the Hungarian 5 forint as the 1 franc, and so on. It was also common to “unpack” floppy disks, removing the internal magnetic disks from inside of their case, and putting two or three of these into one single disk. The recipient reopened the disk, put these in his own prepared disk cases, and was still able to read their contents. In those days the floppy disks quality was high enough to make this possible.

The rising cracker scene was naturally a growing problem for software publishers. House search warrants, police raids were everyday occurances Europe-wide. The German, Swedish, Danish and French groups had the hardest life, but it was easy in Hungary, Jugoslavia or Turkey, where laws didn’t even mentioned software copyrights. Other European countries either didn’t care about illegal activities or their response was very weak. In Germany a lawyer named von Gravenreuth was the loudest; demanding the “dangerous software pirates” to be all jailed. Once the German WDR television channel had an open discussion about software copyrights, where he was invited. Two other guests were there:Theuth Weidemann, alias Kotzbrocken, who was already working as a programmer at Rainbow Arts, and MWS of Radwar, whom von Gravenreuth would have slain at the spot if he knew who he was. He was only referred by the moderator as “someone who knows a lot about crackers”.

The following is an experpt from the discussion as published in the Illegal issue #34.

Moderator: In general, why do people crack a game?

MWS: A game is cracked, mainly because of fun, hobby and let’s say to get famous in the ”scene”.

Moderator: Herr von Gravenreuth, is cracking punishable or just the spreading of pirate software?

Young software pirates in West Germany often received such letters from a 16 years old girl called Tanja looking for the newest games. These letters were actually written by von Gravenreuth as a bait.

Von Gravenreuth: Err, “the changing, destroying and surpressing” of datas is punishable! (Audience laughing) I could and did only repeat what the law says about it… So in general, yes, cracking is illegal when datas are attacked. If there are programmes protected by copyright laws, then it’s also punishable after the copyright law, that can be a changing of any datas … For example, I can remember some cracker on my list “Dr. Mengele”, Paraguay, you see they never caught him.

Moderator: Based on the law, there exist some different possibilities to protect a computer game …?

Von Gravenreuth: Yes, computer games have, like movies or records a copyright law.

Moderator: Theuth, you changed sides. Are you now tracing your ex-friends?

Theuth Weidemann: No, of course not. We work together with those people. They’re working for us and most of them went out of the scene.

Moderator: How do you handle those people?

Theuth Weidemann: I persuade them to make money with programming, using their experience that they got through cracking … And they know what’s going on.

Moderator: What do you think, when one of your games is cracked?

Theuth Weidemann: The crackers are taking the copy protections from the games away and make the games this way available to people who would normally buy the games. So they’re damaging our company, and we’re not able to put more money into the games, so the quality of games is lower than it could be …

Moderator: Markus, is that right? What do crackers want?

MWS: Crackers want to improve their image in some way and spread cracked games to get known and the computer is mainly a means of communication, so that they can be in contact with others, worldwide. And I don’t think that a cracker is cracking a game for money. That’s mainly a software pirate, and that’s not their preferred side … And additionally, I think the audience shares my opinion … (Audience: Big applause)

Von Gravenreuth: Well, it’s often difficult to clear up if we got a cracker or a software pirate … but we ourselves even caught crackers. German Cracking Service is not existing anymore. (Audience: Big laughing) Yes, GCS … Snoopy etc., the group was caught, but we got also a lot of people offering and selling software.

MWS: Why did you, in one of your infamous interviews in the ASM Magazine confuse the term “cracker” with “software pirate”? And you also said that there was a house search and you needed two cars and a lorry to take all the stuff and computers of that guy away?:

Moderator:To make it more clear, the only point for people being punished is they sell software!?

MWS: Right.

Theuth Weidemann: The crackers are the ones who start to spread the games, but the spreaders, err … or how you like to call them, are the ones making a profit off the crackers. They’re selling the games, but without the crackers they couldn’t even exist.

MWS: But, in the end, nowadays games are so expensive and this is up to the software retailers, that small kids who receive, let’s say 30 DM pocket money every month and they find an advertisment saying “Newest games on C64 and Amiga for sale!”.They’re probably more interested in that than otherwise paying 59 DM for a single game, but that is only due to the packing or any other things. And I think, a cracker is not interested in supplying those people with games. They’re as we said “software pirates”.

Moderator: Can one differentiate between that? If, let’s say, I myself would crack a game? (Audience: Big laugh)

MWS: Okay, if you want …

Moderator: Okay, if I do that I would have my self-control about spreading the game or keeping it for myself.

MWS: Gravenreuth also said in his interview that it is already illegal to possess own cracked version for one’s own at home.

Von Gravenreuth: Yes, that’s right.

MWS: And you say that the interest of software companies are more worth than the interests of an individual person during legal preceedings …?

Von Gravenreuth: Not the software retailer, but the owning of copyright as the German law stresses the proprietary right and material guarantees, that means copyrights, so that the programmer who created something has a copyright and it’s surprising to see that nowadays a lot of people who left the cracking scene and started to work for companies, who became top programmers get angry about others cracking their games now.

MWS: That is right, but if you say such a sentence like: “The companies are higher evaluated in front of the court than an individual”, which occurs in your interview.

Von Gravenreuth: Not the companies, but the copyrights.

MWS: Okay, but that means, if someone only buys a game, he at one puts himself under the obedience of a software company, because if he, without knowing it, changes the datas of the program somehow with some other means, he commited a crime?

Von Gravenreuth: Well, perhaps I give another example as we had a BKA decision about a changing of a roof, when someone else put another roof on it and … (Audience laughes so loud he can’t continue.)

Moderator: We’re not talking about roofs.

Von Gravenreuth: That doesn’t matter … There is also a copyright law!

MWS: May I set an interrupt? You also have advertisements in some known magazines where your assistants pretend they’re crackers and offer software.

Von Gravenreuth: No, not crackers …

MWS: But if someone writes in and likes to buy software, which is quite reasonable, then you catch him! Is that really legal?

Von Gravenreuth: If someone only writes in and is fairly interested in getting the games, of course nothing happens. But if somebody sends a list of games and encloses disks with software, then it is possible that something can happen.

Moderator: It has proved up to now, that no protection is unbeatable …?

MWS: What do you want to do against things like freeze-modules which can be bought in every shop?

Moderator: Yes such things are even offered by the industry and they help the crackers doing their job?

Von Gravenreuth: It’s not … It happened that one of the leading software producers in Germany claimed to take away all those things from the shops, and exactly this freeze-module will be taken away soon …

Moderator: But there is no doubt that something new has to be developed … Anyway, I’m sorry, but the time is up. Thank you a lot.

The copyright war started by von Gravenreuth grew so huge that even the government of West Germany took notice. Surprisingly the government, led by CDU and CSU, did not support the protection of copyrights, but decided to abandon some of the referring laws, as they described it nonsense that the German police harrasses German citizens on the behalf of foreign companies.

1001 Crew: E.S.C.O.S. This slideshow appeared in 1987. The abbreviation stands for Screen Construction Set, a screen mask designer utility they developed, which enabled drawing graphics on the screen border. Soon The Judges also developed thei own ESCOS.

– Why are you using your computer for illegal activities?

– Ha-ha, it’s made for that, isn’t it?

Excell of Ikari in a diskmag interview

5. The rise of demos

So, this was life in Europe in the middle of the eighties: crackers cracked, police kept dogging them but they still kept cracking. But now let’s have a look at a field that was not exactly part of the scene, but was very close to it.

While the first demos were being made, the great musician legends of the Commodore 64 were already around. Nowadays people don’t even mind the music of games, it’s something going without saying, and of course it’s also quite normal that in the age of DVD and sound cards with 48 digital channels that the music doesn’t even resemble some beeping noise generated by a computer. But back around 1984–1985 there was only the SID with its three plus one wave channels on the Commodore 64. Creating real music was a hard way of art – and of course there were such artists. C64 sceners still remember the names of Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, Ben Daglish or Chis Hülsbeck. In fact, these musicians were never sceners. They all worked for game companies and they gained fame without even getting in contact with either crackers or demomakers. Of course a lot of other people, including sceners, were making music on the C64, but these game musicians outmatched everyone, at least in popularity. To have a clearer picture we have to add that those times there were no music composer programs yet. Their tracks were composed as an assembly language program, they mixed sounds “by hand” and coded all filters effects themselves. One can imagine the patience and experience it needed. It’s really a pity that one can’t attach music to a book, so I can’t present some of their masterpieces here. But if you, dear Reader, look around on the Internet, you can easily find thousands of converted SID musics, along with a couple of playing utilities.

Rob Hubbard’s most wellknown tune was the score for the game Commando, published by Elite. This is perhaps the most famous classic C64 title. Rob told the following about this music in an interview for Commodore Zone.

The game Commando.

There is an interesting story behind Commando. I went down to their office and started working on it late at night, and worked on it through the night. I took one listen to the original arcade version and started working on the C64 version. I think they wanted some resemblance to the arcade version, but I just did what I wanted to do. By the time everyone arrived at 8.00 AM in the morning, I had loaded the main tune on every C64 in the building! I got my cheque and was on a train home by 10.00 AM.

Rob Hubbard was one of the most productive of all C64 musicians who composed a lot more famous tunes besides Commando. Some of the notables: Crazy Comets, Monty on the run, Sanxxion, W.A.R. Sometimes a bad game only kept selling because of Rob’s music.

Martin Galway added his name and his fantastic tunes to games like Uridium, Parallax, Hyper Sports. He was the first, along with the German Chris Hülsbeck, who wrote sample-based music on the Commodore 64-esen – this was the music of Arkanoid.

Talking about musicians, let’s see a top list of the all time best SID composers. This list was assembled by Zike of FairLight on his great In Medias Res website, containing short interviews with all the greatest legends of the Commodore 64 and the Amiga scene. Based on the answers given to the question “Who is your favorite musician?” he found that the most popular SID artists were the following:

1. Martin Galway

2. Charles Deenen of Maniacs of Noise

3. Rob Hubbard

4. Jeroen Tel of Maniacs of Noise

5. JCH of Vibrants

The names of Jeroen Tel, JCH and Charles Deenen will return some more times during the history of the scene. Now, let’s return to demos.

In the previous chapter you read about the first demomakers: The Judges, 1001 Crew, both from the Netherlands. The Judges, creators of the Think Twice demo series, also released the Rhaa Lovely slideshows. Slideshows were a special kind of demo, displaying graphics one by one, as a kind of digital art gallery. These were the first slideshows of the history of the scene, so we can really say The Judges were pioneers. Actually Rhaa Lovely was not exactly presentable. The first one, for example, told the story of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf from a quite alternative view. But the productions of the eighties were just forerunners of the first generation of real demos.

Arkanoid

1001 Crew: Suburbia. One can well observe the absence of the sideborder and the bottom scroller also running on the border (hence called borderscroller).

Many still know the Finnish group named Byterapers. They celebrated their 15th anniversary just while I was typing these lines. I had a discussion about their old times with Grendel, one of the founders of this team.

Around 1986 the C64 scene went through some changes. Demos appeared. Do you remember the first demomakers?

A screenshot from Xakk’s demo, No Sleep from 1987. They released several demos with their titles always related to sleeping: No Sleep 2, Go to Sleep, Sleeping, Waking Up, Why Sleep, Microsleep.

There were of course the Finnish demomakers who largely first influenced me. Their demos were the easiest to get. One of them were FCS, Finnish Cracking Service. It all started from the small “home” groups who were making little intros, and those “big” foreign names, like 1001 Crew, The Judges started flooding in when we had at least some kind of foreign contacts. I haven’t been checking old demos or scene too much for long, so can’t dig any names just suddenly. One thing was certain, though, was that Finnish Gold and Beyond Force made many great products. Beyond Force was emerged by their coder, Solomon. I still today respect FCS of Finnish Gold above anything as a demo programmer and a great person. His products and each and every release pushed the Finnish demoscene forward and provided great competition. And Xakk’s products I liked a lot as well. The Electronic Knights, Gamma Cracking Force, 777 Team, and so on. Oh, and there is something else that ought to be added. Pure Byte was the group that led Finland to the world scene. They had two great demos that ”broke the wall” and showed the world there is something in Finland as well. Then came FCS and after that Finnish Gold. There was also a ridiculous little group, Wabo-Soft. It consisted of one single fat mouthed kid, calling himself Reward. He later founded Immortal Icarus Imperium, then Powerslaves, and finally the Finnish section of Scoopex, which turned out to be one of the most famous formations in the history of the scene.

What was the general reception of demos? They appeared as a new way of computer art, apart from cracking. Were they immediately widely accepted as a new trend, or were they treated as a new fashion bound to disappear shortly?

That’s a question that can only come now, 10–15 years later. Back then – they were clearly part of the whole thing. Games, demos, intros. They were the same, this was the scene. The trend was that you cracked and made demos and intros.

When was the point when it seemed the demoscene will will separate itself from the cracker scene?

I think that started happening in 1988–1989 slowly, then maybe 1990–1991 very strongly.

Was a side effect of companies discontinuing releasing C64 software? Or were the police raids of the time the real reason, were they successful enough to drive many groups to giving up cracking and start making demos instead?

In Finland the police were never a problem. We read what happened in Germany especially and in other countries. Germans were always on the edge. Sometimes our swap partners just disappeared and later he told he was in jail for a while. I lost some very good friends, as good as you can ever create just by swapping with like minded people and writing letters. They were caught and forced to stop. I think I spent my life quota of letter writing in those years. I wrote long personal letters to the swap guys at best times.

“Real pirates never die, they just get archived” as they say. Did these friends who disappeared ever return?

Some did, some got too tough surveillance and threats so they didn’t. I withdrew from the illegal scene quite early myself, the hobby was becoming too much real work that I could afford to be on both sides of the legal fence.

Which were your favourite diskmagazines back then?

Diskmags, diskmags … Surprisingly there weren’t many. Many groups published paper magazines and spread them by post. Illegal was the most popular and the best.

Which was your first party?

Finnish Gold’s party, December 1987 in Vaajoski. The whole Finnish scene that existed was there, some thirty guys. If I revert back a bit, the first Finnish party with democompetitions was Byterapers Party 1988. We had seven demos competing. There were no prizes, only fame, but it was a start. The average age of visitors was 13–17 years and the oldest guy was 25. The outcome of the first Finnish compo became the following:

1. Finnish Gold

2. Z-Circle

3. Zip Cracking Factories

4. Byterapers

5. Finnish Gold

6. Deathstar

7. Zodux

Grendel’s story can be typical be summed up in that it is quite the same way to get involved in the demoscene even nowadays. Of course it’s way easier today, as even the circles of the elite are not as tight as those times. But there were some whose story can not be called typical at all. German crackers, being frantically pursued by police still had an easy life compared to what’s going on on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in the socialist countries.

It is quite hard to reveal the life of this scene. Their activity was so small scaled that one can barely find the works of an East European group, except accidentally. Most socialist countries had all Western electronic devices on COCOM list, meaning prohibiton of import. Although Hungarians could relatively easily reach Vienna, Austria and a quite lot of Commodore computers got into the country by private import and smugglery. Hungary was also special in a manner, as Hungarian designed computers were manufactured in large numbers by some state companies, and a number of institutes were focusing on state of the art software development. There was a good reason: Hungary (along with Czechoslovakia), as a Warsaw Pact member, had the strategic task of developing military electronics and computers. Hence computer science was an important part of Hungarian education from the elementary school.

All these factors led to when someone succeeded to get a Commodore computer somehow, he immediately tried something more serious than gaming. It was quite easy to get games anyway, as Commodores were widely used despite of the import prohibitions, and some influental users – company managers, high ranking officals – could reach Western software sources. The works of the Western crackers, along with the messages of crackers arrived behind the Iron Curtain along with these games. This was where the Hungarian scene’s history started, sometime around the mid-eighties.

An FBI Crew cracktro.

The first East-European group that became well known was the FBI Crew, formed in Hungary around 1984. Their name was changed to Chromance in 1990, and it had been reinforced by some foreign members. FBI Crew was mainly an importer group, as they never had anything to crack for themselves. Actually this activity was just as hazardous as cracking in Western countries, as floppy disks were forbidden to send abroad, and the communist intelligence service was monitoring all postal traffic. But they weren’t omnipotent and fortunately they disappeared with the political changes.

Every old C64 and Amiga sceners know, for example, the name of Jean, who became the #1. Hungarian swapper by keeping contacts with half of the known world, or the other members of Chromance, Mr. Wax, Painkiller, Alex or Griff. Some other famous Hungarian labels were Triumwyrat, Faces, that had a very long memberlist, Graffiti, formed from Trays, today remembered for their great coder, Grabowski, a master of FLI routines, Delta System, VIP or Astral, which later became world famous as a PC group. There were occassional copyparties in Hungary from 1989–1990, with approximately 50–100 visitors each, but in September 1991, there came a great megaparty, the called C.C.C.C.P., Chromance & Cerberos & Computermania Copy Party, with around 500 attenders. It was held in the Budapest Technical University, officially as a computer exhibition and fair, but unofficially there was an elite zone, for the top of the Hungarian scene. Most of the groups mentioned above were present, along with some famous Amiga teams like Majic 12 or Complex. The most important meeting place of the Hungarian scene was the weekly computer club at the Csokonai Cultural Centre (commonly referred as “Csoki”) in Budapest. This was a public user club, open for everybody, but only insiders knew of the second club, the one held on Saturdays at the same place, open for the elite only. It was a great honor to be invited to this inner circle.

The centre of Hungarian software piracy was a flea market, held every weekend in the backyard of a concert hall in Budapest, called Petõfi Csarnok. Thanks to some diligent copiers, the newest C64 and Amiga software were always was available on this market. Later they also sold PC software. This market was operating till 1995, when the arrant Business Software Alliance was formed in Hungary, and they started their activity with the malfeasance of organizing a raid without a warning against the pirates with the well paid help of the Hungarian police. Today the BSA is still openly applying unlawful methods in Hungary.

I talked with Painkiller, one-time cracker and swapper of Chromance about the early days of the Commodore 64 scene.

How did you get your first computer, and how did you get conneced to the scene?

I had a friend, who used to have a Commodore 64 computer. It was then I started to like it. That was around 1985–1986 but maybe I am mistaken by a few years. I received my first computer from my parents, a Commodore 64 with a datassette. I first became familiar with the scene at the Csokonai Cultural Centre which was not far from my home at that time.

Was there a cracker scene in Hungary in the eighties, or was importing the only activity?

I recall a few people cracking, but it was mainly about importing.

How have you built your first contacts with foreign groups? How were you able to communicate, as it was forbidden to send disks from Hungary to abroad?

I’ve never heard of such a law, but maybe Mr. Wax, the leader of Chromance would be able to tell about it. When I got into it, one just had to find a few contact addresses, put the disks in an envelope and post it. I doubt if the post office even slightly cared about the contents. At least I never had any problems. You just worked, released your stuff, and tried to send them to others, slowly pooling a lot of contacts.

Was it hard for an East European group to become part of the international warez scene?

It was not about the origins, but what you’ve put on the table. In a manner it was hard, as we had way less money for hardware than the Westerners.

Which Hungarian groups managed to climb on the top?

When I was a beginner, FBI Crew was the coolest around. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember many names, and I don’t want to list those I recall, as I don’t want to omit anyone.

Did you have contact with other East European, for example, Polish groups?

We were more oriented to the West, as most new stuff was coming from there. Since no games were officially published in Hungary, we had no other source.

Was there a real scene forming in Hungary, after the collapse of the Iron Curtain? Was it possible to acquire originals quickly? Did Hungarian groups have suppliers?

Demo coding was much more widespread in our country and except for a few success stories, like the smashing of the game Elvira, there wasn’t much cracking. We, Chromance, had some foreign suppliers, sending us originals. Our main goal was to create quality cracks, adding as many trainers as we could. There weren’t Hungarian suppliers at all.

Has anything changed for the scene with the political changes? Has it became easier to maintain contact with foreigners?

I, personally, don’t remember any major changes, but maybe it’s because of my faulty memory. I surely never experienced a feeling like “now it’s easy, but how hard it used to be”. I just sent disks and letters whomever I wanted.

How do you see that period of the scene and computers today?

I was at age 13 to 19 back then, and it was exciting and interesting. I was corresponding with many people, we attended parties, it was a good company. We never thought about relations, just lived our lives without analyzing things. It was delighting to receive all the new stuff, week by week, browsing them, playing what we liked. Meanwhile we were learning programming, and as we were time millionaires in that age, we were able to tinker with our own ideas, to code whatever came into our mind. Despite of the quick spread of demos, crackers were still the focus of attention. Many parties were organized during 1987 besides of the usual Venlo Meetings. The world record on the number of visitors was reached by the Danish Gold Copy Party in Soro, Denmark. In fact this party was bashed bigtime on several forums, due to the quality of both organizing and the place. During this party they voted Mr.Z. of Triand and Laffen of Raw Deal as the crackers of the year. FairLight and Triad also had their party in Stockholm, Sweden, and Radwar Enterprises also started their annual event from 1990.

The hidden part of Personal Lady.

Copyparties were growing. The number of attendees was reaching 200 instead of the 30–40 of some years earlier. During the Equinox/Horizon Party in Eskilstuna, Sweden in 1989 there were 500 visitors! In these early days parties did not have their own names and thus usually beared the name of the organizers, like: Radwar Party, Sharks Illegal Copy Party, Ikari Party or Ikari/Zargon Party. Typically the ones by the best crackers of the scene were the most popular.

Demos were also developing. The first demo containing a hidden part, which means a hidden feature (e. g. easter egg) appearing on a special trick was Personal Lady from 1987 by Scoop Designs. A girl in swimsuit was visible on the screen, and the demo asked the viewer to type in his name. If one typed the handle of the creator, TMC, the swimsuit disappeared from the girl. TMC was none other than Charles Deenen, who later became known as a member of Maniacs of Noise.

The first demo competitions party in the world was most likely the 1988 Byterapers Copy Party, which Grendel referred to some pages earlier. Actually it’s just an assumption, as it’s hard to find out precisely. Even after a long research I couldn’t find an earlier party where they held competitions for demomakers. So it happened that a bunch of very beginner young teenagers took this important step of the history of the scene. In fact cracker magazines and diskmags were already having demo contests regularly but there weren’t such a thing going on at parties before. Soon most parties had their own compos with the number of demos increasing and a new tradition appeared which still drives the scene nowadays: demogroups were making their products only for the parties, to compete other groups. The first “real” party with compos was the Razor 1911, The Cartel, Abnormal Party in Stjordahl, Norwegia, in October 1988, where they held both Amiga and C64 demo competitions. The atmosphere of this party was made somewhat spicy by some policemen present and wearing uniforms warning every attender about the prohibition of software piracy. According to some reports these policemen were called by a journalist who wanted to write a more exciting report about the event but luckily there were no incidents. Of course panic broke out when policemen appeared and many tried to flee through the windows when the cops entered. But the officer leading the task force was also a Commodore 64 user who greatly respected crackers and dispensed with the proper execution of the raid in exchange for a few disks of fresh games.

Later a major Norwegian daily paper, Aftenpostan Lordag had a two column article about the party, so this was perhaps the first event reported by everyday press, not counting the ones which made it to the crime section due to police raids.

During 1988 the Amiga scene was growing strong. Sceners were on the horns of a dilemma: sticke with lovely old Commie C64 or change to the new powerhorse, the fantastic Amiga? Some decided to upgrade to the new platform while others stayed put with their trusty C64. It was the first time in the history of the scene to see an alternative platform rising, and it was really a strong alternative. Different views divided some groups, even the scene itself. Some fanatic C64’ers disregarded the Amiga, claiming it’s easy to make anything nice on such a supercomputer. Others, who changed to Amiga, bashed the old, “obsolete” machine, the weaker graphical and musical possibilities of the C64. In a short time it all led to having “strictly C64 only” and ”Amiga only” parties Europe-wide. Outraged C64 fans called the competition “Lamiga”. Swyx of Triangle, a Danish scener contemplated about the subject on the pages of Illegal.

(…) Since the Amiga was published, a lot of groups moved to the 16-bit’er and left the good old 8-bit’er! I think it’s alright that you guys buy an Amiga, but why in the hell leave the 64 alone? I have had my 64 for more than 4 years now and of course I’d like to have 4096 colors, 4 stereo voices and 512K, but what is the fun in making demos on such a computer? Everybody can do something which looks incredible! (…) On the 64 you have to be cool to do great demos and to crack the hard games! I think that all of you see your C64 as a very good friend, right? Would you sell a good friend? Nope! Therefore, stay on 64!

Fortunately the C64 scene still survived.

The best cracker groups around 1988 were Triad, Hotline, Beastie Boys, FairLight, Scouse Cracking Group, RDI, Untouchable Cracking Force, Strike Force & The Movers, and Fantasy Cracking Service. A new label emerged, Cleveland Cracking Service changed its name to Fusion, enriching the already strong scene with another great group. Ian, the leader of Fusion was one of the oldest scene faces being over thirty years old. Another new group was the Austrian TSK, later Cosmos, with Antitrack, as we can remember. The American Untouchable Cracking Force returned at the end of 1988, when JJ The Breaker got demobilized. But soon the list of names started to shrink, as many great groups changed to Amiga, like Ikari or FairLight.

Genesis Project’s Delirious demo series was a great success. These pictures show Delirious 10, from 1990–1991. The code was almost always done by Raistlin, music was composed by such great names like Drax of Vibrants, Danko of FairLight, etc. Graphics and logos were drawn by Spacie.

Illegal saw its last issue in Autumn 1989. This last one contained a list of all time best crackers. Since this list was assembled by the most prominent members of the scene of the era, we can accept it as an authentic ranking list. Here it is:

The best crackers:

1. Janitor of Triad

2. Weetibix of SCC

3. Mr. Zeropage of TLC

4. Gollum of FairLight

5. Omega Man of TCS

The best cracker groups

1. Ikari

2. FairLight

3. Triad

4. Hotline

5. Scouse Cracking Group

The best coders

1. White of The Jufges

2. Mr. Cursor

3. TMC of Scoop Design

4. Omega Man ofTCS

5. Mario van Zeist

The best programming groups (or as we later called them – demogroups)

1. The Judges

2. Scoop Design

3. Ian & Mic

4. Ash & Dave

5. 1001 Crew

The best demos

1. Think Twice – The Judges

2. That’s the way it is – Scoop Design

3. Trail Mix – Soedesoft

4. Dual Cassette – Ash & Dave

5. Pimplesqueezer – Rawhead

Don’t think any other system will ever have same kind of magic with its plain simpleness and grip. Maybe that’s the reason why we in Byterapers continue to develop for a machine we used back ten years ago when we started whole scenething ...

– Grendel of Byterapers

6. Race with the Amiga

At the turn of the nineties, the worldwide home computer market was undoubtedly dominated by Commodore. The C64 and the Amiga were only competing with each other and it was the same with the scene. A different kind of computer the IBM PC was taking its first steps in the background, but no one took it serious at the time. There wasn’t a good a reason though.

Demos, demos, demos, and better games all the time. This was what the Commodore 64 world was all about. New groups were born again and when the Iron Curtain collapsed Eastern Europe joined the party. Demos had style. They weren’t raw technical demonstrations any more. Multipart, multidisk demos became commonplace and just like on the Amiga scene, the first specialized sceners appeared who were only dealing with a single branch of scene art – graphic artists, musicians, organizers. It was made possible by the great number of smart new programs for the C64 like music composers and drawing programs with a number of these created by crackers and demogroups. By having these utilities artists didn’t need sophisticated programming knowledge any more and they were finally able to concentrate on what they wanted to do. Coding utilities was often a side activity of several groups, just like creating games. Those times things weren’t as difficult as these days. One single programmer was able to build a decent game especially if he was supported by a graphic artist and musician. The first great C64 graphic artist already appeared in the eighties; he was The Sarge of Triad. The Sarge painted many beautiful multicolor pictures well before talented hackers discovered the undocumented high resolution videomodes.

Programmers were always pushing the limits of the hardware and soon found the C64 an incredibly flexible computer. By some smart tricks they could achieve many things never described in any manual. One of these was the sideborder trick and later the discovery of the so-called FLI, or Flexible Line Interpretation videomode. By exploiting an error of the VIC chip, and actually “overdriving” it, it was possible to initialize previously unknown videomodes, which had greater resolution and color depth of the “official” ones known before. Soon a lot of different FLI modes had been discovered, like normal FLI, the higher resolution HiRes FLI, Interlaced FLI, and so on. The screen management system of the C64 was quite different from today’s computers. The screen was not driven pixel by pixel, but it was divided into so-called attribute cells. One cell had a different size in each graphic mode, like in normal multicolor mode (160 × 200, 16 colors) it was 4 × 8 pixel, and a limited number of colors was usable in each cell. In multicolor mode it was 4, (3 colors plus the background color) but in the newly discovered FLI mode it was 16 making the creation of much better graphics possible. The Interlaced FLI meant that two 16 color pictures were blinking on each other very fast giving the illusion of one with 128 colors – unfortunately this interlacing also meant a strong screen flicker.

The popularity of the Commodore computers during the early nineties is well represented by the fact that Commodore’s booth was covered from floor to the ceiling with different groups’ stickers within minutes of opening at the 1990 CeBIT computer exhibition in Hanover, Germany. Some even attracted the police, as they really wanted to catch for example RSI or Storm members. At the same time there were a lot of major copyparties. Some like the Red Sector – Alpha Flight – Spectral Copy Party in Luxemburg had great success while others floundered.

There was a funny incident that happened during the News-Ersatz party in Edderheim, Germany. Around fifty or sixty sceners visited the announced event but when they arrived they found the party hall closed and nobody around to let them in. After a long wait and lots of swearing the entire bunch left to a nearby pizzeria where they came up with the bright idea of collecting several hundred marks to rent the entire building for their own copyparty. A while later the organizer of the original party, who were away playing soccer, also appeared thinking that no one would come. The organizer wasn’t very popular among the visitors and left a short while later with a couple black eyes and broken nose.

Demo compos were common at every party and sometimes they even had separate graphics and music compos. It was long before prizes began being awarded which were usually funded from entry fees. Later some party organizers were seeking sponsors who would donate money and computer prizes. Sponsorship became greatly needed to cover costs, especially as some parties already got close to the “dream limit” of 1,000 visitors. For the first time organizers tried to drift their events into a legal frame and in those cases the party invitations usually contained some warning about protection of software copyrights. Such warnings are still in fashion nowadays and ignoring them is also still in fashion. However, it worked from the start and the police stopped harrassing parties and even the press praised them as “creative computer art conferences”.

A good example for the rising quality of parties and the introduction of professionalism was the Trilogy & Dominators party in December 1989, in the city of Randers, Denmark. It was at this part where the winner of the demo compo could expect a prize of 5,000 Danish crowns, which was around 1,270 German marks those times. The undisturbed flow of electric power was supervised by a hired electrician. For this time even the “lamers” living on the scene’s periphery, or outside it, were invited to the parties. Some party teams even announced their events in legal computer magazines however, the ones arriving without a personal invitation were expected to pay a higher entry fee or sit in a separate hall.

All of the greatest groups of the eighties, who we know from previous chapters, had disappeared by the early 1990’s or were about to disappear. Fortunately their replacements were arriving in a great number. Besides mailswapping and modem trading, BBSes were very popular. The most known ones were running in the United States for obvious reasons as European telecommunications fees were still very high. Some boards really worth remembering were Wild Wares maintained by Exodus, Wares Galore of Talent & Ikari, The Addiction of NEC, Gamezone or Crazy & NEC’s The Disk Shoppe. These weren’t simply a library of downloadable programs, but they also stored news and messages accessible by users. Most BBSes were “elitez only” and they didn’t have a public phone numbers. One could only access them by having the proper contacts. Warezboards still work the same nowadays.

Both illegal BBSes and legal software libraries helped the scene develop. There was the CompuNet commercial computer network, which served the populous community of Commodore 64 users since 1984. It helped create many a sceners career despite of its relatively high fees. Small, spectacular programs which we could call demos were spreading on CompuNet as early as 1984–1985 which was around the same time the first demogroups began appearing.

Just for the technical interest, let me explain a little bit about how CompuNet worked. Connecting to the network required a modem, a huge, brick-shaped device connected to the cartridge port of the C64. Users of the service were able to upload “pages” and packages of data to their own storage space, and could “turn pages” to see other users’ uploads. Sounds familiar? Yes, WWW, the web as we know it, works very similar nowadays.

Many multicolor graphics were spreading on CompuNet, of which some even appeared in demos and later games. Ste was one of the most popular pixel artists, but Ash & Dave, Ian & Mir or Ben Daglish, the famous musician, also made their first introduction on CompuNet.

The modem’s ROM expansion contained an editor utility which made using CompuNet possible for offline viewing of the pages after downloading. User IDs and passwords were also stored by the ROM so CompuNet was quite secure. To acquire a user’s password a hacker would have needed to physically get the users modern. In practice it was actually possible to decrypt the data flow but this would have requred very sophisticated knowledge and thus rarely happened.

One of the most useful features of CompuNet was that users could uploaded materials. Upload speed was only 75 baud – for a comparision, a reading man has a “bandwidth” of about 50 baud, as he gets 50 characters per second on average. However, download speed was 1,200 baud, which wasn’t too bad for that time’s file sizes. Users also had e-mail boxes, called MBX or MailBoX. There was even a chat zone, similar to today’s IRC, where the users could chat realtime. So, quite familiar to what most people are use to these days with the internet but shared by much fewer people.

An FBI Crew cracktro.

CompuNet ceased its services early 1991. The server disappeared although some think it’s lying in the basement at a house in London. It’s really a pity that future computer museums won’t be able to display this technical relic.

The first group cooperations were also born during the early nineties. It often happened that two cracker or demogroups joined forces to gain advantage in the big competitions. Such cooperations were Talent & Ikari, Crazy & Lotus and so on. Around this time some great demogroups were created which are still playing an important role in the life of the C64 scene: Crest, Blackmail, Censor Design, The Ruling Company, Bonzai, Cosmos Designs, Contex, Topaz Beerline, Taboo, Padua. In the early 1990’s the demoscene was still in a special situation. Crackers never took demogroups serious and they were not on any cracker top ten list, so they couldn’t gain respect from crackers. Demo charts were not yet assembled by votes but simply by the personal taste of the editors.

Demogroups were only contacting each other and rarely crackers. Like there was a second scene. A known, great cracker’s name was not so respected among demomakers, and vice versa. This separation was very noticable during the 1989 Ikari-Zargon party. Ikari, thought that as the organizers of the party, they should win the demo compo so they disqualified their competition Horizon and Oneway. There was nothing wrong with it for crackers as they were “unknown” groups, and Ikari was a living legend – the top elite of the scene. Anyway, they were just demos. This outraged the demosceners and the organizers were furiously bashed in many diskmags and demo scrollers. But there wasn’t a single word about cheating in cracker forums, even the Illegal fanzine only reported that the demo compo was won by Ikari. This was the time when crackers and the demoscene finally split.

Blackmail, a group from the Netherlands released his demo titled Dutch Breeze in 1991. This production is still one of the greatest on the Commodore 64. Their production showed the power of the C64 with great graphics, music and code. The demo was coded by Alf, Gaap, Hitchhiker, Skyline and Thunder, graphics were made by Orc, Hein Design and Robert Tan, and music was composed by Reyn Ouwehand, Falco Paul and Jeroen Tel. Alf and Gaap were actually Cesspool and Custard of Hotline. Among the numerous scrolltexts they mention that the demo was originally made for a party, but doesn’t tell which one. Finally it was released outside of any compo, which was a major mistake, as it could have been one of the greatest victories in the history of the demoscene. It was released at the Silicon ’92 party in Utrecht, Holland. Dutch Breeze’s music was rearranged many times during the years and one version was published on the C64 remix album Nexus 6581. Warren “Waz” Pilkington wrote the followings in the CD’s booklet:

Every C64 demo scene fan has at one time in their lives witnessed the epic, classic Blackmail demo that is Dutch Breeze. Even after all these years it’s still my favourite C64 demo ever. It has everything you could wish for – great graphics and intro sequence, slick techniques throughout and great music. It not only revolutionised the demo scene at the time it set a standard.

True. This demo showed everything they ever developed on the C64 and even some small and impressive new features. Among them was the first larg FLI scroller. In fact there were already such scrollers before but as the creators told it in the scroller, they wrote this routine two years before releasing the demo so this was really the first one ever. Dutch Breeze contained a lot of beautiful screen art, including a full screen parallax scroller part, in which a dragon was flying over a landscape with some moons on the black night sky. It was a such high quality product that showed the way for demo design for the years ahead and set a higher standard for other demo groups. The high technical and artistic level of today’s C64 demos is partly a result of Dutch Breeze. But besides of opening new horizons it also closed an era of demomaking, the period of early demos. The purpose of demos was not simply to display a scrolling text or a new technical achievement without any fineries, they became independent pieces of art. Additionally, Dutch Breeze was one of the last demos that was not built on complex mathematical algorythms, but VIC programming and video tricks.

Pictures of Dutch Breeze: a parallax scroller with a flying dragon, a Blackmail logo, a FLI scroller and a screenshot of the slideshow part displaying many drawings of Blackmail’s graphic artists.

Dutch Breeze also contained some erotic pictures. In one of the parts a naked girl appeared on the screen in a certainly obscene position. To continue watching the demo, the viewer had to entertain the lady by rubbing a wet finger against the C64’s joystick port.

Crest entered the scene in 1988 with German, Swedish and Danish members. The primary section was the German one. During their first year they released seven demos and their activity did not decrease for long. They started giving their best during 1991–1992 with a very notable demo titled Ice Cream Castle. The group still exist nowadays, their coders, Crossbow and Vision are among the most respected Commodore 64 programmers, who are responsible for discovering several undocumented video modes.

Screenshots from Ice Cream Castle. The Logo on the first picture was not drawn by some graphics utility, rather Crossbow coded it byte by byte directly into the memory with a machine code monitor called SMON. the second picture shows the sideborder strecht scroller, the third is the D011 split and the fourth is the overlace part.

Ice Cream Castle did for code what Dutch Breeze did for design. There aren’t many demos in the history of the scene which brought so many new routines especially not with such tasty graphical garnish. In this demo there was the first FLI mode FPP, Flexible Pixel Position effect, which was the same to the FLD discovered by The Judges but with the pixel lines of a bitmap instead of character text lines. The first sideborder stretch scroller, a scroller that runs on the sideborder, but the height of the characters changes dynamically. Ice Cream Castle was the first to feature overlace, a single color scroller running over an FLI picture with variable fonts. This was a very hard task and a serious achievement with the weak graphical possibilities of the VIC chip. There was also an FPP in multicolor mode, which ran over a HiRes FLI picture, and a so-called D011 split, in which a bitmap displayed on the screen was divided from a text with a waving sine line, and as this line moved to and back, the bitmap or the text unfolded. These routines were actually the technically impossible. To summarize, Ice Cream Castle vouched for the highest level of VIC coding knowledge, for which Crest deserves utmost respect even in our present day.

The achievements of Crest and other groups started a new kind of competition. Demomaking was not only about discovering new tricks and effects any more, but also pushing existing ones to the machines limit. A good example of this is the introduction of multiplexers. The Commodore 64 was originally able to display and move a maximum of 8 so-called sprites, independently programmable, 24 × 21 pixel sized graphical objects. But as some found that the screen border can be made disappear, others started to experiment with multiplying this eight. They succeeded, and the demoroutine which made it possible was called multiplexer. The first record was set by Hannes Sommer, the coder of Cosmos Designs, with 112 sprites. It was only years later defeated by Crossbow, who was frantically researching exploitable errors of the hardware and raised the number to 144. The absolute record was set by Ses of Genesis Project, who managed to display 290 sprites in his demo titled Spritemania in 1990. A common trend of the early nineties was the race for records, not only on the field of multiplexers but also in several other areas.

Newly discovered demo routines were presented in a specific fashion. First a very simple, everyday effect appeared, often a plain scroller. This scroller displayed something like “Well, this is a simple routine. Let’s change it!” Then something new appeared, which looked better along with the first effect. Now the scroller displayed: “This is not bad, but still not enough!” Now something rather decent was added to the screen, which made the entire routine look good. Finally, the scroller said: “OK, now let’s see the rest!” – and now the routine was displayed in its full glory. This kind of teasing was first introduced by Crest and has been immitated by many other groups since.

Censor Design was born in 1989, mainly with former Swedish members of Triad. They were also doing cracking and weren’t only active on the C64 but also on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) game console. They won their first compo in 1990 on the Phenomena & Censor Party with Wonderland V. The Wonderland demo series saw eight sequels. They also had a disk magazine called Fatal News which was later also issued as a papermag. The group’s most well known member was perhaps Danko, a musician, who is remembered among the greatest like Jeroen Tel or Rob Hubbard. Their demos were mostly built on quality code instead of design.

Animated raytracing in FairLight’s Legoland 2 demo.

Cosmos Designs was active from 1988 to 1990, as a successor of TSK. Their death was reported in the first issue of Mamba yet the groups name was taken on by some members who went on to do game development for a while. Finally the group segmented and its members moved to Conflict, Bonzai, and Legend.

Padua was a team of Polish, French, and German members. Their first demo, Final Torture was first presented in 1994. They gained fame in the second half of the nineties, and we talk about them later.

FairLight was leading the demo charts for a long time, especially with their very successful Rutig Banana demo and later with the Legoland series. But in 1990 the entire demo section transferred to Horizon, and FairLight ceased its demomaking activities.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, Eastern European groups rapidly mushroomed. We can remember, the first groups were learning the trade on computers smuggled from Vienna. Hungarians were the strongest and the Polish followed them. In Hungary, besides of the already introduced Chromance, which soon became an international group – namely they had sections in the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Greece and the United States – there came Chaos, Chorus, Faces, Exile, Triumwyrat, Graffiti, who were only the run of the mill at the beginning but soon they made it to the top of the international elite. Asphyxia, a group born by the fusion of four Polish teams released a megademo in 1990 titled Gasping 4 Air and they organized their own party in 1992, in the city of Glogow. Almost the same time the coder and graphics artist Polonus founded Quartet, which among many others released the first Polish diskmag, Kebab. The first English language Polish magazine was Goldrush by Skylight. Agony, Caution and Galycia, which soon joined Faith were also Polish, but also Success, Chromance and several other international groups had Polish sections. These early years Poland was noisy from the heavy competition between Taboo and Elysium, these two great teams made the most beautiful productions. Many Eastern European sceners worked for Western teams, like for example the American NEC had a Hungarian member.

Taboo: Place in Space. This was one of the first Polish demos bringing home the worldwide bacon in 1992. It gained respect mostly with its serious 3 D parts

The birth of the Russian scene was not an everyday story. Let’s see what A.S., the coder of the Russian Alan Group wrote in 1994 in the American Driven diskmag.

(…) Let’s go back in time … 1994, 1993 … December 1988. Look around: Soviet Union, Russia, Moscow, the middle of Perestroyka. The Iron Curtain just fell down. (…) Most Russians couldn’t write to another country, couldn’t take a trip abroad, even couldn’t watch MTV. By military channels from the USA, Utah, I received a C128D (NTSC). So, new computer. I haven’t heard anything about that computer type. In 1988 I only knew Yamaha-MSX and some Russian computers.

Hard situation: no literature, no warez, except some disks delivered along with the machine. Well, I started searching contacts in Moscow, and found that there is no C128 scene inside the Soviet Union. After some time I contacted some C64 users here in Moscow. They also bought their Commodores in the USA. The first cool programs I saw were Maniac Mansion, Airborne Ranger and some others. Then I decided to build the Russian C64 scene myself. I was crazy and young …

I took the handle Andrew Soft, as my name is Andrey. That was in the middle of 1989. At the same time I met a guy called Alexey. He also had his own C64, a PAL one. After some time we became very good friends, and we established ALAN Inc. (ALAN = Alexey & Andrey). Alexey took the handle Top Alex. I changed my handle to A. S. The first Russian crew was started. The first release of ALAN Inc. was my crack for Tetris, the original disk was bought in the USA. Then ALAN Inc. released the very first Russian demos, using Russian and English languages.

The scene was just about to start in many Western countries where there was not a trace of the scene or demos before. Spain was one of them, where The Blasters Inc., or Desert Nomads from the Canary Islands were emerging. Desert Nomads also made some demos under the label Level 64. The early Spanish scene worked in quite an uncommon way. There weren’t any good cracker groups but many were copying games and swapped warez. Traders, swappers and the few crackers met every Sunday at a flea market in Barcelona. Don’t think of it as some party rather they just mingled with the crowd pretending themselves as peaceful onlookers. When two of them met in the crowd, they both prompted which titles they had in their pockets. If the offer was accepted they unobtrusively swapped the cassettes or one sold it to the another. For some reason they never dealt with floppy disks only datassette cassettes. No one spread demos and no one made demos even as they could not have been sold. Only The Blasters was an exception, but they were also taking part in this hide and seek game and travelled to international parties from the money they earned by selling pirated software. Another unique habit of the Spanish was to release demos under different group labels every time, as there were very few groups, so they pretended as if they had many more than really existed.

There was some C64 scene in Italy but it was the weakest of all European countries. The only group worth mentioning was F4CG’s Italian section but they were mainly importers, rarely releasing a few cracks.

Taboo: Altered States. This demo was finished in 1992, but was only released in 1994, and immediately became one of the greatest hits of the year.

The scene left its footprint in almost all countries of the world until the early nineties. There weren’t any places of the world where they didn’t have at least a few swappers. Clues pointing to the existence of a weak scene can be discovered in South America, Brasil, Israel, and even Pakistan, where some game swappers were active. In Turkey the famous group named Clique was born in 1991 with the breakup of Bronx and within a few months it grew into a major international label. Accuracy, AIDS and MSA were also famous Turkish teams, however, the latter two soon joined Clique.

The first musicgroup, a team only specialized in music composition was Vibrants, formed in 1989. Great names gathered in this bunch, like Drax, JHC and Laxity. Around the same time Maniacs of Noise was founded with members like Jeroen Tel, Johannes Bjerregaard, Reyn Ouwehand. Laxity also started as a Maniacs of Noise member but later quit, and founded the equally famous Vibrants. These two groups still exist nowadays as parts of a somewhat independent branch of the scene, the so-called underground Internet music scene.

Demomaking was not as popular in the United States as in Europe. The American scene, regardless of the platform, was always more interested in cracking and trading warez so their demoscene remained small. The greatest American demomakers of the early nineties were Lords or Venom but North East Crackers (NEC) also made some demos.

A screenshot of Birkenheim by Lords. Everything was moving on thiis screen, the text behind the logo was constantly scrolling, with three other scrollers running under it with different speeds. At the bottom there is a dycp text bouncing, and the credits text on the top was fading in and out. To achieve all this they had to carefully plan the economic usage of the limited rasterime.

In Australia, which was the farthermost possible place from the demoscene’s European heart, there was a surprisingly high level of activity. At the very beginning there were only crackers and traders, like everywhere else. One in particular, The Force, a cracker group, was already active in 1982. The first Australian demos didn’t make their introduction until around 1990 influenced mainly by the European productions. First there were only a handful of demomakers, and the early teams, like Breeze Designs, Hype, Lithium or System soon gave up. The dominant label of these early times was the Tasmanian Shazam! who established the Australian demoscene with their Albedo demo series. But the history of the Australian C64 scene did not end with the death of these groups, soon dozens of new names took their places in the local diskmag charts, like Warriors of Time later renamed to Offence, along with the likes of The Digital Underground, Ikon Visual, Creation, Chrome, Battery and Exceed. Many European groups founded Australian sections. The genre of diskmags was very popular on the remote continent, almost each team had their own magazine, for instance Lithium had three at once. The most important ones were Vandalism, Slowpoke, Reason for Treason and Rock’n’Role. New Zealand barely joined the Australian dash, but they still had some local heroes, who paved the way for crackers and demomakers of the future, like Nukebusters, Ashgard, Ozone, or Chrome’s New Zealand section.

Around 1991 the style of demos changed completely. Up until 1991 the demos were following the cracktro fashion, long scrollers followed each others, and each demopart was built around a scroller. On the other hand, as mentioned in the previous chapter, demos were rarely treated as pieces of art, they were pure technical demonstrations introducing new programming tricks. The real competition among demomakers had started at the beginning of the nineties which led to great competition among demogroups, similar to what happend in the cracking scene: who can code a better demo, a more spectacular new effect, etc. The boom of the Amiga scene greatly influenced this as many new productions on that platform showed new effects that were impossible to code on the C64. If we’d turn a few pages ahead to the history of the Amiga, we’d learn about the first vector graphics were introduced during this time. What did hardcore C64’ers say about this? “Who said the C64 can’t do it? Here ya go!” – and suddenly the same vector cubes and other rotating three dimensional objects appeared on the C64 screens. The first to adapt vector based graphics were Ash & Dave in their Channel 4 single-part demo in 1987, but true 3 D vector graphics were not introduced until around 1992.

Around this time some desperate resistance, a kind of “we can do it” mentality was part of the flavour of the Commodore scene, as they fought for survival against the Amiga, and a few years later the PC also entered the ring. And though all of this the C64 scene survived – but more about this later. An important innovation appeared shortly after the release of the famous Mental Hangover demo by Scoopex on the Amiga. The first trackmos were introduced. These were a new kind of demos which did not stop between two parts for a shorter or longer loading session but ran continuously, displaying all the parts sequentially. The first such demo on the C64 was Triad’s Red Storm in 1992, coded by Alfatech and King Fisher. King Fisher wrote the following about their own work.

In 1992 I released Red Storm which was my greatest contribution up to that date. I employed several techniques and ideas new to the C64 scene. The first was the continuos “trackmo” which we were first to use. The demo used language and imagery not targetted at the computer “scene” but at a broader human spectrum. One thing, the Soviet symbols were loaded with negative connotations (blood on the Swedish flag, turning to Soviet flag, as an image of Sweden being invaded by Sovie) I had at that time begun turning anarchist and anticommunist, and this was why the imagery changed in political terms. I was reading poetry by Shelley, Bob Dylan, and Swedish poets like Kristina Lugn.

Anticommunism was a common view of the C64 scene. Especially FairLight’s productions were stuffed with anticommunist slogans like their famous Kill a commy for mommy in the cracktro of Platoon II, but Triad also pulled their weight with Tiger Hell’s intro where they claimed that A good communist is a dead communist! What is strange that some similar anti-Soviet were created well after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Trackmos soon became popular. Origo Dreamline released Elysion almost at the same time as Red Storm, and many more followed. The quick spread of the new style, however, had some obstacles from the outset, as most coders didn’t have the necessary knowledge about the considerably difficult programming of the 1541 floppy drive and creating trackmos required sophisticated overlay routines that enabled a demopart running on the screen while another was already loading. Many ripped the loader from the game G. I. Joe, like Triangle did in their Road of Excess demo. This was a common and widely accepted method even conventional multipart demos’ loaders were ripped from games sometimes. Finally Taboo released an open source multiloader in 1993 which anyone could use to create trackmos.

Two pictures from Red Storm: a FLI plasma and a fractal based dot vector.

The fall of early cracker groups and also some demogroups was greatly sped up by the decreasing number of C64 software released during the beginning of the nineties and soon even the production of the C64 was halted. People started to pack the old 8-bit machines away in the garage and if we’d browse Amiga or PC diskmags of the time we could often find articles from different people expressing their incomprehension regarding people who still code on this “obsolete” computer. But there still were and still are today these freax who didn’t let themselves go. The first great names left the scene, but new ones kept arriving. A change of generation happened around 1994–1995, the first in the history of the scene, and the mentality, the unwritten rules of the new generation was different from the earlier generation. For example some graphics appeared in demos that were created on other computers like the Amiga or PC, based on a scanned sketch, color converted and transferred to C64 by cable. This method was called wiring. This was really much easier than using the old laborious C64 painting software, but was it fair? The dispute on this subject lasted for years and naturally those who spent years on perfecting their painting abilities were against this new method.

Origo Dreamline: Elysion

The group Oxyron invented the so-called 4×4 FLI videomode around this time, first presented in Coma Light 12. This mode enabled the direct access of video memory, resulting in much faster screen update, but also larger pixels, uglier, lumpish picture. Basically it was using 4×4 pixels rasters instead of single pixels. The 4×4 meant the dawn of newschool style: they now were able to code routines which would have been running too slow in conventional modes, but demo screens got sawtoothed. The new groups were not really coding basic VIC tricks any more, but focused on mathematical algorythms, 3 D vectors, and fractals, so we can say they followed today’s demo style. But meanwhile they cut themselves adrift from the old golden rule: Make it smooth, or don’t make it. The main goal was not making the demo beautiful, but more difficult, pushing the limits of the machine. Of course the demos that became the most successful were those that succeeded in combining difficult code and quality art. A few groups still kept the oldschool style and some, like Crest or Padua, used both methods. Others changed style during their career, like Camelot, a Swedish group founded by former Light members.

A good example of newschool demos is the World of Code demo series by Byterapers from 1994. World of Code became the demo of the year in 1994, while World of Code 2 won the C64 demo competition on the Assembly ’94 party in Helsinki, Finland. Other good newschool works were Mathematica and Access Denied from Reflex or the already mentioned Elysion trackmo from Origo Dreamline.

As the Commodore 64 slowly became obsolete and when it seemed this lovely little computer was doomed, many thought about saving the good old games, demos and such, so they could run them on an Amiga or a PC. This need for preserving the past resulted in the first Commodore 64 emulator for the PC, the C64S which was released in 1991, written by Miha Peternel from Slovenia. The first version was quite a flop – it was cumbersome and slow and emulation was far from perfect, but it brought a very useful innovation which was the D64 and T64 file formats. The converter program created by Miha Peternel was able to convert C64 disk contents to disk image files on PC, and only requiring a simple converter cable connecting a 1541 drive to the PC’s serial port. The D64 format was invented to store the contents of one disk in one single file. The transfer also worked the opposite way, it was possible to write a D64 file back to a floppy disk. The T64 format was created to store single datassette files. These file formats soon became standard, used by all of C64 emulators written ever since. This made the survival of the C64 scene possible, even in our present day since these converted programs can easily be spread by modem or the Internet and enjoyed by all. One no longer needs to have a bunch of floppies or even a C64. And best of all the sceners don’t ever need to send their fragile 5.25" floppy disks through the mail or worry about preservation of said media. To speed up conversions, Joe Forster, a Hungarian coder created Star Commander, a new file manager utility for the PC, which provided user friendly interface by displaying the 1541 as a drive of the PC, enabling users to copy single files from and to the C64 disks. It was perhaps even more useful than emulators themselves, and quickly took the place of the primitive, command driven converter utility of C64S.

Glenz vector in World of Code by Byterapers.

Nowadays Commodore 64 emulators are so sophisticated that they’re almost equal to an original C64. Although emulation will perhaps never be completely perfect emulator coders continue working to shrink the gap to provide 100% compatibility. In fact, these emulators are so good that all the illustrations of this book, the screenshots of demos and other programs were made using an emulator.

A graffiti style Reflex logo and a Phong shaded torus from the demo titled Mathematica. This effect uses 4 × 4 videomode. It is actually a Phong shaded torus, but does it look good? Decide yourself.

The demoscene is global. Don’t ever forget that. Whoever started first, or who’s better, or which country’s got the most coders or whatever, is irrelevant. Differences don’t matter.

– Liam the Lemming

7. Over the ocean

The style changed in 1994, the disappearance of old groups and sceners at almost the same time reshaped the Commodore 64 scene for the forthcoming years. From 1995 to our present days we can talk about one single, homogeneous period, without major changes on any fields. New groups were rarely born, as the C64 was already an obsolete computer around 1995, and the Amiga or the PC was much more attractive for beginners. Only fanatics kept the C64. Hardware and software support was discontinued almost completely and no companies were interested in the little 8-biter any more. Hence the cracker scene was dead and gone as there was nothing to crack any more.

The years between 1994–1995 were not very productive years. It seemed the Commodore 64 would forever disappear from parties. The Amiga and the PC extruded the interest in C64 compos on the major international parties, like The Party, Assembly or The Gathering. Other parties cancelled C64 categories once for all. A lot of smaller scene events also left off the C64 competition, among them the famous Venlo Meetings. Less productions, demos and intros were released. Only Eastern Europe took the recession with relative ease, the fizzle continued in Poland, Slovakia, the former Soviet republics and Hungary. Turning a few pages forward and one discovers the history of the PC scene and active period for Hungarian PC scene during these same years. Yet the Hungarian PC scene did have an influence on the C64. Although neither Hungarian nor Polish parties were big enough to have a reasonable international effect, they were still big enough to delay the fall of the C64 scene by a few years.

It wasn’t all hopeless though. Even these desperate years had its new heroes. In Germany there were Reflex, Plush, Smash Designs, Hungary brought Coma, Resource, Breeze and Profik, bringing some life into the retarding body of the old scene, and also labels like Crest, Taboo, Padua, Wrath Designs, and one group returning after a year long pause, Byterapers, kept holding up the front. Demos started becoming more professional, better designed, taking some of the trends of the Amiga and the PC. Most sceners curtailed their demos’ complexity, recognizing that it’s not enough for an effect to be difficult, it also has to look good. The overall style of demos became clearer, smoother. The mainstreams of the period survived until our present days. They define the layout of today’s productions, and they’re not too likely to change, as the C64 scene has already passed all possible phases of its history.

The average age of sceners changed around 1995–1996. Instead of the 16–22 years of age earlier, it raised to 23–26. Nowadays the average is around 30, this clearly points out that the C64 became the hobby computer of a small group of users, holding tight to their veteran machine. Unfortunately this also meant the further decrease of releases, as these mature people did not have as much time as they used to have when they were teenagers.

A positive progress was the so-called homecoming. Many retired sceners, among them many who earlier changed to the Amiga or the PC and sold their old C64s, returned by nostalgia, and started coding, drawing or composing on the C64 again. Alas this homecoming was not common enough to pad the headcount of the shrinking scene, but quantity counteracted with quality: many homecomers were talented artists, taking advantage of their art experience gained on other platforms on their old-new computer.

The Internet was a blessing for the C64 scene, eliminating the vast geographic distances between groups, allowing the unlimited transfer of scene materials, and sceners could also meet and chat on the IRC round the clock, on the newly opened #c-64 channel. So it happened that the worldwide network obliterated the border between the European and the North American scene, and both sides were surprised on the activity of the other, which they mutually underestimated. Especially Europeans experienced the large number of demos, diskmags and other stuff released in the USA with great astonishment. These were all written for NTSC Commodore 64s, so they rarely made it to Europe, were they used PAL C64s. Americans sometimes converted cracked NTSC games to PAL, but rarely demos. By the Internet and the emulators running on PC and Amiga these products finally came out of the shade, as emulators were able to emulate both kinds of C64s. Suddenly both sides of the ocean realized that actually there were two independent C64 scenes before, and as NTSC sceners could not gain inspiration from PAL works, and vice versa, both scenes walked their own ways, developing their very own styles and trends. The Internet put an end to this separation, and we can talk of a truly homogeneous C64 scene from 1995. American groups, like Carcass Creation Service, Storm, Eclipse, Electron joined the life of the old continent, just to mention the greatest ones.

Screenshots from two demos by Eclipse: Spherical and Whoa!

As a matter of fact, emulators were useful, but not completely perfect. So a European willing to watch NTSC demos as they were intended to look like, had to get an NTSC C64, and Americans had to get PAL ones. Diskmags of the period often contained appeals to coders to make their productions compatible with both systems, but it would have meant a lot of extra work, so most programmers did not care. Many suggested the definition of some programming standard that grants permeability between the systems, but it was never done. A new field of scene activity appeared instead, which was only known on the C64 scene, the fixer. Fixers were a special branch of crackers, who only converted programs to the other system – fixed them, as they called it. Among the first fixers were Mitch, the main cracker of Eagle Soft Incorporated, or Blackhawk of Rowdy American Distributors, an importer group, later Stormbringer of Exodus or Tristan of Empire. Some game fixing were done already back in the cracker era, but there weren’t much demand for such operations, as in the high times of the C64 most games were published both in PAL and NTSC versions.

Fucked Beyond Repair cracktro

For this time this book discussed the history of the Commodore 64 from the European view, accordingly only mentioning those few American crackers and demogroups who became known in Europe, working on PAL computers, or converting their releases to PAL. The NTSC scene was always smaller than the PAL, but its activity was near the European level. American crackers really took their part of breaking the good mood of software companies, and as telecommunication was much cheaper there than in Europe, cracked games spread much faster. Therefore, with all sceners equipped with modems, mailswaping was not as widespread as in Europe.

The works of American crackers was more based on expediency instead of doing it for fun or the fame, and much more groups started cracking for financial profit than in Europe. American expedience is well illustrated by the fact that for many years most games were cracked by Fast Hack’em, a cracking utility coded by Mike J. Henry. This automatically removed copy protections, so not even basic programming knowledge was needed. As even the crackers themselves haven’t considered these releases of any value, the early American warez, around 1984–1986 rarely contained the cracker’s name. The use of Fast Hack’em was discontinued when modems became widespread, because it wasn’t able to properly crack most programs to be transferred. The first true crackers introduced around 1985, along with the first cracked games and utilities, which were marked fully cracked to tell them apart from Fast Hack’em warez. These programs already contained the cracker groups’ names. The first US teams usually picked a name by their home cities or living area, like Philadelphia Cracking Group or East Side Crackers. As these groups noticed how fast the games they release are spreading, cracktros soon appeared. These were just the same quality as their European counterparts. But the American crackers weren’t as ambitious as European ones, their cracking quality was much lower. They rarely compressed or packed anything, as they could spread it for free by modem, regardless of the size, and never were forced to stuff as much data on a disk as possible. Another reason was the usual speed race among different groups. A European cracker’s way was usually buying the original game after school, working on it all the night and mailing it to the contacts on the next morning. An American had to release his game already in the evening, as BBSes were waiting for the ware, so he worked hugger-mugger and less elegant.

A result of some wangling by American sceners was what we already took a glance at some chapters before, as it was a characteristic phenomenon of the C64 scene: pirating telephone lines, also know as phreaking. In the United States several companies issued calling cards, among them AT&T. A card contained a five digit code, by which the owner of the card was able to initiate a phonecall from anywhere in the country on the expense of his home phone bill. The security of these cards was ridiculously weak. The code was simply a random number, which meant that if a company had five thousand clients, then a patient phreaker calling the automatic switchboard with random numbers had a good chance to find a valid code for around the twentieth try. Phreakers were partial to AT&T, as they had the most clients, so they gave the highest chance to break a code. Phone companies didn’t care about implementing security anyway, claiming that no one is stupid enough to try dialing all possible combinations. They were right, phreakers really didn’t dial themselves, they used their modems and an automatic dialer utility instead. They ran the program in the evening, before going to bed, and the computer collected at least half a dozen numbers till the morning. These codes in the hacker slang were called codez, in the same fashion like warez.

Breaking card codes had great impact on the development of the nationwide scene. First, it made it possible to call European crackers any time, however it didn’t happened often. Well, at least compared to the number of crackers, some European groups still got well fed up with unknown American kids calling them in the middle of the night, begging for new games. Codez were more used to establish overland connections, to call BBSes located in remote cities. This made connecting the small, isolated local communities into a country global warez scene. Competition between groups suddenly softened, because horizons suddenly got so wide, and so many warez were available to download that not many were able to get it all. But this was only a temporary state, as soon as the groups got used of the wider limits, the race hardened again, sometimes even led to wars. Americans had a tendency to engage each other in group wars, much more than their European colleagues. Of course don’t think of some armed conflicts, but just stroking each other the wrong way. Groups getting in conflict first just bashed each other in their intro scrollers, then came the childish tricks: ordering pizza to the opposing group’s members at two o’clock in the night, spreading fake news, cutting the enemy’s phone cable on the street so their BBS got disabled, and so on. These were childish, but entertaining fights, and were part of American scene life. Often other groups also entered the enraged struggle. The greatest war ever was between Eagle Soft Incorporated and Untouchable Cracking Force for being the No. 1. of the USA scene, in which almost all American groups took their part on this or that side.

Untouchable Cracking Force cracktro

These times formed the rules and traditions of BBSes, which are still followed nowadays by pirate FTP sites. There were many kinds of bulletin boards, and a kind of hierarchy has developed among them, based on the free stuff they had. The best elite warezboards were open strictly for insiders only, these proudly advertised that they have o-day warez, quite fresh, just cracked material. One grade lower were the public or partially public pirate boards, offering 0–3 days, 3–5 days or older than 5 days warez. Often a legal, public BBS contained a hidden “pirate section”, hidden from everyday callers.

Quotas or credits were also invented. Most boards expected its visitors to upload something in exchange for what they take, but most of them only wanted to download. A slang word was born for when someone downloads much more than what he uploads: leeching. The introduction of credit system meant that each user was allowed to download two, sometimes three blocks of data for one uploaded. (Commodore 64 disk contents were measured in blocks, not kilobytes.) This system kept a healthy rate of up- and downloads, leeching was eliminated. However, sysops often granted unlimited credits for some elite crackers and swappers. The term spreader was also born with the rise of the BBSes, it meant a person who was responsible of spreading a group’s releases on different bulletin boards.

Spreader activity was reaching the top around 1988, when 1200 baud modems came up, changing the old 300 baud ones. This technical advantage was allowed by a countrywide modernization of telephone lines, during which they also changed the cable leading to Europe to a fast fiberoptic one. Cross-continent modemswapping became possible. However, European and American modems weren’t always compatible. The practical Americans cut the Gordian knot by simply sending a modem to their overseas partner, and nothing blocked the way any more. Phone companies finally clamped down on the security of calling cards, so a working code, especially a code suitable for overseas calling became incredibly valuable, worth like the best o-day warez. One could get serious money for a code of the Sprint phone company, who operated a noise-free fiberoptic cable, which was a great advantage for the primitive modems without any error detection. The most active importer groups trading with Europe were Fucked Beyond Repair and The Survivors. These times it became commonplace for an importer to add his own cracktro to a program, as pumping the entire contents of a disk across the ocean was almost as hard as cracking the program itself.

A The Survivor cracktro with rasterbar effect.

The incompatibility of American and European phone lines helped phreakers to outmaneuver phone companies, who took radical steps to crack down on them during 1988. The losses of the companies were so high that they first called for help from the police and the FBI, second they technically solved the problem of tracking pirate calls. Calling codes were now generated from the phone numbers of the clients, and was impossible to get them. But sceners found an easy way. They never tried breaking codes again, but took the method referred as social engineering in the hacker trade. They phoned an unsuspicious calling card owner, and pretended being a clerk from the phone company, willing to “check” if the number on his card is identical to that in their computer. In most cases the cat’s paw told the code. The phreaker sent it over to Europe, to his contact, and the European cracker initiated the call. The call tracking system of the American company lost the track in the jungle of the incompatible European telephone system. This was all, simple and easy. However, Americans could never call Europe any more, now the shoe was on the other foot. American boards were now mostly called by European groups, uploading the newest warez by the codes provided by American phreakers. Quickly a new system of trading appeared, as now Europeans gave warez for codez. This was going till 1989, when phone companies took another step, and made acquiring calling card numbers totally impossible. Here was a very short episode in the history of the scene when traditionally meant hackers appeared, people who broke computer systems by exploiting security holes. They were now the only way to get codez. But hackers were usually not interested in the warez scene, and besides, they were rare findings, so the few hackers had outstanding respect America-wide on the C64 scene.

The Survivor were also making demos. This is an early, single-part demo from 1989, titled Serenity. What we see is seven independent scrollers with different speeds.

The entire calling card misery and the cracker game itself ended around 1990, when C64 software development got discontinued within half a year, and the same happened in Europe.

So the sun of the American cracker scene set. It was shorter lived than the European, also smaller than it, and as we saw, it had different ways. While the PAL scene was only about cracking games, here other areas of the computer underground also played a major role. America did not have neither paper- nor diskmagazines. There was no need for them because BBSes offered immediate meeting and discussion possibility, spreading up to date news. There were no copyparties because of the huge geographical distances, and plane tickets were too expensive.

What sounds uncommon that while police raids were everyday in Europe against software pirates, American authorities never tried to roll back illegal software duplication. This was because American software companies never had an idea how could they find cracker groups and didn’t know who they should denounce. Hence only phreakers had to fear the men in uniforms.

What happened after 1990? How were the first American demos made and who were the first democoders? Naturally this side activity also existed in the US/ Canadian demo scene. To see how it worked, let’s call for the help of The Hobbit, founder of Venom, the famous American demogroup. He wrote the following article in the 15th issue of the Driven diskmag in 1996.

It’s truly amazing that the C64 scene lasted so long. I remember back in ’88 when people were saying that the C64 would die. That statement was truly wrong. It’s 1996, and the C64 continues to stay alive. Groups continue releasing demos and utilities, keeping the C64 going and strong. But where did all begin?

Two factors should be credited for the birth of the NTSC demo scene. The first factor is overseas demo groups. Demo groups overseas were established long before NTSC coders thought of establishing a scene. The second factor should go to the USA cracking and importing groups who made demos as well. People like The Changeling of FBR (Ground Zero, Summer ’87) and Death Demon of FBR (Abstract Reality, August ’87) were making quality demos when I was still lame to even own a demo maker.

The friendly competition between Death Demon and The Changeling only made the two better, as they tried to out do each other with their demos. Something these two shared that the scene lacked in the beginning that the two never asked each other how they did a routine. The result was coming up with new routines instead of repeating what was already done all the time.

According to Death Demon, it was because they never wanted to have to say they learned from the other. In some respects routines were done over, but only things like smooth raster. According to Death Demon, he released his first NTSC demo with smooth rasters (I think it was High Voltage released April ’87), and Changeling soon followed pursuit.

Other people like Ultraman (Electric Dreams II, Summer ’87) and Bad Boy of FFI (Future Force Inc.) were making demos around that time, before Father Time and Riff Raff (of UCF fame) and Microman of FBR made demos and intros as well. But these guys were in importing or cracking groups.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1987 when a group was formed strictly for programming. They were not the first demo group, but I think it’s important to mention ERI (Electronic Renaissance, Inc.) It was founded by an ex-FFI member named Console Cowboy, and a guy called Death Star. The first ERI demo – ERI Demo #1. – was released on July 7th, 1987, by Console Cowboy.

The summer of ’87 can be marked as the first demo scene explosion. Although there were no true demo groups in the US at the time, a lot of demos were being released. In particular, there was a series of FFI daily demos, which consisted of a smooth text scroll, a koala pic and SID music (something that was highly admired at the time). Other programmers, like The Hackman of TLF (The Light Force) – TLF Demo #1 – and The Eniac – One Step Beyond Demo – released demos during the summer of ’87 too. (Note: Eniac was not a member of OSB, and did the demo as a favor.)

A screenshot of the Deception demo by the Canadian group Evil. The animated sinusplot was interactive, controllable by the joystick.

A sad note is that every lamer around was trying to get his hands on demo makers to release demos, including me, The Hobbit – Demo #1 (7-7-87), made with a demomaker, and TLF – TLF Demo #2 (7-20-87).

The Bad Boy of FFI programmed a demo maker on 9-17-87 (released to the public two months later) which allowed you to make demos like he was releasing (koala, SID music, smooth text-scroll). Every lamer under the sun started releasing demos. It’s obvious they were releasing demos with this demo maker before it was released to the public. Network 23 was another early programming group, but I can’t recall if they ever coded or released anything except for a small note announcing that they have existed.

Around this time a guy named The Skull was doing intros for an importing group named TOP (The Original Pirates). There was another guy who was in a group called GIC (Galaxies Inner Circle), which was more a hardware hacking/ cracking group. This guy was a bit lame, because he was still making intros in BASIC, something he learned from The Skull. His name was The Hobbit. Three guys, in order of importance: Console Cowboy, The Skull and The Hobbit are the true “Grandfathers” of the NTSC demo scene. Actually, The Hobbit is more like a “Father” instead of a “Grandfather”. Eniac was a “Father” as well (this will be explained later.)

After a lot of Euro demos started to spread in the USA, coders like The Changeling of FBR helped to create Abyss, an importing group, and started seeing nice routines from Euro dudes. He always maintained that he never ripped a routine, and I 100% believe this. He released Hardcore in January of 1988 (some pages were completed December 1987), with which he is credited for coding the first FLD (Flexible Line Distance) routine in the USA. He got the routine idea from a guy named Red from The Judges.

The Skull soon left Top to join Vision and release demos (Syndrome). Thereafter, he joined Abyss and changed his handle to Raster Blaster. He excelled in the group with demos, since Changeling made most of the intros. The Last Dragon (TLD), another guy in Abyss, started to emerge. It is rumored that Raster Blaster and TLD both learned from The Changeling. This is nothing but a rumor, since Raster Blaster coded before he was in Abyss (in TOP and Vision) and TLD coded when he was in SIN (forgot what it stands for).

A picture of Aftershock.

The legendary Aftershock demo was released around March of 1988 with about 9 USA coders making one big co-op demo. Changeling again astounded the USA with some vector graphics on the last page in file one. (Note from Tomcat: Hobbit uses the word “page”, as in the American scene slang, instead of the word “part” we use in Europe.) I think it’s important to note that other coders who participated included The Eniac, Satan, Alien and TLD.

After Raster Blaster got bored of being called the “Korean rip artist” (he wasn’t even Korean) and all the problems Abyss was having at a time (mainly with everyone getting tired of The Changeling’s ego), he left the group, started teaching The Hobbit how to code, and met Console Cowboy through The Hobbit (who met Console Cowboy through a mutual friend, Xerox.) Once Raster Blaster and Console Cowboy started getting along, the two, along with The Hobbit, decided that it would be cool if there were a demo scene in the USA. Thus, Console Cowboy changed his handle to Eclipse, and together with Raster Blaster and The Eniac started Impulse – the first demo group ever in NTSC. It was near the summer of ’88. The Hobbit did not join. Why? (Comment from The Hobbit: One, I didn’t think i was good enough yet. Two, because I wanted to eventually start my own group, so there would be some friendly competition and some room for the scene to grow, ala Death Demon and The Changeling!)

The early days were filled with nice but simple demos. Nothing too surprising, but people admire those who could code simple back then, so I guess that served as a motivational tool. The summer of ’88 is when The Hobbit became an O.K. coder. The Hobbit and Spy Agent (later Tommy Gun and sysop of Warez Hotel) became friends, and The Hobbit gave him a 1670 modem for his board. The Hobbit made a demo for Spy Agent’s BBS called Warez Hotel Demo.

After that The Hobbit told Spy Agent that he needed graphics in his demos, Spy Agent introduced a local graffiti artist and friend, to him named Hector. He started drawing on the C64 and picked a handle after his favorite musician at the time, Morrissey.

Then The Hobbit met a local kid on a BBS who wanted to learn how to code. This was a guy named Scooter. After The Hobbit taught him how to code, via connection through a CCGMS terminal, Scooter changed his name to Fury. Fury started a group called Online, which would have been the second NTSC demo group ever, but the first Online demo, Vital Signs never got released. This also would have been Fury’s first demo; the date on the unreleased pages was 11/03/88.

A BBS ad for Dragon’s Den by Carcass. BBS intros became a special genre on the American scene, and the European scene discovered it years later only, in the Amiga-PC era.

At this time Eclipse started studying Euro code, and like The Changeling, he never ripped a routine. After nights of banging the computer, and lots of drugs, Impulse released Burning, coded by Eclipse, with the first DYCP done in NTSC. The time was August, 1988. Other demos of the time were Side Efex by The Hobbit, and No Secret by Abyss, coded by TLD. These two demos, for the time, were really good. Enough to eventually land TLD into Impulse, also because he knew Raster Blaster from the BBS scene and from Abyss, and enough to encourage Eclipse to have The Hobbit start his own group. With the help of two local friends/understudies, Morrissey and Fury, The Hobbit founded Venom at the end of 1988, the second demo group on NTSC.

It didn’t take long for the demo scene to establish it’s appeal. Some people from importing and cracking groups began to migrate, and more groups started to form. After Abyss broke up, TLD joined Impulse. Groups like Havok emerged and Evil (from Canada) was formed. Satan of FBR changed his handle to Wanderer, and released a note saying he was only going to concentrate on making demos and intros. As the scene got more complex, so did the groups. A lot of stuff happened that is too much to write about in detail. These are some things that were going on that I remember in rumor & news format, and are not completely in order:

Venom's first demo, Premiere from 1989.

– Eniac left Impulse, and ended up in Beastie Boys/USA.

– Eclipse left Impulse and joined Havok.

– The Hobbit discovered Guardian on a local board making BBS demos, and asked him to join Venom.

– Fury changed his name to Image, and left Venom.

– Megabyte joined Venom, then changed his handle to N.O.C. Necrophilic, and joined Havok.

– Morrissey quit Venom, Eclipse quit Havok, and they both made the legendary demo Decade under no group.

– Morrissey, Eclipse and Image were supposed to form a group called Phase 3 (at the time this was the best NTSC artist, coder and musician), because they were not going to let anyone else in the group. Something happened and the group just got called Phase, with only Morrissey and Eclipse. They released one demo named Toy, then formed the legendary group Lords. (The best artist and coder in the USA, what do you expect the name to be!)

– Image joined Dynamix (not Dynamix USA).

– Kickback left the intro/cracking/importing scene, and joined Venom along with Sir Sid. Both eventually left to join Havok.

– Impulse died, and Raster Blaster joined Venom.

– Venom released a rare co-op demo with Raster Blaster, Eclipse and The Hobbit all taking part. This was an one page demo called Pizza. Xerox from Livewire also took part.

– Guardian left Venom to form the group Crionix.

– Death Merchant joined Venom, but got busted and dropped the C64.

– Dr. O and Reverb joined Lords.

– Wanderer got kicked out of NEC and joined Evil.

– The Green Griffin joined Havok, and then joined Venom.

– Venom dies Summer 1990.

Diskmags dedicated to programming started to spring up like Outline by Lords, Point by View of Shade. Shade was formed by an ex-ASP member, Streetkiller. Sometimes people from the demoscene were also in importing groups, or underground importing/cracking groups (i. e. John Travolta Cracking Group, RAI, Lammies on Parade, etc.)

So, there you have it. I hope you enjoy it. I’m pretty sure people will disagree with a few points, but this is roughly how it happened. Remember, some of this was over six years ago, and it is hard to remember.

So, this was how the United States and Canada lived their lifes in the second half of the eighties. The demoscene was just as well developed as in Europe, and despite there were only a very few smart coders, graphics artists filled the gap. Several thousand intros and demos were made in the USA and Canada between 1990 and 1995, most groups released them monthly. However, this was only a quantitative superiority over Europe, the quality of most of these were low. New effects, experiments were scarce, much more than on the PAL scene. America had far more groups than Europe, but only a very few were producing true quality. As there were neither copy- nor demoparties, the driving force of competition was also absent.

Havok: Phase 1

The Driven diskmagazine was first issued in 1994, which later became the most popular mag of the NTSC scene. After 1995 it also regularly published news of the PAL scene, maintaining a separate section for them. Other American diskmags never became too important. The editors of Driven, Coolhand and Elvix often held smaller competitions, like 4K intro compos on the pages of the magazine. Driven died in 1998, and there’s been no other NTSC scene magazine since.

There are two things I’ve learned about the C64 scene after the twelve years I’ve been involved.
One is that you should never try to predict the future of demos.
The other is that every C64 coder I’ve ever met has no idea about what the word »impossible« means.

– TMR of Cosine, Driven #16.

8. The present of the C64

The “present times” of the C64 is considered anything since 1996. After a short setback, the quality of releases started to increase again. C64 demos were advancing and their style was heavily influenced by the new effects in PC demos of the age. A characteristic, new style appeared, which resulted in productions similar to those on the PC and the Amiga. Today’s C64 demos are almost one and all trackmos, without longer scrollers and messages, with routines resembling PC demos. So today we can talk about three different mainstreams of C64 demo art: the original oldschool, the newschool of the early nineties, and the “modern” demos. The strong will of coders to demonstrate their old computer’s abilities to PC owners, just like some years ago to Amiga users, played a great role in the evaluation of these modern demos, but also the fact that C64 voters were the minority on the demoparties against the overwhelming number of PC and Amiga sceners, whose votes decided the outcome of the C64 competitions. For this reason if one wanted to win these votes they had to create a demo that suited the other sceners taste.

Oxyron: Dawnfall. A quite nice one-file demo from 1995.

Pictures of the SuperCPU-optimized demo titled Daze, presented by Resource at The Party ’96. The first screenshot shows a full screen bump with a plasma tunnel in the small window.

Along with the introduction of the modern style, the quality of C64 graphics highly increased. As seen in previous chapters, screen graphics were rather simple in the beginning. The first pictures pursuing photorealistic quality and artistic value appeared during 1993–1994. Demanding demo design also was introduced and displaying high resolution – FLI, IFLI, etc. – graphics became commonplace in demos.

Even in the second half of the nineties there was the same number of C64 groups as the PC or Amiga had, if not more, and they’re still not small in numbers. C64 demos stayed popular at different parties as many PC and Amiga scener felt nostalgic listening to the old SID sound and watching what these C64 fanatics brought out of their C64. Oldschool and newschool style, trackmos and multiparts coexisted well and as some wizards and workshops kept on developing C64 peripherals almost every week brought some hardware novelty. A few of these included: the SuperCPU, boosting the computer to 20 MHz, and adding 16 MB of memory, the IDE64, the hard disk for the Commodore 64, or the hardware MP3 player, developed by Nate Dannenberg of Digital Audio Concepts. SuperCPU was even used by some demos, like Daze by Resource, Bloody Domination by Samar, or Popel Premiere by Cyberpunx.

Elitism disappeared from the C64 scene during these days. There were no more people or groups despising beginners and fighting each other. The entire scene transformed into a worldwide open community of friendship. However, some lifted their voices against this, claiming that the old scene with its strict hierarchal pecking order was much better. This view typically coming from the members of the old cracker scene. Like, for example, Antichrist, former founder of Genesis Project, wrote the following in the diskmag titled Propaganda, the successor of Sex’n’Crime.

“You are so lame. Jump on the bandwagon and demand so little. I look at Propaganda today, and I see lots of new people and groups. Onslaught, Motiv8, Hardcore. In the grand old days these people never would have been accepted on the BBSes. I’d say you have lost track of what’s good, bad and quality. I can’t access a 64 any longer (blame my Debbie for that!! Hoho!), but I get my very own issue of Propaganda dumped on paper from Per. Every issue I read as a very special moment with curiosity. I think the scene has changed for better or for worse. Respect is not the keyword anymore, and everybody is buddy-buddy with the scene!! La-la-lame! New groups jump up and have no class whatsoever. Some of the old people still hang around. I’m not saying the new guys can’t do anything, ‘coz I’m sure they can.”

The modern art of the C64 can be divided to two streams: first, exploiting the little machine’s possibilities to the last byte, competing with demos running on faster computers, while keeping and grooming the old traditions. These two hit it off well with each other and in today’s demos one can often see modern effects like bump mapping or plasmas, unified with oldschool things like scrollers or rasterbars. Surprisingly even the cracker scene still exists, or better say vegetates, as there are still some little companies publishing games, rarely new ones, but usually so-called jewel versions of old games with some extra functions added. They do it for the traditions instead of profit and crackers of course only crack them for the same traditions. However, there isn’t much demand for real cracking knowledge any more as these programs don’t have copy protections and today’s cracker activity is mostly limited to cracktro coding. Meanwhile the importance of quality cracking has increased. Nowadays a cracker can’t release something preciptately cracked as there’s no race any more that forces him to hurry. Today there are even examples of a cracker group correcting the errors of a commercial game. This late age is well hallmarked by labels like Alpha Flight 1970, Success & The Ruling Company, Onslaught, Chromance, Fantastic Four Cracking Group, Laxity, Motiv8 or Excess: old and new names together, but usually even the old groups don’t consist of any original members.

A brilliant, 10-disk adventure game, created by Hungarian sceners: Newcomer. Published by Protovision in 2001, Newcomer is said to the most complex C64 game ever.

An issue of Domination diskmag from 1999.

The great meeting events of the Commodore 64 scene in the second half of the nineties were the great international demoparties: The Party in Denmark, Assembly in Finland, and mainly the German Mekka Symposium and Breakpoint. These parties, in addition to the great annual X parties organized by Success & The Ruling Company. For the first time, in 1995, this party was held in Utrecht, Netherlands but moved several times to different cities. Some still remember X’95 as the best X party, and later X parties as the best parties of C64 scene history. Interestingly enough the X still takes place every year. In 1997 the party united with Takeover, and became a multiplatform party under X-Takeover label but the cool oldschool atmosphere was broken by Amiga and PC users, so the cooperation split up. X is still the largest Commodore-only demoparty.

Samar: Opium

But not only new parties opened gates, also old gatherings saw rebirth. Radwar Enterprises again announced their famous Radwar Party in 2000, after a five years break, which was previously held every year during the early 90’s. This was a traditionally computer free party for the great old faces of the scene, but of course they welcomed anyone else. MWS showed his way of effective marketing of a party at Mekka Symposium 2000. Suddenly he appeared on the stage, with a decorative girl, who got rid of her clothes during a short but smashingly successful striptease dance act. Artlessly all the 1500 party attenders crowded up at the stage. Then MWS picked up the microphone and announced that Radwar party tickets will be sold at the girl now. Somehow there was no lack of demand. To make the story more interesting, this was not a got-up job, allegedly the Radwar guys met the chick at the party, and convinced her to perform the striptease act.

These times BBSes ebbed away, almost completely disappearing by the year 2000. The Internet squeezed them out but not as fast as on the PC scene. PC BBSes were already completely absent at the millenium but even in 1998 there were still some C64 boards running worldwide with some moving to the Internet. One of the most known was Success & The Ruling Company’s Spanker’s Heaven, or Legend’s Second to None. A lot of web and FTP sites were established to replace the disappearing bulletin boards. Sites like: www.c64.org, c64.rulez.org, www.c64.ch, and www.c64.sk. Sometimes an FTP, following the old BBS fashion, received a name, just like Ganxsta’s Paradise, operated by Chromance, or The Digital Dungeon by SCS&TRC. There was still no lack of diskmags including: Domination, Arachnophobia, Propaganda, Relax, Vandalism News, and Shock. In the Eastern European countries, mostly Poland and Hungary, where less people spoke English, a lot of magazines were published in the local languages.

The third generation of the Commodore 64 scene was born. Who were the best of this era? A few had already been mentioned in previous chapters, only their ranking changed slightly from time to time. Oxyron, Taboo, Smash Designs, Wrath Design, Noname, Singular, Coma, Plush, Crest, Albion, Agony, Padua, Lepsi, Samar, Resource, Therapy, Profik, Breeze, and some old, returning labels like Triad or Byterapers. In fact Triad was not the old group any more, it reformed and some called it New Triad. It’s of no point to distinguish between groups by nationality, as most of them consisted international teams, except for a few Polish and Hungarian ones. All of them wrote their names in the history of the scene and all of them released unforgettable demos, listed among the “must see” items of all C64 owners. Unfortunately, being well past its prime, the number of C64 demos released every year showed a decreasing tendency.

The most well known C64 demo is perhaps Second Reality by Smash Designs, which won first prize at The Party 1997. A very successful PC demo from 1993, Second Reality from Future Crew, and the name of this demo is not accidental. Smash Designs has actually rewrote this demo for the Commodore 64, from beginning to end. Back in 1993, Future Crew recommended a 486 PC for viewing the demo. This, and some later similar productions quickly took Smash Designs to the top of the charts. Later they adapted more PC demos to the C64. This was a message from their main coder, AEG to those programmers who relied on the bare power of the processor instead of optimizing skills. Smash Designs showed that what could be done on a 486 could also be done on with a mere 1 MHz C64 computer.

Smash Designs, despite of their outstanding achievements, were still unpopular in some C64 circles. This had to do with several reasons. First, it was because they were often reusing the same routines in several demos without any modification. Second, oldschool fans didn’t like them because their main goal was to impress PC sceners, and of course, the voting audience of parties. This mentality was not the same for the other C64 groups, but rather was more common within the PC scene. Smash Designs PC-remixed routines, however, were pretty good, but from the design view they were far from the traditional C64 style which often looked ugly on a TV or a monitor, since these routines were designed for the huge projector screens of the parties and only brought a shocking experience for those who saw the original production on PC.

Smash Designs & The Obsessed Maniacs: Second Reality. Maybe you can try turning a few pages forward, and compare it to the screenshots of the original PC demo in the second volume of this book.

Samar, a relatively new Polish group gained fame during the same year, 1997, with their demo titled Opium. Resource and Coma showed up Coma, another beautiful work. Void was the first demo displaying realtime bump effect on the C64 without the help of a SuperCPU.

Triad started releasing demos again in 1997. The former cracker group had a characteristic and casual style. Their demos were mostly good on design while minimal on the field of code. This style was later called concept demo and became particularly popular in Scandinavian countries, mainly after the millenium.

Crest, just like Breeze, Booze Design or Resource, managed to forge the highest quality technical knowledge with brilliant graphical design. Three of their demos are of the utmost importance. The first is Krestage: Back to the Roots. This demo, as Crossbow wrote in the scrolltexts, was not made to entertain “PC lamers” on a big screen but was a kind of nostalgia demo for those remembering the past of the Commodore 64. Krestage mostly featured routines from the eighties, the age of early demos, but in advanced forms. Using their brilliant coding knowledge the Crest’s programmers managed to beat several previous records, like sprite multiplexers, increasing the number independently moving graphical objects to 144, showing a few new sideborder tricks, and naturally displaying some new undocumented video modes. The two other very successful Crest demos were Krestology in 1996, and Deus Ex Machina in 2001, in cooperation with Oxyron.

Triad: 26 kg. The first picture shows the greetings part, the star is rotating and a scroller is running at the bottom. On the second picture, a scroller runs in the upper left corner, while a bitmap picture is being realtime distorted.

If we take a look around on the C64 scene today, there are few better know than Britelite, coder of the Finnish group Dekadence. This short interview, made on the New Year’s Eve of 2004 is the closing of our C64 chapters.

Crest & Oxyron: Deus Ex Machina

The first trivial question: Is the C64 scene alive?

It sure is. Several groups are still releasing stuff, and we even saw some gems in 2004. And I like the fact that there still are some new people joining the old C64 scene.

Newbies?

Yeah, but some of them are showing great progress in a short time. Although most of them are people who have followed the scene for a while, but haven’t contributed with anything until now.

Which groups will keep the C64 spirit forever?

I think most of the current groups will stay on C64 until their machines die of age. I have a hard time believing that for example Crest, Oxyron, FairLight, Triad and the likes would ever quit. Activity may slow down, but it will never stop.

How long do you think the original C64s will keep working? When do you think the last of these veteran machines will go permanently off?

I can imagine them lasting for at least another ten years. The biggest problem is probably the custom-made chips like SID and VIC that really can’t be replaced. Although there is hope in new hardware, like C1 and C64DTV. If they get good enough, people might start coding on them too, so they don’t need to strain their original hardware.

Booze Design: Royal Arte. One of the most beautiful demos of 2001 with great graphical design.

Is there still an evolution of demostyles?

Yeah, some people seem to have got tired in the old code-only demos and want to have more substance in their productions. These are concept-demos, with more thought put into the design and visuals, than in hardcode effects. People want to express their feelings or thoughts in their demos, and this is something that will ofcourse evolve, as the only limit is the imagination and not the hardware.

Do you think the C64 needs more power? CPU, acceleration, memory …

Not really, one of the fun things with C64 is the fixed platform. All C64s are the same, so it’s easier to appreciate the different demos, and one of the challenges is to work with limited hardware.

What is that the scene’s really missing nowadays?

The scene is of course missing activity! Even if there are surprisingly a lot of people working on C64 stuff, there could always be more. More parties with real C64 compos would of course be nice.

What do you prefer: big parties with C64 compos, or small 64-only parties?

Both parties have their positive and negative sides. The spirit at small C64-only parties is often really great, but it’s a lovely feeling having 1,000 people cheering at your demo during the compo at big parties too.

Yes, but they finally vote Metalvotze.

That hasn’t happened in C64 compos yet, but yes, voting results at big parties tend to get a bit screwed up. Although that’s a problem at small parties too, with everyone only voting for their friends and groupmates.

Do you think the scene changed much since 2000?

Well, maybe not that much since 2000, but definitely since the ’90s. The only thing I can come up with is the growing popularity of these concept-demos.

What is the future?

The future will of course be Dekadence dominating the scene! Naah, seriously, the future will be that the same old guys doing demos when they feel like it. But hopefully there will be more new blood too, and some sceners have also shown interest in these new C64 clones (Commodore One and C64DTV).

The Commodore 64 scene still lives, safe and sound. Although Amiga owners tend to call their computers the “survivor,” it is the C64 which is more deserveing of this attribute. The almost twenty year old computer can still surprise those working on a hundred, or several thousand megahertz machines. Democoders explored the C64 it well beyond the limits achieving what even Commodore’s engineers thought impossible. But it’s not only the merit of the hardware, which is only doing what they programmed in it, but those of the people who love and respect this computer, and everything related to it. It’s the man, not the machine – the legendary fighter pilot, Chuck Yeager meant his famous words for aeroplanes, but it’s still true in our case. Presumably while there’s even a single Commodore computer working in the world, there will be someone coding demos for it. And when the last 6510 chip on earth lets out its magical smoke the C64 coder peering at the darkened screen will sigh: “What a nice time it was …”

A good example fpr concept demos: We Control by FairLight, released at Assembly 2004.

part 3

the amiga

“No way! I can’t live without my Amiga! Not for one day, not fr a whole year! Take my money, my car, my girl, but please, NOT my Amiga! Amiga is better than sex! Amiga is a religion! Amiga is unique! Amiga is superior!”

–I-K & RHM, on the question by R.O.M., if they could live for a year without the Amiga scene

Thank you, Commodore for making the best computer ever.
Nothing like this will ever happen again …

– Boogaloo of Horizon, about the C64

1. The birth of the Amiga

Jay Miner, an engineer of Atari Corporation, the arch-rival of Commodore, has suggested to the company management the building of a new, fantastic game console, based on the new Motorola 68000 microprocessor in 1982. It was a daring idea, as the 16-bit M68000 was vastly superior to the contemporary 8-bit processors. But the management thought it was too early to introduce such a powerful machine, and were content with the success of their current consoles and microcomputers, as they were – at least at that time – unbeatable market leaders. The legendary Commodore models, the VIC20 or the Commodore 64 were nowhere yet. Jay Miner disagreed with them, quit the company, and put his best leg forward to realize his superconsole. Lacking the necessary funds he did not get far, and soon he had to find a new job, where he designed chips for medical computers.

In 1982 Larry Kaplan, who formerly also worked for Atari, and later founded Activision, the world’s first game developer workshop, called Jay Miner, and proposed him the foundation of a new game company. Miner happened to know three dentists who wished to invest 7 million dollars into the rapidly developing videogame market. This money finally made it to Kaplan’s account and so the company called Hi-Toro was founded and began developing games and peripherals for the leading game console of the era – the Atari VCS. However, Larry Kaplan was not satisfied with the advancement of the company and soon left it. Dave Morse, the CEO offered the position of the vice-chairman to Jay Miner and he accepted. His first suggestion was to build the 16-bit computer, which was once rejected by Atari. The management nodded approval.

A JoyBoard ad from 1983.

Hi-Toro was divided to two divisions from then. The first division kept on developing games, joysticks and other hardware devices. Their products reflect a touch of an era, the industry’s poking about for new solutions, for more interesting and effective ways of computer entertainment. One of them was the Joyboard, a special “joystick” tilting plate, with the user standing on it, and tilting his body to control the game. It was perfect for a skateboard or a ski game but not for anything else, and no games supported it, except for a few of their own releases. The versatile joystick called Powerstick was a greater success as was the connector interface called Power Module which enabled the users to copy their games on ROM modules to regular tape cassettes and load them back. In a way, it was a tool of software piracy.

The division developing mid-grade games and weird hardware was actually cloaking a secret second division, working on Jay Miner’s superconsole. Assuring secrecy was a constant necessity as Hi-Toro was a small company and if a large corporation learnt about their design they would have just purchased the dangerous competition. A dozen engineers were employed just to keep building simple devices and joysticks while the “big bomb” was being assembled in a hidden workshop. The trick worked. The industrial spies were deceived and the large companies all believed that Hi-Toro was just a harmless little game company. Surely they were surprised when the team introduced their machine a few years later!

The game console named SCOA16/II soon received a more humanlike name: Amiga, which means girlfriend in Spanish. Jay Miner disliked the name but soon settled with it. It is said that the decision about the name was greatly affected by the fact that the name Amiga would precede the names Atari and Apple on the alphabetic list of retailers. The company was also renamed to Amiga Technologies, officially because there was also a Japanese lawnmower manufacturer called Toro.

The Amiga’s CPU, according to the original plans, was the 16-bit Motorola 68000. The designers created a multiprocessor architecture, applying a special custom chip for each task. This is how the Paula sound chip, equipped with four 8- bit DACs, the Agnus video controller, and the Daphne general DMA controller chips were added. It also had a graphics accelerator, the so-called copper, or coprocessor. The multiprocessor architecture enabled running multimedia applications fast, without loading the CPU, so it was only taking care of arithmetic operations and program control, all the rest – graphics, sound, control of peripherals – were committed on the custom chips. These chips received their female names for the sake of secrecy to deceive the spies probably tapping the phone lines.

The new game console was slowly forming. Rumours were spreading Americawide in 1983 about the new “supercomputer”, the Amiga, which was named Lorraine, after the wife of Dave Morse. Suddenly a debate started about the future of the Amiga. R.J. Mical still wanted a game console, but the others proposed to build a home computer. Jay Miner was thinking about something which later became the Amiga 2000: a fast but simple 16-bit computer, with wide extensibility. Finally Jay Miner made the decision for the Amiga to become a computer. The decision was affected by the quick collapse of the videogame market, which was similar to the dotcom crash at the millennium. In 1983, there were already speculations whether the computer entertainment industry was just a temporary phenomenon, without future. A game console’s prototype would not have attracted investors, but a computer sounded much better.

Ron Nicholson dropped in the idea around this time to incorporate a so-called blitter into the Agnus chip. The blitter was a 27 MHz graphical co-processor, actually a fast memory content copier, a programmable tool for drawing lines, pixels, filling areas and copying screen content. This drastically sped up the computer’s graphical abilities. They also developed a new memory management scheme, never used in any other computer before. The regular RAM, used by the programs, and the data memory used by the custom chips were separated. The first was called FastRAM, the latter ChipRAM. The resulting architecture was well ahead of its time, such memory handling technologies only started to spread seventeen years later, with the introduction of intelligent video controllers and sound cards. However, the PC’s memory management is still behind that of the Amiga, since each PC card has its own, “private” RAM, which can not be accessed by another peripheral even if the card is not exploiting it. Besides, PC hardware is more expensive than necessary, because of the array of redundant RAM chips they contain. The Amiga used the common ChipRAM, accessed by all devices, and each unit used as much as it needed.

The protoype of Lorraine. The large circuit boards are the custom chips, before they were miniaturized.

Guru Meditation error message.

Another curiosity from behind the Amiga’s scenes is the story of Guru Meditation. Every Amiga user knows this message, which appears on the screen in case of an application crash. The computer then displays Guru Meditation, then the code of the error, the memory address, and halts. This means the user has to sit down and meditate like a guru to find the reason of the crash. But why a guru? The story of this message precedes the entire Amiga project, to the development of the Joyboard. They used to have a special “game” for internal use, which just processed the signals of the Joyboard, and displayed which direction the plate was tilting. In their empty hours the developers often entertained themselves with competitions about who can sit still longer on the JoyBoard without moving it, like a meditating guru. When the Amiga was being built, the Guru Meditation message was meant to be temporary only, to be replaced with a more serious error message in the final version. So, actually this message was for the developers themselves, and invited the user for some sitting on the Joyboard. But for some reason they forgot to replace the message in the product line and it became a feature of Amiga computers.

Pictures from Boing! and Robocity, the two first techdemos ever demonstrating the capabilities of the Amiga.

At the end of 1983 the project budget reached seven million dollars but it was worth all of it: the first Amiga was introduced to the public in January 1984, at the Computer Electronics Show in Chicago. It was not yet finished – just a heap of cables and chips – but it already dazzled the audience with the first Amiga demo, the famous Boing, created by Dale Luck and R.J. Mical, on 4th January,1984. It consisted of one single routine: a white and red checkered, rotating ball was bouncing on the screen. Later this ball, called the Boing Ball or the Amiga Ball and became the nonofficial symbol of the Amiga. It also had sound. A digitized sound sample was played each time the ball bounced. It was the sound of a styrofoam-coated baseball bat, smashed against a garage door. Many visitors tried to peek under the desk of Amiga Inc’s stand, searching for the hidden second computer, as they couldn’t believe that a bunch of rumpled cables can boast such brilliant graphical capabilities. Their fascination was just enhanced by the cartoon animation titled RoboCity, another Amiga demo, which is somewhat less remembered than Boing but it was the first animated demo ever on the Amiga.

The developers expected to find an investor during the exhibition, who will refill their quickly dwindling financial funds. Their hopes were not in vain as companies like Sony, Apple, Philips and Hewlett-Packard were all interested in the Amiga. However, neither of them made an offer and despite the impression of the general audience it seemed all the success they reached was for naught. The company was so poor that Dave Morse had to raise the mortgage on his own house to avoid bankruptcy.

Suddenly Atari appeared on the horizon, led by Jack Tramiel, who had meanwhile been rooted out of Commodore. Tramiel granted a short-term loan of 500,000 dollars to Amiga, for one month, to develop their new computer. Not having any options, Amiga accepted the offer. As they were unable to pay it back, Tramiel offered to purchase the little company, offering 98 cents per share. Besides his bid was only for the technology and not the team, which he did not want to employ. Amiga Inc. rejected this absurd and humilating offer and they looked for another investor. Just two days before the deadline Tramiel’s old company, Commodore Business Machines, approached them and started negotiations. Finally they purchased Amiga for 4.25 dollars per share, and just one day before the deadline Tramiel was given his half million back. The little company became a subsidiary of Commodore and on 23rd July 1985 the freshly completed Amiga 1000 was introduced at the Lincoln Center of New York.

The first model, the Amiga 1000.

This was the first multimedia computer of the world. Its 7.14 MHz clock speed made it the fastest of its time. Its computing speed was almost 1 MIPS. The original Lorraine was redesigned, but the Agnus, Portia and Daphne chips were still inside. This setup was later called OCS, or Original Chip Set. Two different models were made, one with 256, and another with 512 kilobyte memory, both expandable to 8.5 megabytes. This was a pleasant surprise as the first prototype only came with 128K RAM in 1983.

The A1000 was expandable with a hard disk. For a thousand dollars one was able to add 20 megabytes of storage capacity. By default, it contained a 3.5“ DD format (720 KB) floppy disk drive.

The Amiga was world first on many fields. It was the first computer which was able to display more than 256 colors in its basic configuration. By its HAM (Hold And Modify) mode it was capable of handling 4096 colors! Actually HAM was quite unreliable. Since the speed of color mixing operations was not precisely calculatable, some pixels were often misplaced on the displayed picture. Sometimes a pixel was plotted to the next or after the next position instead of the specified one, because while the graphics chip calculated the correct value, the cathode ray has already stepped a few positions. This was because HAM was not a real feature, but a hardware hack. The idea was presented by Jay Miner, after he saw it working in a military flight simulator. After he realized it on the prototype and found that it was not working correctly he wanted to abandon it. But the mainboard designers had already incorporated the HAM circuits and would have had to redesigned the entire computer to remove them. The strange feature remained; fortunately for Commodore because eventually this feature was what granted superiority for the Amiga over Atari’s similar computers. The capabilities of HAM mode are practically unlimited and there are no monitors built, even today, which are able to handle its highest possible resolution.

The Amiga was the first microcomputer with four digital sound channels – this was outstanding that time – and this was the first computer that came with a mouse in its basic configuration. It had no text mode only graphic mode. The first pre-emptive multitask operating system, the AmigaOS, also appeared with the Amiga. This system was loaded by the so-called kickstart, a routine library that loaded from a floppy disk, but was later burnt into the computer’s ROM. The kickstart library contained the most important routines and information necessary to control the hardware which is pretty similar to the BIOS in PCs. The AmigaOS also had a graphical user interface called Workbench. Hence the system consisted of three elements: the kickstart was the “soul” of the computer, the routine library that enabled the operating system to start, the AmigaDOS was built on it, and finally the Workbench was loaded to provide a graphical interface to the user. However, it was possible to run programs that disabled the Workbench, thus saving some memory.

The suggested retail price for the Amiga 1000 was 2,000 dollars while the simple and crude “professional” IBM PCs, with the primitive single-task MS-DOS cost 4,000 dollars. The Amiga also offered a lot of simple but neat features, which facilitated the users’ everyday life, and which neither the PC, nor any other computer ever had. For example, it was able to detect automatically if a disk was inserted into the floppy drive and it never needed a keypress to continue.

All the designers’ autographs were painted on the inside of the first Amiga 1000’s case, including the paw print of Mitchy, Jay Miner’s dog. Mitchy escorted Jay to the office every day and the team was really thankful for her “helping” to design the machine. The Amiga engineers were a bunch of cracks anyway. There were a couple of styrofoam-coated baseball bats lying around in the workshop and they often decided smaller debates by beating up each other with these. Allegedly the fate of the Amiga, whether it should be a console or a computer, was also decided by such a fight. They were somewhat weird figures anyway. Some of the lead engineers looked like they just came off the street. Dale Luck, as described by his colleagues, looked rather like a homeless person than a lead research professional. Others wore a purple hair, or furry bunny-mules. The most interesting person was Joe Pillow whose name appeared on the hidden list of creators in the first version of the kickstart and was also found in some developer documents. However, nobody actually knew him or what he did on the project. Some meticulous tech historians also discovered his name on the passenger list of the plane that flew Jay Miner and his team to the CES in Chicago where they introduced the prototype of the Amiga. Joe Pillow was also registered in the hotel where the Amiga team lodged. Who was this mysterious person? Well the answer is nobody. When they brought the prototype to Chicago, they did not register it as a luggage, but kept it along with themselves, on a passenger seat. They needed a name for the seat reservation, so they just made up one, Joe Pillow, from Amiga Technologies. Since the hotel reservation was also managed by the airline, Joe Pillow also received a hotel room. Finally this name got stuck on the prototype and sometimes appeared in different written materials.

The Amiga became a stunning success among microcomputer users and many immediately switched to the new wonder from their old C64, Atari or other 8-bit computers. A new Amiga scene developed rapidly. Amiga World, the first Amiga magazine, issued by Commodore, debuted the same year. Perceptive readers of this magazine noticed that the computer was always mentioned as “Amiga by Commodore”, and not “Commodore Amiga”, to avoid the new computer being treated as just a new member of the company’s successful 8-bit family, a descendant of the Commodore 64, Plus/4, Commodore 128.

An Amiga 500, equipped with a monitor.

The Amiga 1000, despite being an excellent machine, still did not satisfy all the demands. The first modular expansion pack, assembled by Tecmar Corporation, appeared in March 1986. It contained 1 MB of additional memory, a SCSI and a serial port on the first, a 20 MB hard disk on the second, a 20 MB tape unit on the third, and a 2400 baud modem on the fourth module. The modem alone cost 569 dollars and the first module was sold for 849. Seeing these price tags many decided to stick with the basic configuration.

Soon some controversy rose between Commodore and Amiga. The new Amiga 2000 was reaching completion but in two workshops at the same time. The original Amiga team worked in Los Gatos, USA, while a German developer team operated in Braunschweig, Germany. The debate started when Commodore wanted to make the Amiga IBM PC compatible but Jay Miner disagreed. Finally two solutions were found. The Germans designed an $1,000 expansion unit for the Amiga 1000, which was basically an IBM XT without a keyboard, and granted full IBM PC compatibility. Miner and his team developed a software emulator, and built a $200 hardware accelerator unit for it. Finally the Los Gatos laboratory turned towards the new “dream machine”, the new Amiga. The result was the A2000 in 1987. Its most important innovations were incorporating the kickstart in the ROM and adding a new chip called Denise, which replaced Daphne. It came with 1 MB RAM, expandable to 9 MB. Another great novelty was the 16-bit Zorro-II interface system, which provided uniform, plug-and-play hardware connectivity. The Amiga 2000 was the basis for several future Amiga models, like the A1500, the A2500 or A1500 Plus.

Later the same year, the Amiga 500 was introduced, first in Great Britain. The A500 was the cheaper portable version of the A2000. It was almost the same as the A2000 except that its mainboard and keyboard were united – arranged in the classic typewriter fashion – and it didn’t have the internal connectors of the A2000. Both the Amiga 500 and the 2000 had a new graphic mode, the EHB (Extra Half Bright), capable of displaying 64 colors. The operating system’s version was 1.2.

Jack Tramiel sued his old company, Commodore, in 1988 claiming that since Atari provided the money for developing the Amiga all the manufacturing rights should come to them. The lawsuit was won by Commodore. Meanwhile, development on the Amiga did not halt. Agnus had grown into Fat Agnus, and later Fatter Agnus, already capable of handling 1 MB of ChipRAM. Using this chip and taking advantage of many more new achievements, the Amiga 3000 was introduced in 1990. This was the world’s first pure 32-bit computer. Its Motorola 68030 CPU was supported by a 68881 FPU, resulting in 16 MHz clock speed, but later the 68882 FPU raised this to 25 MHz. It had a built-in SCSI controller and 32-bit Zorro-III interfaces. There was also a version with UNIX operating system, codenamed A3000UX. It had a standard IBM VGA monitor connector. Its 2 MB of memory was expandable to 18 MB. Its tower case version was marked A3000 Tower or A3000T. Besides the Fat Agnus, it had another new custom chip, Gary, “who” managed the RS-232 serial port and the keyboard. A new chipset was born, which was called ECS, Enhanced Chip Set. Based on the A3000, the Amiga 500 Plus was built, an advanced A500 and almost exclusively sold in Europe. The kickstart reached version 2.0 but it was not fully compatible with its previous versions.

Commodore outpaced its competition again in 1991. They introduced the first CD-ROM-equipped multimedia computer the CDTV (Commodore Dynamic Total Vision). The designers nicknamed it baby, as it took exactly 9 months to complete it. The CDTV was actually an Amiga 500, with kickstart 1.3, and a 150 bit/sec, or single speed CD-ROM drive. The world first CDROM computer was unfortunately a flop partly due to being more expensive than a regular A500, and also because it didn’t even wear the Amiga logo so it failed to gain the customers’ attention. The few published CD-ROM games were not better than earlier floppy disk titles. There was no serious need for such a computer yet. At the end of the year, a CD-ROM marked A570 was also introduced for the A500, but there was little demand for it.

Amiga 600

In March 1992, the first Amiga 600 left the product line. It was a redesigned Amiga 500, referred as the Amiga 300 in its prototype stage. All its extras were just a composite video connector and an IDE hard disk interface, while the numeric keyboard was missing and it had no expansion possibilities. It was meant to be a portable club computer but didn’t pay off. The users disliked the too simple model and called it the “crippled.”

A few third party Amiga mutations appeared during the early nineties, mainly portable Amiga models. Most of these never made it to the market. In 1989, Dale Luck built an A1000 into an old Commodore SX-64 case but the tiny, 4" screen proved unsatisfactory. The experimental model was displayed during the AmiExpo exhibition in the Marriot Marquis Hotel, New York. Another company, MicroMomentum displayed an Amiga built into the suitcase at the same event, offered for 2400 dollars, but nobody was interested. Strangely, the company did not tell technical details about their machine so it’s not known which Amiga model they modified but it probably was an Amiga 500.

The German Gigatron created a portable Amiga 2000 in 1990, but even this one didn’t work out. The only Amiga laptop that was fully completed was the Newer Technologies Model-10, announced in the same year. The company developed a brand new mainboard that fit into the machine sized about like an A3 paper sheet and was 8–9 centimetres thick. Its processor was the Motorola 68030. The company denied handing over the blueprints of the machine to Commodore, and Commodore, as a reply, denied them the rights to use the Amiga custom chips and ROMs. It all ended up in a lawsuit resulting in this computer never being commercially released.

Rumours were spreading about a new Amiga around this time, which will be capable of displaying 16 million colors and faster than any previous personal computer. These rumours turned out to be true. Commodore announced the completion of the new AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture) chipset and on 11th September 1992 the Amiga 4000, developed from the prototype marked Amiga 3400, was introduced at the Commodore Show in Pasadena, California. Commodore called it the greatest advancement in the history of Amigas since 1985. The AmigaDOS 3 operating system was also released, which featured the new Directory Caching File System (DCFS) file management system. This was not only faster than anything before, and enabled the use of 255 character long filenames, but also the hardware independent management of any data format – images, sound, text, and so on – by just installing the necessary drivers. A similar technology was introduced by Windows 3.0 a few years later, and Microsoft called it an “innovation”. Thanks to DCFS, any kind of data was immediately viewable, readable or listenable with the program called Multiview, which came attached to the operating system.

Amiga 4000

What did the new Amiga contain for 3,699 dollars? The A4000/040 model boasted the 25 MHz Motorola 68040 CPU. There was also a cheaper version, the A4000/030, with the Motorola 68EC030 chip.

The A4000’s AGA chipset had six custom chips called Super Gary, Super Ramsey, Super Amber, Lisa, Alice and Paula. The names show that everything was improved except for the sound chip. By default, the machine had 2 MB of ChipRAM and 4 MB of FastRAM. The SCSI interface was replaced with a cheaper IDE, used by a 120 MB Seagate ST3144A hard disk, factory preformatted with two partitions, an 8 MB one for the Workbench, and a 116 MB one for general use. Its floppy drive was able to handle HD disks. Its memory modules were common SIMM modules, also used in IBM PCs, making future expansions easy. Development continued, soon the Internet became accessible with an Amiga, and Amiga computers also gained Ethernet network connectivity.

The A4000 also had its little sister, the Amiga 1200, which ended up as the most popular Amiga model. For its really fair price – 599 dollars – it provided everything one could expect from a home computer. It was a bit shaped like the Amiga 500, but was a little bit bigger. By default it had 2 MB of ChipRAM and no FastRAM. It had the same AGA chipset as the A4000, thus being compatible, but its Motorola 68EC020 CPU was only 14 MHz. Since this processor was only able to address 16 MB, the A1200’s FastRAM was only expandable to 10 MB.

The Amiga 1200 also had a laptop version, called PAWS (Portable Amiga Workstation). This was developed by Silent PAWS, using plenty of PC parts to avoid licensing hassle. The model did not do well, and its planned descendant, codenamed Puma, was never completed. The Amiga 4000’s portable versions were the A4030L and and A4060L, designed by Quikpak, but they weren’t finished either.

Amiga 1200

No more Amiga new models were built till the millenium. It is hard to understand why, since they had a great market. Everybody liked them for these cheap and reliable computers, which offered several times that of a PC’s performance, for the fraction of the PC’s cost. Commodore’s poor management did an amazing job in ruining the success of Amiga, as we will soon see.

Commodore’s last computer, the CD32 game console was released in September 1993. This was the world’s first 32-bit game console. During the time the market was dominated by Sega’s 16-bit machines. The CD32 looked exactly like a Sega MegaDrive, except that a large Commodore logo garished at the place of the Sega emblem, drawing the attention of Sega owners at the first glance. The machine was equipped with AGA chipset and 2 MB of ChipRAM, with one novelty, the FMV (Full Motion Video) module, or its connectivity. This was the first and last computer with a version 3.1 kickstart. Many were sold, but still not enough to help the growing financial troubles of Commodore. Besides, most CD32 games were actually conversions of older titles with no extra music or animations, hence meeting no demand.

News arrived about the plan of a new model, the Amiga 5000. This would have been similar to the Amiga 4000, but with the lightning fast 68060 CPU and improved custom chips. It would have been able to handle multiple kickstarts, letting the user to pick one during booting, thus eliminating the compatibility problems of the A4000. However, this machine was never completed. With the failure of the CD32, Commodore got into a grave financial situation, and the new inexperience management was driving the company towards bankruptcy as if they intended to do so. The company’s CEO at the time was Mehdi Ali, whose fingers seemed to be all thumbs. He did not understand computers and didn’t like them either. His single objective was profit and he did not care about product quality nor marketability. CBM’s loss reached 107 million dollars to the end of 1993. While 800,000 Amigas were sold worldwide in 1992, 17 percent more than in 1991, only 640,000 were sold in 1993, 20 percent less. In 1994 Commodore lost 8.2 million more and the management was forced to announce that their financial situation which eventually led to bankruptcy. Their shares fell to 75 cents, and the New York stockmarket halted their trading by the end March. Production kept running until the end of April. The new, 24-bit AAA, or Advanced Amiga Architecture chipset was being brewed, capable of 1280 × 1024 pixels screen resolution, and CD quality sound by its 16-bit sound chip. This design was never finished. Commodore closed its manufacturing plant in the Philippines in the second half of April, leaving a huge stock of completed Amigas in the stores. On the 22nd of April they closed the semiconductor plant in West Chester, and four days later only 22 people loitered in the factory which once employed over a thousand workers. The partial liquidation of Commodore started on the 29th April 1994, 16:10, New York time. On 20th June 1994, Jay Miner, the leader of the Amiga design team died of heart failure but as a result of kidney complications. The Amiga world community always said it was not the illness that killed him, but the desperation to see how the masterwork of his life is being mangled apart …

The Amiga Walker

Several bids were placed for Commodore, from Amstrad, Philips, Samsung and Commodore UK, Commodore’s former British subsidiary, which separated from the corporation just weeks before the breakdown. Soon more names joined, Nestlé, Atari, Sony and many other companies. The highest bid was placed by Creative Equipment International, a former Commodore reseller. Commodore UK outbid them in January 1995, but CEI immediately raised the offer, and came to an agreement with IBM that if CEI can acquire Commodore, then IBM will receive the manufacturing rights of all Commodore products. Suddenly Escom, an insignificant, little German company jumped out of the background, and seized the quarry for just 7.4 million dollars. On the 20th of April 1995, the knell was tolled for Commodore: everything went to Escom. One year later Escom’s total revenue reached two billion dollars. They promised a bright future for the Amiga. In 1996 they already started developing the new Amiga generation, the PowerAmiga, or AmigaBox, a RISC-based system. The release of another new Amiga model, the AGA-based Amiga Walker, which was nicknamed “vacuum cleaner” for its uncommon case design, was scheduled for the middle of 1997. Finally both were cancelled. The Walker and the A-Box proved to be blind alleys.

Escom also went bust at the end of 1997. Amiga Technologies was acquired by Gateway 2000, a company which previously manufacturing Amiga peripherals. Gateway was fully at the back of the Amiga, and never treated it as a dead platform. First they changed the name of Amiga Inc. to Amiga International, then they started to develop the new generation of Amiga computers, planned to be released at the millennium. The beginning of the project was announced in May 1998, in London. A year later the new Amiga family, labelled Amiga II was taking shape. “Amiga has the opportunity to move ahead of the industry in setting standards to follow” – said Jeff Schindler, the new director of Amiga International optimistically. At the same time they mentioned a new operating system, AmigaOS 4.0, to be released November 1998. Later it was renamed to OS5Dev. This new system contained a built-in emulator that enabled old Amiga programs to run. Actually there was also an x86 port of this software, running on PCs.

Despite all the great plans, the Amiga II remained a plan forever. According to the information released by Amiga International, the new machine would’ve boasted fantastic abilities. Its CPU would’ve been a completely new chip, the Motorola MMC, with unmatched memory access speed and built-in multimedia instrucion set. Just like at the old Amiga models, differently priced versions were planned to be built. The cheapest ones would’ve been MMC-equipped game consoles, beating any contemporary consoles on the 3 D graphics field, sporting a DVD drive instead of the usual CD-ROM. The next category was planned to include cheap laptops, chiefly for students, for an incredibly low price, around 300 dollars. The desktop version would’ve cost some 500 dollars, which was a very competitive price, as PCs usually cost over 1,000 dollars, and the price/performance rate would’ve easily beat any competition. Finally they planned high end graphics workstations, aimed to compete even Silicon Graphics’ similar models. The MMC processor was rumoured to outmatch a 400 MHz Intel Pentium II, the standard PC processor of the time five times, meaning it was able to compete against even Intel’s next generation chip the Pentium III.

Development of the Amiga still continues today. Amiga International is developing the AmigaOne, which is already available while I am writing these pages, but its operating system, the AmigaOS 4 is still not ready, so they are shipping it with Linux. This machine is based on the Motorola G3 or G4 PowerPC processor and the Teron CX mainboard by MAI, with Articia chipset. Otherwise it’s a regular PC. The PPC chip is not unknown for Amiga users, since PPC-based accelerator boards are also available for the classic Amigas, which can boost the performance of these computers to a modern PC’s, unfortunately for a quite stiff price. The AmigaOne is not compatible with the classic Amigas.

The German BPlan GmbH, which formerly designed Amiga peripherals under the name Phase5, has also developed a new G3/G4 PPC-based computer, called the Pegasos. It’s also similar to normal PCs, runs its own operating system, MorphOS, but it’s also available with Linux and BSD. MorphOS is capable of software Motorola 680x0 emulation, hence it’s able to run old Amiga software, albeit it has nothing to do with Amiga products, apart from the common roots. The new Pegasos-II was introduced recently, sporting two G4 processors.

The Amiga’s history, just like the background of the Commodore 64 and other 8-bit Commodore models, is surrounded with legends, mysteries and curiosities. The story of the company, the computers, the development, and never introduced machines hide plenty of exciting stories, funny facts, like a maze of secrets. Dave Haynie, former lead engineer of Commodore Amiga is among those few trying to map this exciting episode of technical history. His self-made documentary, The Deathbed Vigil and other tales of digital angst tells the story of Commodore, mainly focusing on the process of liquidation of the company and the situation afterwards. When I contacted him about an interview, he was glad to answer my question, since, as it turned out, he was well aware of the phenomenon of the scene, and he has watched several demos over the years.

When have you started working for Commodore?

Basically, I was brought into Commodore by Bil Herd, on the TED project (C16, Plus/4, etc). He left after we finished the C128 … I stayed on, initially working on a C256 prototype with Frank Palaia (the other hardware guy on the C128), then moving onto Amiga when that didn’t go anywhere. That was the time of “old Commodore” meeting this new Amiga thing, and while we had lots of software people doing that, I was the first hardware guy (well, we had West Chester people working with Los Gatos people before I got involved, but they were 900 Commodore people, and not anyone who worked on the 8-bit stuff).

How did the Amiga appear on the horizon, and what happened, till it became a Commodore division?

Well, I’ll tell you how I came upon it. In the days leading up to the Winter 1984 Consumer Electronics Show (Las Vegas, early January), Bil Herd, Frank Palaia, Dave DiOrio, and I were busting chips to get 25 or so working C128s for this show. The problem was the 80 column chip; it didn’t synchronize to the C128 bus properly, and even if you could force it, they had such a low yield, most didn’t work at all. So we spent Christmas to New Year picking the best 25 from several thousand chips, while Bil and Dave were working up a phase-lock loop tower to hopefully fix the problem. A “tower” is a circuit board that fits into the socket of a chip, basically letting you replace one chip with a bunch of chips. We had only heard bits about this new “secret project” that Commodore was buying.

When we got to Las Vegas, I spent most of my days chasing marketing people around with a can of freeze spray. See, this PLL tower would sync the 80 column chip to the C128, but if it lost sync after heating up, it wouldn’t automatically resync. And of course, the marketing people kept flicking the switches all the time, causing C128s to fail because of this. So I had a can of freeze spray in one hand, a “tweaking tool” in the other, ensuing C128s kept going.

One evening, everyone on the Commodore staff got to take a look at the new Amiga. There was no OS to show, but they showed the demos: Boing!, RoboCity, some of the others. Later in the show, after a big company party, Bil and I got up to the Amiga suite – Commodore had spared no expense – with R. J. Mical and Dave Needle, and got to look inside. The funniest thing, they had a “tower” too, on their video chip. Anyway, it was that following year that some people from West Chester started getting involved in the Amiga.

I actually spent most of 1985 finishing the C128 and then the C128D, but I got my own personal Amiga in the fall of 1985, I just knew it was what I wanted to work on. Bil left Commodore, Frank Palaia and I worked on demos of a C256 (he got the Z-80 running double-speed, I got the 256K of memory up and running), but there was little interest at Commodore in this, or much of anything else, in 1985 and on to early 1986. They had a poor year, and several rounds of layoffs during this time.

Meanwhile, in another corner of Commodore, there was this other development project, the Commodore 900. This was in its third instance, with its third hardware team, primarily George Robbins and Bob Welland. This was another 16-bit computer, based on the Z8000 processor, designed to basically give Sun a run for its money. They had a high resolution monochrome display, and ran the Coherent OS, a UNIX clone. All in all, a very good computer, with amazing speed, thanks to a proprietary windowing system written by Rico Tudor. Rico went on to work on Amiga UNIX, and later, on the BeOS. I also wanted one of these. But sadly, with their economic woes, Commodore would only commit to one 16-bit computer, and that was the Amiga. So the C900 was cancelled, and George and Bob needed a new project.

Bob wasn’t the world’s best guy in the lab, but he was one of the best architecture guys Commodore had. He studied the Amiga 1000 design, how expensive it all was, and came up with a cost reduced version, which led to the Fat Agnus, and with it, the Amiga 500. This was underway in West Chester by the summer of 1986, and it was the first all West Chester Amiga project, other than the Genlock. I got involved with the A500 for about a month, with the expectation that I would take over the A500, being the low-end guy, while George would adapt the A500 technology for the A2000, which, at the time, was basically just an A1000 with the Zorro bus built-in, developed in Germany. George was also more experienced, I had never led a project. But as it turned out, George didn’t want to quit the A500, so I wound up taking on the A2000.

How have you, tech guys seen this acquiry, from the inside? What was the old team doing when the new 16-bit machines came to production? How have you received the Amiga, did you see a bright future for it?

That’s most of it already. When I first got my hands on Amiga specs, the C128 was launching and we were all happy about that, of course, because it wasn’t a bad system, and it had a natural built-in market, about 4.5 million C128 were sold. But I really got excited about the Amiga. The hardware capabilities at the time were just so much more advanced than anything, the OS was far more to my liking. I already knew UNIX and some of the DEC OSs, I programmed in 40-something languages by then, and didn’t consider assember of any kind to be my strong point, and so on. So yeah, I didn’ t have to be convinced it was the future, I decided that by the time I had finished reading the original green-cover manuals. Sure, it was another year before I worked on the hardware, but I started writing DiskSalv in late fall of 1985.

When and how have you first met the original, four member Amiga team? What was your personal impression about them?

Well, see, I never met the whole team at once, and of course, by the time Commodore got involved, there were quite a few people at Amiga. As I mentioned, I met RJ Mical, Dave Needle, and I think probably Dale Luck out at the CES, but of course, after what I had just seen on the hardware, this was kind like meeting your favorite rock star or something; I rather doubt they knew who I was. I met Dave once or twice more in West Chester before I was working on the Amiga, mainly as he came out to get an idea of how we made things “the Commodore way”. I didn’t have lots of personal contact with the team; I never went out to spend time in Los Gatos, as many of our software folks did. But as I started taking on Amiga projects, they eventually got to know who I was. I’m not sure the A2000 won me any points; not because my A2000 wasn’t a decent design, but because it had been a poltical battle, the German A2000 versus the “Ranger,” was their idea of the follow-on. It was all decided by the time I got involved and I couldn’t make any huge improvements in the A2000, but I did a bit. I made the CPU slot work properly so you didn’t need to pull out the 68000 as you did in the German model and I also buffered the clocks properly. George and I also expanded the video slot (originally just an internal version of the 23-pin video connector, for Genlocks) into the real video slot (that’s why there are the two 26-pin connectors), with access to all 12-bits of digital video.

I think I got respect with the A2620 and A2630 accelerator boards. The A2620 was originally Bob Welland’s project. He wanted to get UNIX on the Amiga, and that was seen as The Way. I got involved, made sure it behaved properly as an Amiga device as well, and solved a few technical bits to get the thing working properly. Bob left for work at Apple before it was completed. All the software guys loved these, of course, because they got work done much faster.

Were you working under Jay Miner or together with him?

I never worked under or with Jay, unfortunately. I got to know him a bit later, as we met a few times at shows, and I think he gradually understood that I was helping out, not part of the problem the Los Gatos guys saw with West Chester, like, not enough money spent on new chips. By the A3000, Jay knew me by name, and I guess was impressed enough to hang out with me a little at the Paris Devcon in 1990, the first time we introduced the A3000 to anyone. The world debut was April of that year.

What was the proudest moment of your Amiga carreer?

It’s hard to say with any certainty. I think when we debuted the Amiga 3000, first to the developers at the Paris DevCon, February 1990 was certainly one of them. This was the first major revision of the Amiga system architecture since the Amiga 100. The Amiga chips weren’t all that different than in the A2000 or A500, but the system design was full 32-bit, of course, something guys like Greg Berlin and I brought to the game.

How did things change around the Amiga when Commodore started to go down the drain?

You know, it happened so fast, I can practically figure out the very day it happened. This was in the late Spring or early Summer of 1991. I had been working on the first Pandora system (later dubbed AA, later still dubbed AGA) earlier that year, along with Bob Raible, the designer of the Lisa chip, and some software folks, mainly Chris Green and Spenser Shanson. We had the first system booting that February, with a few issues, but surprisingly few problems for a project at that stage. This machine I had called the Amiga 3000+, intending to drop it right in as an upgrade to the Amiga 3000. The main point of the Rev 0. prototype was to deliver hardware for the software people to use: Amiga 3000 class system design, Pandora/AA chips, and a new thing: an AT&T DSP3210 coprocessor.

This DSP was to run its own multitasking operating system, VCOS, which was an ideal match to the AmigaOS. Jeff Porter and I had met with the AT&T people at their chip division home office, about an hour from Commodore, and persuaded them to develop a software package full of DSP modules that could be useful in this context. They only understood, at that point, the use of the DSP as a replacement for hard-wired analog stuff, not as a general purpose resource.

Anyway, this machine did the DSP3210 interface using some high-speed PALs, and it had some issues. I made some mistakes, AT&T changed some of the timing. So I was doing a Rev 1. So this new version is getting ready for release in June, and also pioneering Commodore’s use of surface mount components. June was also when Mehdi Ali had basically taken over Commodore, dropping in Bill Sydnes, an ex-IBM guy, and Jeff Frank, the leader of the PC development group, which had basically been disbanded, replacing Henri Ruben and Jeff Porter, the bosses in charge during the Amiga 500 and 2000 days. Anyway, their first move was to essentially sabotage the A3000+ Rev. 1 PCB. They refused to pay for a solder mask, on a huge surface mount PCB. I worked on the resulting board for a month and couldn’t bring it to life, just too many solder shorts underneath chips. They then proceeded to cancel both product-oriented Pandora/AA projects, allowing me only to do a scaled-down revision of the 3000+ as a “developer test machine”, but not a product. They pushed through the Amiga 600, which you know about, and the Amiga 3200/3400, which you may not. That machine, dubbed the “Amiga 1000jr” – Bill Sydnes was the guy at IBM in charge of their greatest failure in the PC market, the PCjr – was just a scaled down Amiga 3000, without AA chips. It would have become a product, but for a funny thing: no orders. Each Commodore sales division had to order a product before it was made. The A1000jr was ready around April of 1992, about the time we had planned to release the orginal AA machines, but not a single unit was ordered by any Commodore sales companies. This basically sent the bumbling management team of Sydnes and Frank scrambling to come with with some kind of AA machine, which is what became the A4000, basically the A3400 with Zorro III back in, the AA subsystem from the Amiga 3000+, and the “cheapest 68040 board known to man”, designed originally as an A3400 upgrade.

Were these never completed models that might have saved Commodore from bankruptcy and liquidation?

I’m certain that, if Mehdi Ali had not been hired, Commodore would not have gone under in 1994. It’s just that simple – the guy was an egomanical idiot. He had no business running a computer, much less a computer company. He though he was some genius, though, and refused to listen to anyone.

Before they interfered, we had two projects in progress using the AA chips: the Amiga 3000+, which I mentioned, and the so-called Amiga 1000+, not to be confused with the Amiga 1000jr. The 3000+, as mentioned, had the DSP3210, and I had planned to redesign it for the 68040 before release. The DSP3210 could do 32-bit floating point math 5x–10x faster than the 68040, and excelled at the kind of things Amiga 4000s did. Then there was the Amiga 1000+. This was being designed by Joe Augenbraun, who had been working under George Robbins. I think this machine would have sold like crazy. The basic idea was a AA machine in-between the Amiga 500/1200 class and the Amiga 3000/4000 class. This would retail for an $800 list price, include a 25 MHz CPU, probably 68030, maybe 68020, depending on the pricing, its own FastRAM, a CPU expansion slot, two Zorro slots and a video slot. Keyboard is detachable, there’s a hard disc interface (probably ATA, but a good implementation – the ATA implementation in the A4000 sucked) and room for one HD inside.

Were there such embarrassing stories around the Amiga as what happened to the Commodore LCD laptop?

Nothing happened: it was a prototype only, they made something like 5–10 units. Commodore management at the time didn’t think it would sell, plain and simple. Of course, with 20/20 hindsight, we know how nicely the Tandy 100 sold. The Commodore LCD was far superior to the Tandy in every way, including the software. And Commodore made their own LCDs in those days, which itself could have been a very good business for the company, as time went by.

Were you aware of the phenomenon of the demoscene at Commodore?

Being involved in the Amiga, I knew about this. Though I didn’t quite grasp the magnitude of it until I was at a Commodore show in Austria back in 1990 or so. I was asked to be one of the judges for a demo contest they held, and wow! The kind of stuff they were doing at the time in those demos was way beyond what you’d see in a video game or pretty much anything else. And of course, it was art, a new kind of multimedia art. The first place prize was a car. Commodore Austria took it seriously, too! I don’t really recall the particulars of the demo contest, such as the names of the groups involved. I do recall that at least one of the finalists had been known as a cracker group before they got into demos.

I think, while this stuff existed on the C64 before the Amiga, it really “came of age” on the Amiga. If you spent enough time in the Amiga community, especially in Europe, you knew of it. Keep in mind that while the “demoscene” was very much a European thing, demos on the Amiga were not. Early on, that’s pretty much all we had, and they were from the very early days. Before the OS was finished, you had demos like Boing! and Robocity. Later on, in ‘86 and ‘87, when the first primitive 3 D software was being created, you had things like The Juggler and Leo Schwab’s Luxo Jr animations. He had seen Pixar’s film Luxo, Jr and proceeded to more or less clone a tiny bit of it, which actually made the Pixar people angry. Commodore’s support group, CATS – Commodore Amiga Technical Support – sponsored a yearly Killer Demo Contest, along these lines.

I think the big difference was the culture of it. In the US, the demos were largely the work of individuals, and simpler; in Europe, you got these teams doing all kinds of things: Amiga hacking, music, etc. I do recall one of the demos at an Austrian show, a very impressive one, was doing dynamic “Jello Physics”, animating a jello-like blob.

Have you visited other demoscene events after this Austrian one?

That was pretty much it. I talked with occasional demo folks from time to time, but most of my visits to Europe were for DevCons or the CeBIT show, not big demoscene events.

Have you been watching demos during the years? If so, can you name some of your favourites?

I’ve seen dozens of demos – everyone played them, around the office at Commodore, around the DevCons, etc. I really don’t remember the names, sorry.

Have you yourself made demos, just for fun?

I never really did any demos, only so many hours in the day. I suppose you could say I did the first AA chip demo, of sorts, in that I wrote the very first program that put graphics up on the screen, since, of course, I had the first board that worked, and had to ensure it really worked before bothering the software folks with it. This was really just a nice 8-bit color test pattern, static, no music, nothing very interesting if you saw it on a computer that wasn’t booting for the first time in a lab somewhere. I did a bit of music for my DVD version of The Deathbed Vigil and other tales of digital angst, that was very much inspired by the kind of tracker/technostyle music you heard in demos. This was the background to a short “tribute” video I made. Basically, I collected some quotes from the Amiga community, anyone who had something to say could send me an email. So I set the best 50 of these to music. Not really a demo, either, but something I wanted to do, something a little more positive than the tone of the video (well, Commodore was going bankrupt during the taping of that video).

Do you yourself still own or use an Amiga computer?

I actually have two: one Amiga 3000 with improvements, and one Amiga 1200. I have used the Amiga 3000 for years, but these days, I can run all of the useful tools in emulators on Linux or Windows, faster than they run on the A3000 with a 040 accelerator. Also, being in the startup company business, pretty much since Commodore, I haven’t really had the time for hobby computing. Some, here and there, but not like the Commodore days. And the funny thing about Commodore and the hobbies: some of the stuff I worked on, became “work”, at least in the way that it could generate some small income. Stuff like DiskSalv, the Deathbed Vigil video, video and Amiga in general, and so on.

How do you think today’s computer world would look like if Commodore never went bankrupt? Would the Amiga beat the PC on the long run?

That’s a tough question. And some of it’s the wrong question.

I was working on a new project, when Commodore went under, called Acutiator, a highly modular, custom configurable computer architecture, that would eliminate all the modularity problems of the Amiga models. I was designing a chip to chip interface, a different way of building things, etc. This started in 1991. By 1992, I realized that the new PCI bus did so much of what I wanted, I switched Acutiator to use PCI. Independently of this, Ed Hepler, the smartest guy at Commodore, the Jay Miner of West Chester, chose PCI for the Hombre project, which was a game console with Internet access capability.

– Modern PCs are pretty close. I had the idea of the TPU, Transfer Processing Unit, basically to shlep data around in a system faster than, and independent of, the CPU. The idea was that this tiny 32-bit CPU I worked out would live in each and every interface chip. With perfect knowledge of each bus, it would be able to run transfers better, faster, and without bothering the CPU. The idea, as well, was that most I/O chips were pad limited – like, for example, you’re paying for the connections, not the silicon – so these would be totally free. That’s the one thing I had in 1991 that isn’t in every PC. However, some smart chips, like SCSI controllers, have their own DMA queues, buffers, and basically, intelligence. So there’s a little piece of this, out there today.

– On the downside, it was clear even then that Commodore couldn’t always compete in graphics. If you do the math, you find that all of the successful graphics chip companies in the 1990s were successful because they had a big market. The did in the ’90s what the CPU people did in the ’70s and ’80s. Commodore would have failed doing graphics, by the mid-90s, even if they didn’t have the suicidal bosses like Sydnes and Ali, or they would have started selling the graphics chips to other companies. There is no way you could justify custom graphics for personal computers in those days.

Some say it’s perhaps better that the Amiga died, because sooner or later it would’ve developed into some unstable and unreliable thing like the PC is. What do you think?

No, I don’t think so. For one, the PC is very, very reliable. The hardware all works together, very nicely. Maybe it’s 98 % or so, better by far than the HW developed over time for the Amiga.

On the software side, you have issues. Linux tends to be rock solid, and lately even does expansion fairly well. Windows has had problems, it still does expansion wrong, but even at that, it’s not generally unreliable anymore.

As in most software and hardware interfaces, there are issues of algorithm and implementation. Early Windows was simply brain dead in all things: nothing was well designed, and what was well designed was poorly implemented. In modern Windows (NT-kernel-based), they have fixed more than half of the bad ideas, and even more bugs. But there are still bad ideas. Those are the ones that don’t necessarily get fixed, like the way Windows does autoconfig. They’re totally wrong about how they do that, and yet, don’t understand that they’re wrong. So they won’t fix it. But that’s more of a boot-time than runtime issue. Windows may screw up your network configuration, but it’ll happily run for months without crash with that incorrect configuration.

What’s your opinion about the new Amiga successors, the AmigaOne and the Pegasos? Do you think they have future?

They’re both just PCs with PPCs. Nothing more, nothing less. If a PowerPC is something you find interesting, look at these. If not, they’re barely a blip on the radar. What really bothers me is the business case. I don’t think anyone working on these things has actually run a company before, certainly not a real company.

First question: who are your customers? If you can’t answer that, you are not in business. Both seem to be saying “old Amiga users”, but I don’t believe that alone is a market large enough to sustain one new computer platform, much less two.

Second question: how dedicated are your customers? AmigaOS/MorphOS require custom hardware. So it’s $ 800–$ 1600 invested before you boot to Workbench. Once there, you don’t have applications yet. So it’s just a toy.

My claim is and has been that AmigaOS, or a clone, should have been ported to a PC. I just bought a 2.6 GHz P4/Celeron machine, including 80 GB hard drive, DVD/CD-R/CD-RW drive, 256 MB of DDR-DRAM, etc. for $ 199. Ok, it was a good sale, this is one of my son’s Christmas presents. This runs many times faster than any “neo-Amiga” class PPC machine. And many other people have PCs, they don’t have PPC machines. What this means: there’s a barrier to entry for new Amigas. In the old days, we had advances in hardware and software. But when the hardware is substandard and expensive, why bother? AmigaOS or MorphOS on x86 would sell orders of magnitude more than the current, hardware-intensive solutions. And they’d go faster.

Ok, so my opposition will say something like “but, if it runs Windows, they’ll just run Windows, not AmigaOS”. Dudes … Newsflash! They’re already doing that. No one will accidently run AmigaOS rather than Windows. Everyone running AmigaOS, or MorphOS, made that decision. They’re early supporters, they see something better. So they absolutely will run things on AmigaOS, if they can run them on AmigaOS. This is exactly how Linux has been growing.

Flip the coin around … if there’s a job I need to do, that I can’t do under AmigaOS or MorphOS today, that’s a reason to not buy. I might also have reasons, such as interest to buy. Add them up, and there’s my purchase decision. It’s a threshold thing. If the path-independent means to getting AmigaOS on my desktop is $100 rather than $1,000, more will sign up. Likely, many more, because the threshold of rejection is a log scale. You might find, for every 100 people willing to buy a New Amiga, there are 1,000 or 10,000 willing to buy the software to run this environment on their PC. This is only made more obvious by the fact that none of the hardware is even as good as the cheap PC stuff. If it was better than PC, you’d have a big geek attractor there, even if they didn’t know Amiga. Today, it’s a big geek repellant, they understand all the details, and don’t want to be made fool of.

And all of these issues are largely independent of the OS itself. In OS terms, “better”gets some curious people, if there’s a free download. “Dramatically better” gets more, if there’s a free download. “Dramatically better, with applications” is where the revolution might begin.

Finally, what do you feel when seeing people still using, loving the machines you designed? People wearing Boingball tattoos …

Hi Courtney!!

… destroying PCs at great Amiga parties …

Well, that one, I think the PC vendors love it more than I do. Now, if people were taking PCs and reformatting them for Linux or, better yet, Amiga emulation, now that would be a cool thing. Better still, buy the PC, put on the Linux or the emulator, then demand a refund from Microsoft for your never licensed and accepted version of Windows.

… painting the name “Amiga” on their cars, and marrying girls they met at Amiga parties? Where do you think all this love towards the mere machine came from?

I have a piece of it. One reason people know my name, or RJ’s, or Dale’s, or Jay, or Carl Sassenrath, George Robbins, Joe Augenbraun, Chris Green, Bob Raible, Andy Finkel, Greg Berlin, Dave Needle, Scott Hood, Scott Schaeffer, Carolyn Scheppner, Jeff Porter, Hedley Davis, Gale Wellington, Bryce Nesbitt, Keith Gabrielsky, Fred Bowen, Jeff Boyer, Ed Hepler, Mike Sinz, Spenser Shanson, Terry Fisher, Randell Jesup, or any of the others, is this simple thing about engineering: it’s art.

What’s art? It’s an original thing, something that, if it weren’t for some guy somewhere, simply wouldn’t exist, or would be markedly different. Edison and Einstein and many others figured out science, at a level most of us could never work. But in a very real sense, they found it – relativity, general and special, were there before old Al found them, he was just the only guy on the planet who found these things and could tell others about them.

But Amiga … if a spaceship full of those nasty Greys had spirited a bunch of the Los Gatos guys away to Tralfamadore, the Amiga simply would not have been. This kind of stuff exists though the artistic application of scientific principles. In a real sense, the same process that gets a Mona Lisa out of Leo DaVinci’s studies of the human anatomy. I also see that big corporate muscle would like for engineering to be another thing they can put on the assembly line. Which explains why tiny startup companies consistently do things that giants in the same business do not. And the Amiga, from start to finish, was one of the few instances, in hardware and software, where the Art really shone though. People understand and appreciate art, sometimes without even knowing why. The Amiga’s allure, and subsequent following, is this same Real Art. You cannot find that in a PC, or likely, even a Mac.

Life is kind of a landscape that you have to explore. Without walking, there is no forthcoming. There are broad ways many people choose. Following them is easy and you are always in company. But the really exciting places are those that you discover for yourself when you find your own way, following nobody but your instinct. So one aspect of the meaning of life is you have to go out and discover it!

– Amicom of Spreadpoint

2. The dawn of the Amiga scene

The excellent abilities of the Amiga was immediately discovered by both the game industry and the underground. The first Amiga groups appeared and in the course of nature and the Amiga scene blossomed. This primarily consisted of already known Commodore 64 groups. In 1986, and even a year or two later, the Amiga was an expensive novelty, unaffordable for most customers. Accordingly, the Amiga scene was not yet alive with activity.

Some Amiga cracktros. The first is a simple scroller intro from High Quality Crackings for Silent Service, from 1987. The second is a joint effort by Bamiga Sector One and Kent Team, made for BMX Simulator in 1990. TRSI’s cracktro from 1993 displays the mathematical game of life. FairLight’s cracktro features a cogwheel, “propelling” the scrollers on the top and the bottom into two opposite directions.

The first known cracker groups were for example the Belgian, later international Bamiga Sector One in 1986, the English Level 4, and the Austrian Megaforce, which was originally formed as a C64 cracker group in 1983. The first crack on the Amiga was achieved by Megaforce, in February 1986. The “victim” was Tetris. This group’s French section got in trouble with the police during 1988, so the leader, Ranger disbanded the group and founded Scoopex, which later gained great fame. Kent Team was also also built a reputation during this time and made the first serious cracktros.

Alpha Flight 1970 was founded in 1987, being the first to create a subgroup, a group inside a group. Such subgroups were Vision One, Z-Dream, and Zyklon. Finally they exaggerated this subgroup thing a little bit and formed so many that a few years later they couldn’t tell who is in the group and who isn’t. Alpha Flight soon became a respected cracker group. Other well known early labels were High Quality Crackings, a Perfect Cracking Crew, Action, The Silents, Rebels, Phenomena, Interpol, Ministry, Vision Factory, The Round Circle, Defjam, Quartex, Soft Sonic Force, TOC, Ackerlight, Paranoimia, The Band, Angels, Star Frontiers, and the legendary Skid Row. Almost each of them created simple demos and cracked games similar to what groups from the Commodore 64 scene had done. The only novelty was the advent of trainergroups who specialized in coding trainers but never or rarely cracking games themselves. These groups tried to out do one another by stuffing 20–30 plus trainers in a game. A silly form of competition arose at the time of which group could release a game supposedly with the most trainers.

Most contemporary formations were international, usually with a few dozen members. There were only a very few noted groups coming from one single country, since the Amiga scene was not built from the ground up but was founded by several experienced teams which already had a well working contact network, traditions, and customs.

The first demo of the Swedish group Phenomena, Flight of Dreams from 1988 and a picture from their first megademo, Phenomena Megademo from 1989. The cross-bones hebind the skull were moving according to the rythm of the music. Both demos, following the era’s trends, solely consisted of scrollers, bobs and simple bitmap effects, like waving and scrolling.

Early Amiga productions were far from the artistic standards which developed some years later. Demos were still in their embryonic age on the C64, and only a few were experimenting with the abilities of the new, high performance Amiga 1000. Features giving eaglewings to graphical effects like the copper and the blitter were just peculiar almost unknown novelties which most cracktros had not yet used for more than moving a few colorful bars. A few cracker groups however, had already tried to create uncommon spectacular visual effects for their intros. Bamiga Sector One and Kent Team, working in a loose cooperation, were one of these, and also another group duo, Trilogy & Thrust. Some of their cracktros were so nicely done that some people collected their releases not for the games but the intros themselves. The first Amiga demo displaying a single rotating cube without music was created on the 8th August 1986 by Star Frontier. This was not really widely distrubuted in its time but years later, in 1994, Reward of Complex dug it up from some of is old disks and published as an attachment of the diskmag titled R. A.W., as an illustration for his article about the history of the early scene.

The first demogroup which did not do any cracking, only demos, was Razor 1911, formed in 1986. For a short time they also existed on the Commodore 64. First, like everybody else, they released single part demos but in 1987 they changed their ways and began cracking games. Their activity intensified soon after they enrolled Onyx, the cracker, and Zodact, the sysop of The Castle BBS in the USA from the the disbanded group The Accumulators. Razor 1911 existed till 1992, but after a short break the group was reformed in 1993.

The number 1911 in the name of this legendary group actually has a meaning. In this time it was common to attach a number to a group’s name. Alpha Flight 1970 is another good example. Most such numbers had no meanings but some low ranked lamergroups often thought it was cool to use 666. When Razor was formed they first thought about 777, the number of God in demonology, which is superior to 666, the number of Satan. Since this looked a little bit odd, they decided to use 1911, hexadecimal for 777. Another explanation, given by Jawbreaker, a former member of the group, and later a founder of Scoopex Norway, 1911 refers to the foundation year of the world’s first condom factory.

The mixed American-European Red Sector Incorporated came from the Commodore 64 in 1987, and soon started a cooperation with the Swedish Defjam. This was the first, albeit short-lived coop on the Amiga. RSI was founded in the USA in 1985 by Bill Best, Kangol Kid and Greg. They also ran the first Canadian BBS. The European section was founded in 1985 by Irata, the famous trader and Mr. Zeropage, one of the most well known crackers of the C64 golden age. RSI was only active on the Amiga in 1988, however, a few years later they relaunched their C64 section with the homecoming wave. Most old C64 groups had their own C64 section up util 1988, or completely changed to the new Amiga platform, like Byterapers, FairLight, Doughnut Cracking Service, Eagle Soft Inc., Dytec (Dynamic Technologies), and so on. Generally crackers migrated to Amiga more often than demogroups.

Rivalry between certain groups grew excessively around 1990 and this often led to serious wars. Paranoimia, a group making excellent cracktros, was widely hated and was often flouted Paralamia. The group’s members were finally engaged in a fistfight with Quartex at Amiexpo ’89 in Cologne, Germany. Storm also promised a big beating for Red Sector Incorporation, but finally did not show up at RSI’s party to comply. Strider of FairLight and Stalker of Classic were also preparing for a big punch-up at the Miracle-FairLight-Horizon party in Sweden but they ended up only engaged in a tongue fight. Meanwhile someone blew up a Commodore 64 in the yard with a hand grenade and soon the visitors practically dismantled the building. Fortunately most parties remained highbrow and most groups condemned this cocky attitude as they considered friendship as the most basic unwritten rule. Rebels, Venom, Vision, RSI, Apex and Spreadpoint started a movement in 1990 called the Friendship Movement to free the Amiga scene from hostility and arrogancy. Such bothersome incidents have finally disappeared from parties from the end of 1990.

The contact system of the Amiga scene, for a distinct reason, was built up similarly to that of the Commodore 64 scene. The main way of correspondence was mailswapping but more ambitious groups also had their own BBS and employed modem trading members. Soon plenty of Amiga boards were running in Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia. The flourishing boardscene brought the advent of special boardgroup, programming or so-called doors. A door was an executable script on a board’s user interface, which could be doing anything from a simple file listing to more difficult things like opening a chat conference or an FTP connection. To use these doors, the user were required to have a certain user level. Such BBS groups were, for example, 2000 AD, Digital Chaos or Submission – later they became Mystic – but sometimes “everyday” groups also had doorcoders. Bulletin boards, however, were hindered by two great drawbacks. First, in Europe it was still very expensive to keep calling them. Ozzy of 2000 AD, the sysop of Valhalla BBS for example received a phone bill of 43,000 Danish crowns, almost 4500 US dollars in 1992, which is so far a world record not just on the modemscene, but probably in the history of telephony, as the highest known bill. Second, the police were still fìghtning the evil software pirates, and sooner or later they knocked on the door of almost every sysop regardless if their BBS was containing illegally copied software or not. The police sometimes even busted parties like the Cryptoburners-IT-Visual Bytes party in Drammen, Norway in 1990, or the Bamiga Sector One copyparty in the same year in the Netherlands.

Wild Copper: Wild Copper Demo. This French multipart demo first appeared in March 1988 and was probably the first to display a circlescroller routine. The Workbench desktop is just a graphical imitation, as an early example of design, the user could choose the different parts by clicking the icons.

The evolution of the creative scene was boosted by a piece of utility software. A music composer program appeared in August 1987, or, according other sources, December, which revolutionized computer music. It was Ultimate SoundTracker by the German programmer Karsten Obarski, released by Electronic Arts. The company first intended it for internal use only, for their game developers, but it turned out to be so handy and useful so they released it commercially. This program was the first tracker and hence the music composing technology called tracking was born, which is still widespread today.

What is tracking, and howdo such programs work?

When composing regular music, the order of sounds is described with notes. Each musician in the band receives his own sheet, and if they all play together, we hear the music as intended. Trackers are a “computerized” method to do the same thing. There are no traditional instruments but a set of prerecorded short digital sound samples, like a twang of a guitar, the sound of a piano key, or practically any sound or noise. The “score” is a special program, written on a script language specially developed for composing. This program describes which sample is to be played during any given moment of time at what pitch and speed. By this method we can play a simple melody by just recording a single note of a xylophone and playing it on a varying pitch again and again hence emulating all possible sounds of the instrument. In addition multiple samples can be played at the same time, each on at different pitch, with additional effects, if necessary. This was actually not a new idea, wavetable synthesizers were already working the same but they never used the idea on home computers since they lacked the ability to play digital sound samples. The Amiga’s Paula chip was capable of doing this.

The first version of Ultimate SoundTracker. The module itself was divided into “pages” with 64 notes each, called patterns. The composer controlled the parameters of playback for different sound samples on the four sound channels by the pattern list, seen on the bottom of the screen. Today’s music trackers still work the same way. The green arrow is the mouse cursor

Another advantage of this new method was that it did not require storing the entire music just the individual sound samples and the special “score” which drastically reduced the storage space required. The first version of Soundtracker stored sound samples and the “score” in individual files but later these combined into one single file giving birth to module music – the compact and well usable Amiga MOD format. The module format was introduced with the 2.1 version of Ultimate SoundTracker and soon became a worldwide standard. To speed up this progress Electronic Arts released a series of sample collections for years so that self-styled home musicians could have something to compose their own music. Each floppy disk contained the sounds of different instruments – one had drums, another guitars, and another synthesizer samples. For many years Amiga modules were built from these sample collections.

Since the Amiga’s Paula sound chip had four digital channels, it goes without saying that modules also had four channels allowing four samples to be played at the same time. Of course the possible number of actual samples were a lot more. The program was able to add musical effects, distorting the sound with mathematical algorythms. The first musicians had five effects at their fingertips: portamento up and down, volume up and down, secondary tempo setting, and arpeggio.

A few packmenues: the Candyland series from Rebel, Delicious Fruits from Alcatraz, Tuff Stuff from TRSI and Rack-Pack From Horizon.

The first module music was written by Karsten Obarski for the game titled Amegas, programmed by his friend, Guido Bartels. It was a clone of Arkanoid. Obarski was not just a good programmer but also the first Amiga musician. Some of his modules were later also used by crackers and demogroups. Bamiga Sector One, for example, used his module titled Blueberry for the cracktro of Carrier Command. The first group using SoundTracker was The Jungle Command and they created the first improved version of the software. Others also developed their own trackers based on SoundTracker so further legendary pieces of composer software were born like Noisetracker, coded by Mahoney and Kaktus, the famous coder-musician duo of the Swedish group North Star. Later came Protracker, Startrekker, and so on.

Even an 8-channel tracker was created titled Oktalyzer. For the first sight it seemed beyond belief, how could it be possible to double the number of sound channels? The trick was actually not too difficult. The program halved the playing frequency of the samples – they were sounded on 11 kHz instead of 22 – and the extra CPU time saved on downsampling were used for switching to and fro between channels quite fast, several thousand times a second. The result was the illusion of one physical sound channel playing two samples at a time. The price was worse sound quality and weaker effects, as the processor was busy switching channels, and didn’t have power for mixing and distortion. Oktalyzer was written by Tip of The New Masters, a previously unknown German coder, who later became a member of Spreadpoint.

Returning to demos.

The first demos, just like on the C64, consisted of one file, and had only a single part. These were also called filedemos. Soon multipart demos also came into fashion, which were a collection of demoroutines independently created by the group’s individual members. These demo stopped for a short period of time or loading session between each part often displaying some simple effect, usually a scroller. Such demos were called megademos. Oddly enough, groups usually didn’t give a title for their demos, especially megademos. Most of them were simply named Megademo, with the name of the creator group: Dexion Megademo, Slients Megademo, Triangle Megademo, RSI Megademo. If they made a second megademo, it was titled Megademo II, the third Megademo III, and so on. The best coders often created entire megademos alone with the help of one musician and a graphics artist.

Several filedemos from different groups were often chained together as packdisks. These were mostly assembled by swappers from the newest stuff they received. Packdisks usually incorporated a so-called packmenu, a menu to browse the contents of the pack. Often these were also nicely done, designed by a famous pixel artist. The first such quality packs were released by The Pride, a Danish swapper, the single Danish member of Sanity. Packs soon came into fashion since swappers gained quick notoriety by releasing packdisks. If someone assembled a good pack it soon became widespread promoting the name of the swapper. Unfortunately this also led to a whirl of lousy packs. The best swappers however kept releasing only the best. Packs were usually released as a series, and had titles like demos.

Sometimes packs appeared as attachments to diskmagazines, for example Stolen Data often contained short intros. This led to the development of packmags, which were a special kind of diskmags, usually released after parties. Such a packmag contained the smaller releases – intros, dentros – from the party, the results of compos, partyreports, even regular diskmag articles. Later even regular diskmags contained some attachments.

Megademos and most scene products – demos, intros, diskmags, but even commercial games – were bootloader programs, not executed by clicking an icon or typing a command, but inserting the disk containing it into the floppy drive and restarting the computer, to let it load instead of the operating system. Filedemos were an exception. Since the bootloader program ran without Workbench in the background, programmers could save serious resources. Coding such bootloaders were not a difficult task, because Amiga DOS supported such programs. It didn’t require any special programming technology, it just ran as a regular DOS program, accessing the file system, the interrupts. Coding such a bootloader on PC is practically impossible or at least very difficult.

The first multipart Amiga demo – not yet called a megademo, as the word was not yet used – was Techtech in 1987, created by two Danish coders, Sodan and Magician 42. This contained the first great technical achievement in the history of Amiga demos, which the coders called multiscreen scrapper screen scroller, but was commonly referred simply as techtech. This routine waved a bitmap on the screen, while the picture’s edge lopped over the screen edge.

What was so peculiar about this? Theoretically the Amiga was not able to do this. Although the blitter was capable of waving the picture it would be very slow. The solution was the copper, which was a rarely used mysterious device at this time ignored by most programmers. Let’s not forget that the Amiga was ahead of its time and it took a few years until programmers became familiar and recognized its fantastic abilities. The copper made it possible to execute some programmed operation while the screen’s cathode ray was scanning, before refreshing a specific pixel. An instruction list called copperlist specified what should happen before the refreshment of certain pixels. This was still common programming knowledge. Sodan and Magician 42 figured that the copperlist itself could be modified during the running of the program, it doesn’t need to be static. If a routine shifts the instructions of the copper list after each screen refresh then the contents of the screen will change accordingly. If this routine is a sine wave generator then the screen contents will wave nicely, like a flag.

Sodan later became known as a game programmer, he coded, among many others, the game titled Sword of Sodan. In the years ahead countless sceners started working on commercial games and nowadays there are barely any great Amiga groups which were never involved in the creation of one or two successful games.

Pictures from Techtech: the first part with the credits and the famous techtech effect.

As we discussed previously, plenty of enhancements were to come for the Amiga computers. The Amiga 2000 and 500 were introduced in 1987 and later, in 1990 the Amiga 3000 brought a whole new set of new innovations. Faster graphics and larger memory were the most important for the demoscene. These new machines were already able to use hard disks, making bootloaders unnecessary, however they were kept for for a while since it took a few years until the price of hard disk controllers became affordable. These computers opened a new era in the history of the scene, the period of ECS/OCS demos. This is how they call the demos of the time, referring to Enhanced Chip Set/Original Chip Set which were the two different graphical chip sets of contemporary Amiga computers. The expression “Amiga 500 demo” was also used, as the most current Amiga model was the Amiga 500, equipped with the OCS chipset and most demos were written on it until 1992.

D.O.C. (Doctor Mabuse Orgasm Cracking): Demons Are Forever, a nice early single-part demo from Switzerland. The demon sometimes transformed into bobs, dancing around the D.O.C. logo in farious formations.

While mentioning ECS/OCS demos we are referring to demos for OCS-based computers. Backwards compatibility enables these demos to run on ECS machines, like A3000, A600, A500+, hence the ECS/OCS. However, ECS-based Amigas were not so widespread, as the A3000 was very expensive, while the extremely simplified A600 and the incompatible A500+ never paid off. For this reason there weren’t any ECS-optimized demos, which ran on older models.

The first Amiga diskmagazines: the simple looking Cracker Journal and Stolen Data.

The new hardware eventually opened new horizons, and the sceners exploited the possibilities. Once again this new hardware (Amiga 500 and 2000) helped revive the demoscene giving the scene a more powerful computer to push to the limit.

The first Amiga diskmag was Cracker Journal from Alpha Flight which was first released in January 1988. Plenty of copycats soon appeard and at least a half dozen groups were regularly releasing their own magazines at the end of 1988. RSI edited the famous Criminal, Italian Bad Boys ran Bad Tongue, Finnish Gold had Scandinavian News, Danish Cracking Service and Tristar created Stolen Data – the latter was later passed to Anarchy UK. Anarchy’s graphic, the designer of Stolen Data, was Raistlin who also participated in the creation of Sex’n’Crime on Commodore 64 as a member of Genesis Project. Two great musicians, 4-mat and Dr. Awesome were also Anarchy members.

Interestingly enough these diskmagazines were often also published on paper as floppy disks were expensive and it would’ve been quite costly for someone to keep all issues. This might sound odd nowadays but originally most diskmags were sold for money or one had to send two disks when ordering an issue – one for the magazine and one as payment. Sometimes the diskmagazine was given for free but the most interesting articles were saved for the paper version. This practice traced back to the old Commodore 64 traditions where most paper fanzines were sold for money. The traditions of the Amiga scene also enabled coders to sell their demoroutines. Many demoscrollers announced this or that routine’s source code for sale with the necessary contact information. Apart from a few exceptions it was typically only beginners who bought sources for learning since one could’ve never became a notable coder if he weren’t writing his own code.

The first issue of Cracker Journal featured a German language article about the first Amiga party, CCW Copyparty. SSI organized a similar event in Zürich, Switzerland, named SSI Copyparty in February 1988. Bamiga Sector One also threw their own party in Denmark at the end of the same year. A lot of other smaller Amiga parties were happening Europe-wide while many Amiga users kept showing up at old C64 parties. The first great megademos, like Dexion Megademo, were released at these events.

The creation of Dexion, a group with mostly Danish members, was a typical Amiga megademo and one of the best. There are a coupe items that separated this demo from the similar megademos of the late eighties and the style of this era. Most parts consisted of hard to code, difficult scrollers and copper effects, with a few 3 D vector routines. It’s well noticeable that Amiga coders were usually just recoding old Commodore 64 routines at this time, simply using the superior power of the Amiga to further enhance these routines with more colors, more objects, and more scrollers.

Four pictures from Dexion Megademo. The first is the loader screen, which appeared during the loading of different parts. The second shows a vector part: linevector objects rotating on both sides and an uncommon scroller is running in the middle. These two parts were coded by Mr. Mega Mind. the third screenshot shows the scrollers of Liteace, atypical scroller part, with plenty of running texts. The fourth picture is a sinplot bob with a starfield in the background.

These times copper bars were probably the most popular demoeffect. They were colorful, horizontal lines moving up and down controlled by the copper. Actually it was an offshoot of rasterbars from the C64. The copper enabled more lines and more color with smoother movement than on the C64. This routine was first developed by High Quality Crackings. Different scrollers were also basic effects and bobs independently moving, colorful “balls,” were also in fashion. They were usually following an algorythmic path, like an oval, a Lissajous-curve, or just bouncing around. The word bob referred to Blitter Object, as they were put on the screen by the blitter. The idea of bobs were proceeded by the sinplot which is an animated line of white pixels, dancing like a snake along an animated Lissajous or sine curve. Later the mere pixels were replaced with the more spectacular “balls.” The synthesis of bobs and vector objects resulted in vectorballs when someone had the idea of plotting the edge of vector objects with bobs instead of pixels. Animated bobs also appeared, for example, rotating little globes instead of plain balls. The animation was pre-drawn. The third, almost obligatory basic effect, seen in almost all demos at the time was the starfield which consisted of white pixels flying against the screen, or paralell to it, like what you would see if you looked out of the front or the side window of a starship. Sometimes it moved randomly creating the illusion of the camera being dragged helter-skelter among stars or shiny points floating in empty space. This was also called an independent starfield.

Alternative bobs in the Finnish Gate Megademo II. Since traditional “balls” were employed by most groups they grew boring after a while and coders were seeking new ways to renew the routine. One of the changes was to use different graphics instead of balls.

The first filled vector routines appeared around 1989, dazzling the audience with an illusion of solid three dimensional objects, usually cubes. Filled vectors soon became commonplace and every demo contained at least one mandatory cube. The first filled vector routine was supposedly coded by Jabba, the coder of the Norwegian group IT, and released on 17th May 1989, according to an article written in 1994 by Sector 9 of Razor 1911. The title of the demo is unknown, and as a matter of fact the date is also a bit doubtful since the great Equinox-Horizon Party took place just two days earlier, between 15th and 17th May 1989 in Sweden, attracting a number of Norwegian visitors, and it’s much more likely that Jabba has first presented his routine at this event.

Finally the plasma effect was also an innovation of 1989. Plasmas were colorful spots, twirling and waving on the screen. For many years it was a basic demoroutine and thousands of versions were developed.

The next step of the technical advancement for the Amiga was the introduction of AmigaOS 1.3 in 1988 with the new FFS (Fast File System) filesystem. FFS was not entirely compatible with the older OFS (Old File System) and some old programs did not run with it. For this reason all sceners soon migrated to FFS and all demos were written for it and continue to be written for FFS to our present day. However, packmakers still used OFS as packs were supposed to work on all Amigas.

The first serious year of demos on the Amiga scene would have to be 1989 After the first primitive cracktros, intros and other experiments, the first great Amiga demos appeared, determining the trends of demo design and art for the forthcoming years. Recoding C64 effects were not the aim any more. Coders were already thinking of more difficult routines which made use of and stretched the Amiga’s abilities.

The greatest creation of 1989, also the greatest of all megademos, is undoubtedly the RSI Megademo, assembled by the German members of Red Sector Incorporated. A really mega-sized, mega-quality demo appeared on the screens of the wonder-struck Amiga fanatics. The RSI Megademo was released in September 1989 in the city of Venlo, Netherlands, and won the first prize at the Tristar Party – one of the biggest European sceneparties of the time. Brilliant graphics for the time, excellent music, and fabulous codework made it obviously a milestone in the history of the Amiga scene. This demo was for the Amiga what Dutch Breeze was for the Commodore 64, or Second Reality for the PC. This demos is best summed up in a short but telling description about RSI Megademo from Scenery, a demoscene history almanac by Glenn Lunder.

“Words cannot describe what the RSI Megademo meant for the scene at its time of release. It was a breath of fresh air, a show of force so powerful that noone dared deny the fact that it was a modern classic from the moment it was released. The design and – not least – the music gave it a very special atmosphere that I can safely say is still there when viewing it today. I have never been more spellbound by a demo, or watched a demo more times than this. An amazing achievement.”

What was new in RSI Megademo? According to the pictures it appeared to be a simple scrollerdemo just like Dexion Megademo and all other contemporary megademos. RSI Megademo did not change the basic design theory of demos, but created a new quality echelon which all Amiga demos must reach. It raised the bar which, in essence, is what the demoscene was and still is all about. The main field of innovation was the graphics. Almost all of the parts contained some serious pixel drawings. Scrollers were also well crafted colorful characters. The music was also not the usual cheap techno but rather RSI’s musicians daringly experimented with digitized sound samples creating a more fitting rock score instead. This was the first time Amiga sceners heard a computer playing heavy guitar riffs, drums, and as an extra feature, the demo even “talked.” Back those days it was quite uncommon to hear a human voice from a computer. Finally this demo was one of the first experiments to synchronize visual effects with music. One example is the spectrum analyzer part, where the Schwarzenegger-portraits were nodding on the rhytm of music and their mouths moved when a voice sample was played. Later demos naturally had much better synchronization but in 1989 it was an incredible achievement. The RSI Megademo took nine months to make, which was already a world record. Nobody had worked on a single demo for that much time and it immediately rocketed its makers to the top of all the demo/scene charts. The main coder and designer was TCC, with other coders Dr. Beat and Delta, music was composed by Romeo Knight, SCS and Bit Arts, and the graphics were made by Dark of Black Monks, Rat Sign and Dr. C. Unfortunately this great team soon broke up with members dispersing to other demogroups and they never made anymore demos together.

Pictures from RSI Megademo. The first one shows the loader – this graphic was later reused in several other demos. Schwarzenegger’s portraits on the second picture were originally animated and followed the rythm of the music. the third screenshots shows a vectorgraphic spectrumanalyzer with caleidoscopically twirling pixels in the background. The fourth picture shows a special vectorballs part, which was not only displaying merely rotating objects, but also animations: here a juggler character was playing with a few balls. The juggler later became quite commonplace and made its apperance in dozens of other demos.

The last part of RSI Megademo was a special treat. It was a message wall where viewers could write messages and save them after watching the demos. If someone copied the demo to a friend he also copied the messages, and as the demo spread it contained more and more people’s messages.

Other groups also gained fame for the Amiga, like Scoopex with J.O.E. Slideshow, a collection of the drawings from one of the first brilliant Amiga artists, J.O.E. We must not forget to add the name of Doctor Mabuse Orgasm Crackings (D.O.C.) to the hall of fame and their great single part demo Demons Are Forever. Some suspected Karsten Obarski behind this one claiming he was the coder going after the handle Unknown, but that would be incorrect. Unknown and Obarski were two different people. Later Unknown wrote the Amiga version of the famous game Dynablaster which was also known as Bomberman.

Between 1988 and 1990 Amiga users kept showing up in computer clubs and at parties in increasing numbers and Amiga demos and intros showed a similar tendency. New names appeared out of nowhere, like Silents, Kefrens, Rebels, Crusaders, Andromeda, Alcatraz; they were the first groups born on Amiga but migration from the C64 scene also continued. Even great names like Byterapers, Beyond Force, Deathstar and Horizon appeared. Summer 1990, at The Summer Conference in Denmar, Red Sector Inc. united with Tristar, forming Tristar and Red Sector, or TRSI, which was one of the most recognized cracker and demo labels of all times. A few Silents member also took part in the foundation. TRSI launched its demo section in 1992 but they soon parted as an independent group called Masque. Since all members specializing in legal activities left for Masque TRSI stopped making demos. Masque also had a PC section from 1993 and left the Amiga completely in 1995. During this time some great scene legends left their marks on the scene in their works, like Peachy, the excellent German graphics artist, or Romeo Knight, who became one of the first world famous Amiga musicians after RSI Megademo.

J.O.E. Slideshow by Scoopex was the first Amiga slideshow.

It was in the early years of the Amiga scene where we first recognize the obvious segmentation of the scene. Previously everybody was doing everything, coders often wrote music or made graphics, graphics artists could also code and so on. The reason was that with the relative simple cumbersome old 8-bit computers one had to master the machine to use it proficiently. Users had to know how everything worked. This wasn’t too different on the Amiga either but it had much better performance and was easier to use so users were able to focus on a single field of creativity like music, graphics, or code. Music composing and drawing graphics became separate branches of art because on the Amiga it was possible to spread pictures or musics individually, as a single file, while on the C64 you had to code a separate viewer or player for each piece. Around 1990, and for the following few years the most famous musicians were, for example, Romeo Knight, Pat, Firefox, Audiomonster, Static, Jester, 4-mat, Mantronix, Peter Salomonsen, Dr.Vector, Tip, Moby, S. L. L., Bit Arts, Nuke or Dr.Awesome. The most respected graphics artists were RWO, Dr. Claw, Facet, Uno, Fairfax, Milkshake, Peachy, Danny and J.O.E. It wouldn’t make sense to mention their groups, as most of them took part in several legendary group’s work over the years and most of them were members of several groups. Listing all of their works would be impossible. Demo graphics reached a truly artistic level at the end of 1990, to early 1991. Sometimes the releases even exceeded those in commercial games. Musicians generally only acquired the necessary skills and found the necessary composing principles used by professionals and came into their own towards the end of 1991. The great storage space needed for good sound samples was a drawback restricting the possibilities of musicians. Hence, most early Amiga demos contained simple, somewhat wobbly music, while code and graphics were already excellent. Most musicially experimenting teenagers, thanks to much practicing, soon became excellent composers.

The interesting question of the ownership of sound samples was raised around this time. Some musicians created their own samples for their songs while others who didn’t have their own instruments or keyboards took their samples from other musicians modules. A heated debate was started about sample ripping – is it ethical or not. The Maniacs of Noise, for example, copyrighted their samples. The debate settled down around 1993–1994 and an unwritten rule was accepted that musicians must mention the source of their “stolen” or used samples in the information text of their song modules.

The Amiga also made a hit also outside of Europe during 1990 and the first news about the existence overseas groups started to arrive. The first party outside Europe was supposedly held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1990. This was the Desaster Area – Freelancer Party. There weren’t many visitors, only thirty. The location was changed at the very last minute as they got wind of a police raid being prepared so finally they had the party in a parking lot where they had a good lookout to the empty building on the other side of the street, and the police cars building a blockade around it. Mystix threw a party in Australia, called Mystix Party with the event supposedly held in November although it was announced in the December issue of Cracker Journal. There’s no information whether the party was held or not and some sources claim the party was held but not until early 1991.

A relatively large Amiga scene emerged in Australia and New Zealand, but with only few serious groups. The large distances only enabled small copyparties with about 20–30 visitors. Cracker groups were nonexistent since it took weeks till the newest games reached these remote countries and usually a European group had already cracked in the meantime. Importer groups, however, were numerous: in Australia there were The Force, Factor4, Dawn, in New Zealand Nukebuster, The Lost Boys (not identical with the similarly named Atari ST group), and Dave and Christine. The graphics coming from these groups were at the same quality level as their European companions but most groups lacked good musicians and coders. It was perhaps the group known as “The Force” which was the luckiest, as their musician, Kreator belonged to the frontline, and could easily compete with the best European composers.

The Alcatraz-Pentcoast Party held in Aubonne, Switzerland was perhaps the first granting free entry for girls which is a tradition these days. Since the scene has always had so few females involved any parties loss of revenue/party prizes would be minimally affected. The Mirage X-mas Party held in Tilburg, Netherlands with 300 visitors also brought something new: for the first time the visitors were watching the compo entries on a big projector screen. Until this time the visitors copied the demos to each other, and everybody watched them on their own computer. At some major parties they were displayed on large televisions. The usage of projectors became commonplace around the end of 1993.

They French Dragons Megademo was a colorful, nicely arranged megademo, far-reachingly taking advantage of the copper’s abilities. This demo is also intersting for its music, written by two musicians, whom later became legendary. One of them was Allister Brimble, the Rob Hubbard of the Amiga, who later wrote the music for excellent games like Superfrog, Subwar 2050, Alien Breed, Mortal Kombat and many more. the other was Moby, who was almost unknown during this time, but today is one of the most respected scene musician on both the Amiga and PC.

By 1990, the activity of the Amiga scene and the quality of Amiga productions had already started to bypass the C64 scene. An even stronger more diversified community was born. Out of all computer platforms having a scene making demos, intros, cracks or anything of the like, it was the Amiga which gave birth to the strongest, most sophisticated and most quality-consciscous groups. We can say the scene was molded on the Commodore 64 but that it reached maturity on the Amiga. The excellently engineered Amiga computers made programming, music composing, and drawing funbut it still had the technical barriers for the coders to break so it was also a constant challenge. Real scene spirit, the mentality which was a blend of the authoritarian hierarchy of the cracker scene and sportsmanlike friendship was most typified by the Amiga scene.

Two leading magazines from the early nineties: the first issue of R. A. W. (Revolutionary Article Writing) and Zine. Zine’s look did not change even to the last issue.

Some serious diskmagazines appeared in 1990 which were more than mere electronic representations of paper zines. The style of articles improved as did the graphics, the user interface and the music. The earlier clumsy articles were gone and diskmags were not the quality of school magazines any more. They usually had intros, ranging from a simple splash graphic or a scroller to a difficult routine. The main value was the article content. A prized diskmag columnist was often just as respected as a good coder or cracker.

One of the most popular magazines was R.A.W. – Revolutionary Article Writing – founded by Pure Metal Coders, later passed to Spaceballs and finally edited by the independent R. A.W. Team. Their articles were truly revolutionary. Another great title was Zine, founded by the Swiss Brainstorm. Originally it was edited together with another group called Setrox, but eventually they ran it alone. The most internationally recognized diskmags were coming from West Germany: Hackmag by D-Tect, McDisk, D.I.S.C., I.C.E. (International Computer Entertainment) by Cytax, Slime, and even the Hungarian Top Secret was known and popular. These magazines laid down the stylistics and design principles of later mags. Chartsmags appeared as novelties which contained no articles, only charts assembled by the readers’ votes. The first chartsmag was Eurochart, edited by Crusaders from 1989, later passed to Static Bytes then Depth and today is managed by Iris. Other successful such publications were World Charts by Scoopex in 1992, European Top 20 by Equinox, and a host of other titles followed.

The only problem with charts was that not all voters knew who they were voting for so many simply wrote some random names or copied them from older charts. This naturally led to incorrect rankings. Thus, since charts and voting were invented there was always a debate about which dork had voted this or that group that high. Prejudice sometimes also caused warped lists since voters tended to vote for the groups of their own country or for the editors of the chartsmag even without justification. Sometimes swappers forged the voting forms collected from their contacts to push their groups higher on the list.

Diskmagazines were usually taken care of by their main editors not necessarily the groups releasing them. So if a main editor changed his group, he usually took the magazine with hims and kept releasing it under the new label. Sometimes it happened that an editor got bored of the diskmag and passed it to someone else who was in another group. Most mags changed hands many times during their history. There were even some which had each of their issues published by a different group.

The musicdisk, a pack containing a group’s musicians was Crusaders’ invention. Their first musicdisk was titled Bacteria, released in 1989, and contained the msuic of Dr. Awesome and Fleshbrain. Msuicpacks and musicdemos were around even earlier, but th term “musicdisk” gained currency after Bacteria.

As you may recall the cracker and demoscene groups got separated on the Commodore 64 around 1990–1992 with the former groups soon disappearing due to the decline of software support for the C64. After this time the cracker and demogroups were discussed separately in the C64 chapters. This separation did not happen on the Amiga. Effect coding and illegal software piracy were still walked hand in hand. Crackers were often also democoders and most groups had independent crack and demo sections. The demo section often had the task of creating intros for the crackers. Crackers respected democoder and vice versa, so nothing happened on the Amiga scene like on the C64 after Ikari’s party.

In the next section we will discuss some of the most renowned groups of the Amiga scene between 1986 and 1990, the era of ECS/OCS megademos. The groups that laid the foundation, and set the bar of the demoscene for the next decade.

We begin our journey of these greats with an unconventional artist, the genial French coder, Thomas “Tomsoft” Landspurg who was never a member of any demogroup, except once giving a hand in a demo to Threat using the handle Digital Wizard. Landspurg already had several years of programming experience when the Amiga appeared which he gained by coding on every possible platform from the ZX81 through Vectrex to the Commodore 64. He made some Amiga demos at the beginning of the nineties which today are remembered as elementary works: VirtualWorld, Vectorballs, Trip to Mars. A lot of widespread demoeffects were invented or first employed by Thomas Landspurg. For instance, the idea of the vectorworld, a 3 D world roamed by the camera was originated by him. This was very hard to code on the Amiga, because even though the computer supported visual effects very well it was too slow for the complex arithmetics required for 3 D vector graphics. Thomas, however, was one of the first coders who was not only a good programmer, experienced in code optimization, but also experts in mathematics so he successfully solved this difficult task. Many such coders later appeared and replace the earlier, hacking-like programming style with another style based on complex mathematics and more sophisticated coding. The advent of newschool style on the C64 was making similar progress around this time. As a result, more and more 3 D vectorgraphic routines appeared in Amiga demos by mid 1990’s including displaying rotating cubes, spaceships, regular or irregular vector objects, slowly superseding the old bobs, raster and copper effects.

In Tomsoft’s Trip to Mars demo, released at Amiga Conference ’90, a little spaceship wandered around a city on Mars. This was the first VR demopart or vectorworld in a demo. Although it’s very rustic for the today’s eye, it was quite a programming challenge back in its days, seriously putting the weak processor of the Amiga 500 to its test. It is to be noted that all objects, like the spaceship, are casting shadows on the ground.

Besides the vectorworld, Tomsoft has also invented vectorballs which was first presented in his Vectorballs demo in 1989. Later, in 1995 he said in an interview for Generation diskmag that the idea was not his own but came from his friend Fred.

The Norwegian Cryptoburners was founded in 1988 by two Norwegian C64 groups, Scandomatic Crackers and TWCA. Soon they gained notarity with their demos and other works. They did not release cracks. Their two most successful works were the Wild Bunch and The Hunt for the 7th October demos, winning first prizes at 1989 IT & Razor 1911 Party and No Limits & IMP 666 Party. They also released a diskmagazine called Fourth Dimension. Their most interesting product was a demo titled Third Dimension, winning the second prize at Theatre and Network Party in December 1990. This was a stereoscopic demo, to be watched with special red-blue goggles, resulting in a true three dimensional illusion. A novelty? Surely it was since nobody had tried this before. However, Cryptoburners’ lead is arguable as Third Dimension was squeezed to the second place by another stereoscopic demo, Quo Vadis by the American group Exit.

FairLight is a returning name in the great story. They were discussed in the Commodore 64 chapters and are one of the oldest and most well groups in all of the demo scene history. FLT was primarily a cracker group, and still it is today, but time to time they also released demos. The group got its name after a synthesizer brand. The Amiga section was founded by Black Shadow in 1987 and Strider, the founder of the original FairLight on the C64 joined in 1988. Soon they had dozens of members and many more BBSes than the average. Their cracker memberlist featured names like Exolon, N.O.M.A.D. and Gaston – their names were seen in all of the best cracked game intros – while their demo section was polished to brilliance by Danko, the excellent musician, and Exolon and Celebrandil, the two coders. Danko was already mentioned in the Commodore 64 chapters but it was Celebrandil who rose into view on the Amiga. Today many remember him as one of the greatest innovators of the scene. Just like Thomas Landspurg, he was also a math wiz, experimenting with new, arithmetics-based demo routines. The first of these was the so-called spacecut, dividing a vector object with a plane. This was a nice new idea because it was not possible to intersect two vector objects with the regular commonly used vector routine. For example, intersecting two cubes would have resulted in a flickering, messed up effect, or more possibly both cubes would have disappeared, as the vector routine couldn’t decide which one to draw over the other. The real solution of this problem was z-buffering but the democoders of the era had yet to used it, because of the limited computing power of the Amiga. The spacecut was working, but only applicable for a cube and a plane – it was not working with other objects. Another great invention of Celebrandil was the glenz vector, which was later also called Celebrandil mode. The glenz, meaning glass lens effect, made the displayed vector object partially transparent, like glass, so through a cube’s plane we could see the opposing plane on the other side. Also Celebrandil was the first to use raytracer effects in a demo, and he was the first on the demoscene to code a raytracer program. Where he got his ideas, how his routines worked, and his earlier years in the Amiga scene are what he discussed with us during an interview:

Cryptoburners: Third Dimension

Tell me how you became the famous coder called Celebrandil from an unknown kid who just got his first computer?

I used to play a lot with my cousin’s Commodore 64 back in 1983. I was 13. I bought mine two years later. The name Celebrandil came a bit earlier, while playing role-playing games. So, in fact I started coding on the C64 and other computers we had at school like the Swedish ABC80 and Compis. The Compis was quite cool. It was similar to a PC with 16 available colors. One day I bought an Amiga World magazine and I found an interesting article about raytracing. I tried to create a simple raytracer on one of the Compis machines and it was really amazing to see it working. Then I started programming a game on the C64 with a friend called Boerni. This was around 1986 or 1987.

I came in contact with the scene around this time. People already started making demos on the Commodore 64, but not as good as the ones that would later come of course. There were quite a few demos on the Amiga then and I still hadn’t bought one on my own. I did that in 1988. We also knew the illegal scene. Most of the games we received those days came from a Swedish group called West Coast Crackers. WCC later got split, and two new groups called FairLight and Reflex were born from its ashes. They used to have a member, who cracked almost all the games we got: he was called No. 1. He was a great cracker. Later he changed his handle to Strider.

Strider is one of the most mysterious figures on the scene ever. Barely a few people know his real personality and even fewer can understand his ways.

I agree. And he always tried to look bad and nasty. I remember when once he invited everyone to a small local party and gave them forms to fill out in order to become members of FairLight. Everyone did so but when the party was over, Strider fired all these new members. This was his kind of humour.

West Coast Crackers is a typical American group name, weren’t they originated from the USA?

You may be right. I’m sure Strider had a whole lot of American friends even then. The BBSes were probably run by Americans. After all, the stereotype of an American scener was a heavy guy, running an even heavier BBS. Strider later moved to the USA and lives in San José today. He was running a company trading in game console copiers and I guess it was easier to maintain his American contacts by moving there.

Back to my story, our group, which we formed with Boerni, was named Altair. Boerni met some guys from a small group called Defiers. Mahoney and Kaktus were also members of this group that time. Boerni soon decided to code a demo on the Amiga and I wanted to do the same. So he sent a letter to North Star, a demogroup working in cooperation with FairLight, asking to join, and they accepted him as a new member. I followed suit, and I also became a member of North Star in 1988. Kaktus and Mahoney also came over in 1989.

We never finished our C64 game with Boerni but we had success on the Amiga instead. Our first demos were released as parts of the North Star/FairLight Megademo III in 1988. I had two parts in this, one of them featured a raytraced image. In fact the first one later became a title spot for Kosmopol, a Swedish TV show about computers. My next demo was titled Interpol. It was basically a number of vector objects changing all the time, interpolating, hence the title. At that time everyone liked to compete in displaying as many vectors as possible, along with a lot of 15×15 pixel balls. Interpol was planned to be released at the Ikari & Zargon party in Slagelse, Denmark, but I failed to finish it. I met Zike of FairLight and Grendel of Byterapers there and we went out partying instead of coding … There I remember Grendel falling in love with a flowerpot. I finally released Interpol at the Triangle & Amiga Lords party in Karlstad. It came in second, which quite pissed the organizers.

The North Star guys were really nice. They already made a game on ZX Spectrum, and worked on a new game titled Wizmo, sort of gradually leaving the scene. So I hung out with the FairLight guys instead and joined their group during a meeting at a computer exhibition, the PC Show ’89 in London. This show was pure fun. Strider and Black Shadow knew a lot of people from the C64 scene, and a lot of them were there. Jeff Smart from Triad, for example. FairLight snatched a lot of unreleased games during the show, entering closed areas and copying disks. They borrowed my entry badge for this, as I was working for the Swedish TV, and had entry to some restricted areas. However, later one of the game companies found their trails and FairLight finally couldn’t release the games.

The C64 cracker magazine Illegal also reported this little action.

I remember meeting Jeff Minter, the famous game programmer from Llamasoft, showing some effects on the Amiga. He smelled of joints. I also remember meeting some members of Bamiga Sector One. Those guys were living legends back then and when I saw them I really felt like a little lamer. I also met David Whittaker, the great computer musician. Back then there was a game titled Strip Poker, which was displaying girls undressing if you won in the game. One of these girls was called Maria Whittaker, and jokingly I asked if she were David’s sister. And really she was!

There were some more parties during that year. Local Defiers parties, with not more that 50 people and another major copyparty in Holland, the Alpha Flight & Vision Factory & Powerslaves party in Hertogenbosch, near the German border. Lots of nice people … There I met RSI, Spreadpoint, even got the RSI Megademo before its release. Delta of RSI was quite nice.

In September 1989 I was enlisted to the Swedish Navy. I was a signalman on a small torpedo boat named Munin. My job was to be on the lookout, identify other boats in sight, take photos, and use signal lamps in case of radio silence. It was boring but I had my Amiga with me on the boat and continued working on my raytracer when not on duty. The electric power came from the Diesel engines but they were not providing a stable 50 Hz AC so the screen kept randomly changing size all the time. But I was still able to work and the next demo I finished was My Room, released for FairLight at the Phenomena & Censor Party in Arboga. It was actually finished at the party. There I met Danko of FairLight, he wrote the music for it.

Were you the first on the demoscene to code a raytracer?

At least I don’t know any others. I got the idea from a demo titled The Juggler, which appeared in Amiga World as a programming tutorial.

Could you tell how you first put raytracing in a demo, and how it worked, as the Amiga was far too weak to calculate realtime raytracing?

The first demo in which I displayed this trick was titled All Around. It came second at the same compo Interpol won. The routine was very simple, at least by todays standards. Everything was precalculated. The middle ball had eight animation phases, representing 45 degrees of rotation, and this was played looped. As the balls moved, it looked like if the surface of the large ball were reflecting. Since all the green balls looked the same, you only had to rotate them 45 degrees around the reflecting ball, in order to end up with an image that looked like the first. So eight different images was enough to create an illusion of the balls smoothly circulating, when these images were looped. The demo did not have any music because the eight HAM images took most of the memory.

In fact I was more proud of the balls on the top of the screen, over the scroller. The text actually rotated around the balls, but the choice of colors made it impossible to see. The raytraced balls were quite simple. I remember an annoying little guy at one of the Defiers parties, who did the same trick on the C64. His name was Yabba of Light. Later he won the student olympics in mathematics. We were from the same school. He was just like Mahoney. When I met Mahoney in 1987, he was only 13 or 14, but already a really good coder. There was another guy in the same neighborhood, also a very good young programmer. I don’t remember his nick, but his real name was Tomas Möller which might ring a bell for some as later he wrote a book titled Real-time rendering, a bible of 3 D coding. He’s a guru today, and his book was among the top 8 best selling books at the French subsidiary of the world’s greatest online bookstore, Amazon.

The first raytracer demo from Celebrandil, All Around. The green balls were revolving around the reflecting big one. Note that the green ones never overlap the large ball. So it’s actually one animated bob in the mddle of the screen with eight regular ones around it.

I have a certain feeling that Amiga sceners’ average age was quite low back then – 14–18 years, so most of them were much younger than on any other platform.

That’s right. I was 17 in 1987 and felt old. This was probably the reason why we thought our math routines were advanced. Later we went to the same university with these guys and with Gollum of FairLight, JAS of Phenomena and Exolon of FairLight.

How have you invented glenz vectors?

The much more advanced My Room, featuring another raytraced animation. Proably the only demo coded on board of a warship.

I am not sure if I was the first to come up with the basics of this routine. I remember seeing a similar effect somewhere, but I can’t recall where. Not for the complete thing, but the manner of mixing the foreground and background colors to achieve the glass-like effect. The glenz was not a difficult thing, it’s quite easy to understand if you know how planar mode works on the Amiga. The routine draws the background on two overlapping image planes, then the foreground on two others. Then you fiddle with the color registers to get the effect.

So it’s just the matter of two bitplanes and some color mixing?

Two is not enough, it needs four, but basically that’s it.

Have you given the name “glenz” to it?

No. Photon of Scoopex programmed an improved version of my routine a bit later, and he called it “Celebrandil mode” or glenz. My original version was slower and had some errors of black dots appearing along the edges. I used a bad monochrome monitor back then that’s why I didn’t noticed those dots. Someone once asked why I always chose weird colors … the answer is because of the monochrome monitor.

Glenz and spacecut were both first presented in the demo titled Animotion, released as a Phenomena production after Celebrandil left FairLight.

What was the basics of spacecutting?

That was the part in my Animotion demo I was the most proud of. Technically it’s similar to intersecting a ray with a plane in raytracing. I was surprised people hadn’t done it before. All the edges of the cube consisted of two parts, one in either side of the plane. These edges were cut by the plane, using a simple ray-plane intersection calculation. The cutting plane never got exactly parallel with the cube sides as it would have caused an error. Then the background half of the cube was drawn on the screen first, then the plane, and finally the foreground. It gave the effect you could see in the demo.

Can we call the years 1989–1990 a period of transition from hacker-coding to mathematics-based demo coding?

Yes. But the game was still a lot about fiddling with the Amiga’s different registers. One could make cool effects just by simply understanding how the Amiga worked, that’s how glenz was also born. On the other hand, everybody was trying to come up with their own ideas that time, at least if they wanted to win a compo.

In your opinion, which were the best demogroups of during this time?

Kefrens, Red Sector, Spreadpoint and hmm … Scoopex was also cool of course, but their attitude was not as good … Pure Metal Coders were skilled, but that was a bit later, around 1992. Also Cryptoburners. Vortex 42, they did the very first demos in Sweden, I believe. I once read that V42 members all went to Phenomena when it was formed. North Star was also a big team, they created three megademos in 1988, that was outstanding. I believe, it’s my personal opinion though, that Sweden was the best scene country in 1989–1990. Next was Denmark, and then definitely Finland with Scoopex.

The math-wiz school marked with the names of Celebrandil and Thomas Landspurg were also followed by the coders of Crionics. This group is not to be confused with the PC group Cryonics. Crionics released a great vector megademo in 1990, at the Amiga Conference ’90 Party in Copenhagen, organized by RSI and The Silents. The two coders, The Spy and Deftronic drew up with serious filled vector and flat shading routines, while Grumble and Saxs came up with a new idea, the filled vector scroller. This was to renew the already boring world of scrollers. The text running on the screen was seemingly fixed on a rotating spatial plane and the letters were built up of polygons. It was later also called spacescroller. An interesting aspect of this demo was that the parts did not following each other but rather the viewer had to select the one he or she wished to see from a menu. Such menus came into fashion for a very short time, but soon vanished.

The Swedish Phenomena was founded in 1987 by Avalon and Silmarillion, but the original group split up after releasing a few simple demos. The members left to Vortex 42. Later they decided to reform the group, and Phenomena was born again. One of the refounders was Antiaction, a known member of Defjam. He created LHA, a compression utility, the most widely used such tool on Amiga even to our present days and its PC version is also popular. When the Swedish group Triangle got split up – actually this was a trio of three groups, Crack Force Five, Jet Speed and The Gang – most members joined Phenomena and quite a powerful team was formed. Their first demos, the already delineated Flight of Dreams and Phenomena Megademo were released soon thereafter.

Phenomena was originally a mixed group, but the crackers all left in 1989 and founded Miracle. Two new fantastically talented members arrived to replace them, the coder Azatoth and graphic artist Uno. Azatoth, whose brother served on the same boat with Celebrandil at the navy, learned coding from Celebrandil. His teaching was not wasted as proven by the Vectormania filedemo which won the competition at Amiga Halloween Conference held in the city of Motala in 1990. Azatoth later met even more success when Celebrandil also joined Phenomena in 1990. He wrote a new demo titled Animotion, still as a FairLight member, but released it under the Phenomena label already at Dexion’s party in Denmark. This brought another Phenomena victory making the group the brightest shining new star on in the demoscene.

The most important internal rule of Phenomena – and perhaps the reason for their success – was that all members had to know each other personally, meet often, create and party together – in short, they had to be friends. For this reason they only had Swedish members.

Crionics Megademo: flat shaded vector with shadow casting and filled vector scroller (or planevector scroller).

Another Swedish group, The Silents, was founded almost at the same time as Razor 1911 in 1987. Soon they launched a Norwegian and a Finnish section, and became an international group within a short period of time. They had two significant releases up until 1990: the Welcome on Amiga borntro, heralding their birth to the world, and their own Silents Megademo since they also couldn’t live without having their own megademo. For a short time they were mostly known as a party organizer team, but later returned to demos. Their most significant work from this period was Blue House, a multipart filedemo from 1990, made by the Swedish section. The code was written by Alta, music by Marillion and Blaizer, and graphics was made by Rizzo and Alta. The title referred to an actually existing blue house, a school in Kungsba, near Göteborg, where the Silents group meetings were held each Saturday. Another remarkable Silents product was the Sound of Silents musicdisk.

Finally we must not skip Flash Productions from Denmark, authors of the Digital Concert musicdisk series and the famous Budbrain Megademo I–II. Budbrain was actually a duo of two Flash Productions members, the coder Psycho and the graphic artist Diablo. They were not a subgroup but a quasi-independent label. Today we’d call this formation a fungroup. But back then there were no fungroups, only “serious” demo and cracker groups, so these two funny nuts were really breaking the trends. They did not experiment with new routines, did not chase records, but created demos of simple effects and funny graphics. Budbrain Megademo reached its success through hand drawn animations. Computer animation such as full screen cartoons were quite a novelty back then. Animated effects were seen in demos but only small graphical objects appeared with a few repetitive animation phases. Full screen animation was just as special as the voice samples of RSI Megademo even if they didn’t need that much programming knowledge or technical background as contemporary demoeffects. This demo was definitely different from others and the audience set a high value on this originality. The first Budbrain Megademo won the first prize at Amiga Conference ’90, outmatching Crionics Megademo and Blue House. The sequel, Budbrain Megademo II came in second at Dexion X-mas Conference ’90, after Celebrandil’s Animotion.

Vectormania was similar to Animotion: the group’s logo on the top, a scroller on the bottom and vector objects In between. Other groups copied this layout and many demos took similar shape. On this picture we can see Azatoth’s record – moving six vector cubes at the same time.

The Silents: Blue House

Three screenshots from Budbrain Megademo (the third one is on the right side).

– Do you think this demo will be remembered in the Amiga scene in two years?

– Two years? I don’t know. I hope, because it would be great for us, yes, we in Alcatraz hope somebody will remember it in two years.

– PGCS of Alcatraz talking about their Odyssey demo for R.A.W.

3. The age of trackmos

Perceptive readers might have miss the introduction of Scoopex in the last chapter. This Austrian-German-Finnish-American group is best remembered for a quite uncommon demo, which changed the principles of demo design forever and ended the era of megademos once and for all. This demo was titled Mental Hangover. It was made by the Finnish section of Scoopex and it was released in April 1990 at the Swedish Elite Easter Conference. The demo was already mentioned in the first chapter of this book and a bit later when we talked about Commodore 64 demos so the term trackmo might sound familiar. It is the abbreviation of trackloader demo. Scoopex used a new technology to load the parts of the demo. For example, while a part was running another one was already loading so the spectacle was not interrupted with loading screens. A continously running, fascinating, videoclip-like presentation was born. This was a fantastic innovation. Mental Hangover broke all the trends and after this the megademos disappeared over the next half year and only trackmos were made. The trackloader technology became obsolete and went out of fashion some years later with the adoption of hard disks but the design principle that a demo should present a continous and uninterrupted show is still considered a part of demo design.

The essence of trackloading was that the data was not saved to the disk as a file or multiple files but the disk’s sectors were directly filled with it, in raw format, without a filesystem. The demo read this unconditional disk with its own special loader routine. The demo was launched just like old ones, the user put the disk in the drive and restarted the computer. Although the trackloader worked quite differently from a conventional bootloader, but it made no difference for the user. The only drawback was that the disk was unreadable for AmigaDOS, since it had no filesystem, hence it was treated as unformatted. However this was not a problem since there were several disk copier utilities which could copy even a trackloader disk.

This was nothing new. Many game and even some earlier demos – among them RSI Megademo – used this technology, as sector-based data management was faster than the conventional file-based. When using a trackloader, data chunks were put next to each other in neighbouring disk sectors in proper order and the computer did not need to seek file fragments. The programmer of the motorcycle racing game, Super Hang-On, developed an interesting trick. He arranged the blocks in a certain order so that the drive head first moved from the edge of the disc towards its middle, then repeated it on the other side. As a result, the floppy drive made a sound like a motorcycle engine was starting.

Scoopex: Mental Hangover

So, the trackloader was already around before Mental Hangover but nobody ever tried to load a new demopart while another was still running. This was the actual novelty made possible by the Amiga’s multiprocessor architecture. It was an innovation of Slayer of Scoopex, the Finnish coder, who naturally found himself on the top of all charts in an eyeblink. The graphics of the demo was made by Reward and the music by Uncle Tom. Neither of them were among the best known sceners but this quickly changed Mental Hangover.

Style and designwise Mental Hangover strongly wore the megademo heritage. The trackloader was a special innovation, but the demo itself contained the same old effects – starfield, scrollers, vector routines and bobs. However, Slayer presented them on a master level and rightfully ripped on other groups’ productions in his scrollers. Still, it was obvious that someone would soon beat even this unique and epoch-making demo. This took almost a year. The dethroner was Azatoth of Phenomena with the demo titled Enigma released in March 1991 at the Anarchy Easter Party in Nykoping, Sweden. Later, opinions were that if Scoopex invented the genre of trackmo with Mental Hangover, then it was Phenomena who laid down the basic principles of this style. Azatoth put his best effort into this demo, and as he later told, he watched Mental Hangover several times very carefully during coding, checking to make sure his work was better in all aspects. He really wanted to prove it to Slayer that he could do better. Enigma was not simply an excellent demo but brought a set of new routines. For the first time we saw combined effects like a rotating cube with a different effect on each plane. Azatoth used vectorgraphic transformations to project the image of other vector objects, a starfield, a planevector on the cube. This was not the first example of texture mapping, but spatial distorsion of 2D effects, synchronized with the cube’s movement.

Enigma’s best remembered part is probably the vectorworld, similar to the Trip to Mars demo. Enigma featured the first starwars scroller, a scroller running in space, towards a remote horizon, like in Star Wars, or the dotvector, a special 3 D vector routine which only displayed the vertices – the junction points of the polygons of an object. Finally Azatoth presented a few features of his raytracer program, Perfect View with a short animation, showing an array of balls running through a fractal projected on a spatial plane. This was the first advanced raytracer in the history of the scene. According to Enigma’s scroller, it featured the following functions in March 1991: shadow casting, reflection, refraction, Phong shading, texture mapping, recursive raytracing (calculating the travel of a ray of light after bouncing from a surface), management of unlimited light sources and objects. This was very unique at its time especially considering commercial applications did not have all this functionality.

Phenomena: Enigma. Combined effects on a cube, vectorworld, the first dotvector routine and the famous raytraced animation.

After these two demos, Mental Hangover and Enigma, nobody doubted the future of the Amiga as a demoplatform. Even the good old Commodore 64 could hardly follow the Amiga progression. While hundreds of demos were being made on this new Amiga machine, the Commodore 64 had reached its pinnacle with Dutch Breeze at this time. This being prior to the next great generation of C64 demogroups like Crest and Oxyron. The PC scene was not even known by a mere report, as the PC was still in the era of EGA monitors and only a few crazy folks were coding simple demos on it. The PC actually never made up this leeway, at least, not during these early years of the 90’s.

More and more Amigas were being purchased and used worldwide and games were also released in increasing numbers. The modemscene was growing, the world of bulletin boards was expanding, and modem trading was getting more popular. Although the debate at the time was if mailswapping or the more efficient modemtrading was better and more practical for maintaining contacts and keeping the emotional peace between swappers. This controversy took several years to settle with technology winning in the end. Many groups used the modem as their primary communication tool. Modemtrading of games, demos, etc. became so widespread that some groups even put up ads looking for conventional mailswappers since the old school mail swappers migrated to using modems. Phone rates, however, did not follow the fast advancement of the scene. So, with most sceners being students with no jobs and no money it didn’t take much before someone figured out a work around. The Europeans looked to the best phreaking traditions of the American C64 scene. Illegal groups, although with a bleeding heart, were forced to tap the phone lines again. Calling card thievery still worked well, many offered codez for sale, for money or warez. Fake codes were working on the AT&T USA Direct service even up to 1995. AT&T’s system only checked if the given code matches a given scheme but not if it’s an actually existing code. Hence anyone who had a few existing codes, was easily able to find out the scheme and generate as many fake codes as he wanted. These codes usually worked for two weeks because AT&T sent the bills of card-based callings to banks in every two weeks and only then they found if a code did not exist. In this case they banned the code from the system but it did not help much since there were several hundred thousand possible combinations. Not to mention the possibility of the phreaker accidentally finding an existing code, because in this case he kept calling for free infinitely, or at least till the real owner of the code noticed that his bills were mysteriously high. Using codez was completely safe in Europe since American phone companies were only able to track down the country, or in a better case, the city where the call was originated. However, this was only safe for the user of the code. The code importers were still in constant danger.

One of the first notorious codeztraders was Maximillian, founder of the French Paradox, who was finally caught by Interpol – not the cracker group called Interpol, but the police – and was honored with several years of prison for his indefatigable work. The risky codeztrading was soon replaced by a new, much less dangerous method, only employed by elite swappers, true insiders around 1991–1992: the bluebox. This method allegedly doesn’t work on today’s digital phone lines so we can discuss how it worked. Of course, it isn’t much of a secret anymore since some careless lamers spilled the beans to journalists visiting parties around 1995 which resulted in phone companies applying some simple technical countermeasures in most countries, like France.

Sanity, the most successful German demogroup of the Amiga 500 era existed till 1992. Here are two screenshots from their excellent demo Elysium – Search for Anarchy, coded by their two stars, Chaos and Panther, with musics by Jester and graphics by Chtulhu and Cruiser.

Blueboxing was based on the fact that analogue phone exchanges used differently pitched, beeping sounds to communicate with certain commands associated with given frequencies. The Amiga was also able to beep on a given frequency. Just a headphone was to be held next to the phone receiver, and the phone exchange was fooled. The first step of blueboxing was to call a number abroad available for no charge from the phreaker’s home country. These were usually direct call lines, maintained by the foreign country’s phone company to let their citizens call home from abroad. Such services were available in France, Japan, the United States and Australia. Before the direct call center picked up, the phreaker would hang up and sent a special seize signal. This reactivated the broken connection. After a short time the next signal followed, initiating a new call on the reactivated line. Then came the phone number, with country and region code. In a few countries the country code was also followed by a 0. This identified the caller as an operator with special privileges. A 1 meant a regular caller and a 2 was registered as a call from a phone booth. Operator status made a set of useful functions available, for example, releasing a busy line or in other words, “kicking” someone off a BBS he’s currently calling and logging on instead of him. The phone number was followed by a closing signal and the call was initiated. It was not billed to anyone since the phone exchange still treated it as a call to the free foreign number but it was unable to notice that the call is “turning back” from the foreign relay and is not reaching the destination. The signals returning from outside of the country were registered as a normal incoming call, paid by a foreign caller somewhere abroad. Hence blueboxing was safe, all it required was a list of exact frequencies of phone exchange commands in the phreaker’s country.

It’s interesting why it was called bluebox. Despite the popular belief it was not named after the basic special movie effect where an actor is playing in front of a blue screen and the background is later painted behind him, although it would’ve also served as a good explianation. The word bluebox originated from the sixties during the dawn of phreaking. It happened in 1968 that an American food company introduced a new corn flakes brand, Cap’n Crunch. Each box contained a little toy whistle for the kids. John Draper, radio operator at the United States Air Force surprisedly noticed that the frequency of the whistle – 2,600 Hertz – was exactly the same of the phone exchange signal sending a phone connection to operator status. Blowing the whistle resulted in the exchange breaking the line and reconnecting but this time without billing. It was named bluebox because the Cap’n Crunch cereal was packaged in blue boxes. After the trick was revealed the whistles did not work any more but phone exchange systems did not change up until the mid-90s, with the advent of digital phone systems. So if someone knew the appropriate signal frequencies they could do anything once the system was enabled. Draper later left the Air Force and wrote the first word processing software for the IBM PC, EasyWriter.

The first application of texture mapping in Spreadpoint’s Cube-O-Matic filedemo. The demo itself was not too interesting, it was just showing a rotating cube, changing textrures again and again. Also this demo featured the first animated textures, like a scroller on a cube’s surface.

Phreakers used different tools during the decades to sound the desired frequencies: flutes, whistles, synthesizers. Hacker history pays tribute to a guy called Joe the Whistler, who was born blind and was able to whistle on any given frequency. Half of America’s phreakers were calling him if they needed some special sound, and allegedly he missed the frequency in less than 2 % of the cases so he was more accurate than a modem today.

Another, much simpler phreaking method was the usage of PBXes. PBX stood for Private Branch eXchange. Major companies used this service. They set up their own phone exchange, which the employees could call from anywhere, and after supplying a given code they could call anywhere on the company’s account. Most PBXes enabled calling abroad for a local fare, but some even offered free calling to anywhere in the world. Naturally PBXes were not public and only company employees were suppose to know the access codes. But if someone acquired a code he could happily use the service unauthorizedly. They only started protecting PBXes with call identifiers around 1992 but since it was an expensive extra service, most companies did not use it. It sometimes happened however that a company throughly examined their bills at the end of the month and discovered the illegal calls. It usually meant major whoop-de-do, but it barely ever reached the phreakers. Tens of thousands of pirated calls went though Mitsubishi’s system but when AT&T billed these calls Mitsubishi sued them for a ten million dollars compensation for not ensuring the security of their PBX and not informing them about the possible risks. The two megacorporations litigated for years while the phreakers kept using the codes without incident.

When AT&T finally made calling cards secure by the end of 1991 and fake codes could no longer be generated shoulder surfers appeared on the American streets. Surfers loitered around major railway stations, airports, and looked for people going to phone booths, trying to use a calling card. Then they just stood at the neighboring booth and listened as the unsuspecting caller told the code to the operator – not a very secure system. After this method gained popularity and press AT&T set up a new system of codes being dialed but surfers found a solution: they simply got a pair of binoculars and watched callers from a distance.

Meanwhile the FBI initiated a major operation to roll back phreaking. Analyzing traffic reports of phone companies they found that most illegal calls were going abroad. Hence using their brilliant logic they assumed most phreakers were newly arrived, illegal immigrants, calling their family. The New York and Chicago police soon gathered plenty of Mexicans and black people from the streets who were found guilty of standing close to a phone box and wearing their baseball caps in reverse. Real phreakers had a good laugh.

There was another method called incalling, which was not widely used, as it was not usable for data transfer only plain voice calling, however, it was perfectly safe. When wireless phones started to spread some New Yorker phreakers had a thought. They bought a cheap Chinese wireless phone, sat in a car, and drove around the city. With some luck they sooner or later found a place with a similar Chinese phone within a 200–300 meters distance and their receiver came alive. They just had to dial a number. The same method is used nowadays by wireless network hackers but it’s called wardriving and instead of Chinese phones they’re looking for WiFi hotspots to connect into a wireless local computer network.

The discovery of these methods especially boosted the modemscene in Germany, based on the already strong C64 scene. The high quality German lines enabled using 9,600 baud modems, and codez were constantly flowing from the United States which the German groups paid for with freshly cracked warez. Soon most elite European cracker groups operated a BBS in the United States, mostly to get calling codes for their cracks, and most American spreader teams maintained contact with at least four or five European cracker groups.

Party organizers raced to herald their program every possible way, including flyers, which were given away at parties or spread by swappers by mail.

An interesting question that often arises when talking about scene culture is why Germany had the strongest modemscene in Europe and why the Scandinavian countries produced the most demos. Yankee of D-Tect explained it in the 6th issue of Hack-Mag diskmagazine with the fact that the Amiga was first introduced to Europe in West Germany where there was already a strong C64 cracker scene so the Germans quickly build up a strong warez- and modemtrading network on the new platform. Scandinavian groups got into the business a bit later and few could compete with the Germans who were able to collect fresh originals and cracked them quickly. Since the new groups, which appeared around 1990, were born in a different atmosphere very few of them grew interested in illegal activities and they ended up creating demos instead.

The modemscene gave birth to another form of art, ASCII graphics. This word is the abbreviation of American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This definition standardizes data exchange between different computer systems by defining 256 different characters with unique numeric codes. Thanks to this standard, an A character has the same code, 65 on any system be it an Amiga, a PC, a Macintosh or a Cray supercomputer. ASCII graphics is assembled from these standardized characters, which will display the same on any computer.

Modemtraders always attached short text messages to their uploads. These were always called file_id.diz, and when a user browsed the download zone of a BBS he saw these file_id.diz descriptions. These short messages delineated the title and content of a downloadable archive. Naturally modemtraders always tried to make them more than plain text messages, drawing the attention of the user with something spectacular. That’s why they started making ASCII graphics and some of them soon reached artistic levels. This first began as a side activity for modemtraders. The first ASCII graphic artists appeared at the end of the eighties, mainly in West Germany, like Desert or Rotox. They were the first generation of the ASCII scene but it wasn’t long before the second generation arrived. ASCII became a separate branch of art by 1990–1992. The first ASCII groups appeared first also doing modemtrading, like Upper Class and Dezign in Germany, or the British-German ART, but later most groups only specialized in character graphics. Such were the German H2O and Mogul, the Swedish U-Man and many others. First generation groups often didn’t like this as ASCII was part of modemtrading for them, and not just art by itself. They often argued that the ASCII scene would become diluted and they were actually right. Many new ASCII groups were started around this time with their only goal to gain quick fame. Not all of them succeeded of course, resulting in a dump of lousy graphics. However, there were still some amazing groups like Artcore in Germany, later splitting into Contra and Arclight, or the Swedish-Finnish Epsilon Design. The first ASCII packs were released around 1992. They were collections of ASCII graphics, actually plain text files with the graphics following each other. Sometimes poems or messages broke up the graphics a bit. Most ASCII packs contained logos for demo- and cracker groups, for use in their own productions. Apart from this, ASCII scene had little connection with the demoscene and soon also parted from crackers and the modemscene.

A few graphics from Rotox’ ASCII pack from 1993. The logos were made for the greatest groups of the era. They were usually built up from slash and dash characters. Despite their simplificity, these characters offered a wide range of possibilities for an experienced artist.

The main field of illegal activities, the cracker scene was already losing steam on the Commodore 64 around 1990–1992 as the computer decreased in popularity and less products were released. This was not the case on the Amiga! Rapidly improving tools, faster computers and an extended modemscene smiled on the crackers. Years later, when the software support of the Amiga declined, and later ceased, many blamed the pirates. It’s true that there was already a computer in the eighties, namely the MSX, which was left without support because companies got fed up with everybody copying their programs without paying for them and it was not worth releasing products anymore. But still, it took a lot of years until the time when pirates attached warnings to their warez: please, if you like this game, buy it legally. It was a digital, Wild West, during the early nineties where the unlawful side was gaining by the day. Hence police had a lot of work Europe-wide and free copying also ended in the USA after the FBI busted a couple of warezboards within a short period of time. The Norwegian police set up a new software piracy section after a raid on the Cryptoburners’ copyparty. The Norwegian cops were trained by their German colleagues to the necessary investigation methods, but at the same time experienced German crackers also trained their Norwegian mates to avoid these methods. In fact there were also some countries where the government relieved copyright restrictions. Denmark for example abolished the software police in 1990, and Holland didn’t even set it up. Sometimes pirates avoided jail time only because of ham-fisted cops. One time the police “expert” formatted the confiscated floppy disks to ensure they would stay readable for a longer time. At another case, during a warrant search, the policemen had not seized an Amiga 500 because they thought it was a typewriter.

Some software companies with more guts found that crackers could be neutralized by breaking their doors with cops. Psygnosis, for example, used a quite elegant method. They leaked each of their new games well before the official release, in an unfinished state, getting it to some major groups’ suppliers on the necessary channels. The group naturally cracked and released it immediately, as it was the hottest 0-day warez. But the software did not work as expected. When a few days later the final version was officially released, nobody cracked it, since the prohibition of recracking was one of the oldest unwritten rules. Psygnosis killed two birds with one stone: the game was not copied illegally, and the cracked, defective version worked as a quickly spreading demo version.

Let’s return to the world of demos.

Not only Mental Hangover and Enigma were released during 1990–1991. These two years are remembered today as the best times of Amiga 500 demos. The greatest groups, their names meaning the classic demoscene itself for every Amiga user, were already up and running by early 1991. A few of them and their first productions were introduced in the previous chapter, but this doesn’t mean that their story ended there. The year 1991 brought such a great advance in both quality and quantity that is unique not only in the history of the Amiga, but the entire demoscene. Never has such a diversified and still homogeneous subculture formed in history like that of the Amiga scene. The makers of the best demos or diskmags were almost equally popular as a pop band or a soccer team. They had a camp of fans of several thousands wishing to know even their every step and thousands of beginners wanted to be like them. A successful demo meant a similar cultural experience for a demoscener – either a member of a famous group, or just a keen amateur – like a movie like Star Wars, Dr. Strangelove or Lord of the Rings for a movie fan. Demogroups occupied the space in the heart of those who experienced the demoscene. This would be similar to the feeling a typical teenager might have for certain pop bands or movie stars. But the demoscene was free of fake glitter and made-up stars. This world was not moved by smart managers and millions of dollars but real talent and art and the only gauge was quality. Anyone who became world famous was really deserving it since the audience immediately saw if a group is worth respecting or not. Famous demogroups were not just products of some fading fashion but real artists, unlike those mass produced teenager bands, or plastic celebrities without any values.

As a result, anyone ever touched by the magic of the scene – not just on the Amiga, but any other computer – will never be an average person again. All the commercial trash the for profit media feed us, the imbecile TV shows and disbelieving values can not pollute the first generation which grew up with computers and found the demo scene. This generation learned to choose their own heroes, not following ads or the media as a guide. Those who missed the early years of digital revolution end up often treating computer freaks as some funny specimen, who are not always watching TV or buying into the media’s stories. These freaks listen to their weird music and care more for the programmability of their cellular phones than its beautiful ringtones. The stereotype of computer freak has its roots somewhere in the scene of the early nineties, mostly around the Amiga. It’s interesting how the image of the teenager hacker, flying in the face of all rules has suddenly replaced that of the computer wiz kid, just eight or ten years old, but already programming.

The Silents: Global Trash. One can well observe the typical demo design of the year 1991: group logo on the top, a scroller on the bottom. the beautiful HAM plasma on the second screenshot was a true eyecandy at this time.

During 1991 groups still came out with a new demoroutine almost weekly. By the end of the year it became obvious that all new ones were actually upgraded versions of older ideas, and the perspectives are slowly depleting. A good example is how scrollers ended up. Originally they were simply running texts, then sine-waving DYPP (Different Y Pixel Position) scrollers appeared, irregularly waving stretch-scrollers, the Star Wars scroller, three dimension planevector-scrollers, or planetscrollers running in virtual 3 D space around a spherical surface, and so on. Implementations of just this simple effect are countless and we didn’t even mention other, also overused, routines like vectorballs, starfìelds, filled vector or bobs. Novelties included fractals, colorful plasmas, stencilvector, and realistic lightsources in 3 D space. However, most of 1991 passed in terms of the old fashion: who can craft another program beyond possibility just for someone to surpass it a week later. Perhaps the most significant change was the vanishing of old style megademos. Loader parts were gone forever only trackmos and filedemos were made.

These were two different styles. Trackmos were similar to Mental Hangover and Enigma, while filedemos followed the tracks of Animotion and Vectormania. The first was practically a megademo without loading screens. The easier to make filedemos and dentros were displaying the group’s logo on the top, a scroller commenting the routines on the bottom, with the visual effect itself in the middle of the screen. Such demos were made by the newly appearing and talented German group Sanity, another new label, the Finnish Complex, but also Phenomena, Kefrens, which were disbanded in 1990, but refounded in 1991, or Scoopex – old and new names. These two styles were sometimes blended nothing ruled out a logo-scroller design from a trackmo or forbade a filedemo to look like a trackmo.

Kefrens: Guardian Dragon. The first megademo of the reformed Kefrens won first prize at the Static Bytes & Light-Lowlife Party in September 1991.

Graphic artist were highly appreciated in the new year. Any graphic just wasn’t good enough for a demo any more. The graphical quality of some products, like RSI Megademo, Mental Hangover or Dexion Megademo, which were rousingly celebrated just half a year ago, was already considered poor in 1991. During these times a good graphic artist was greatly honoured. They were not only making logos and scroller fonts any more, but also full screen graphics. As a new design element demos often displayed such a graphic for several seconds, usually as a title screen, but often without a purpose, just to display the work of the graphic artist, without any effects or scrollers.

The most popular pixel artist of the era was undoubtedly Uno of Scoopex, formerly a member of Phenomena. Uno, already as a Scoopex member, took part in creating Enigma. Phenomena had another good pixeller, Color. However, they were not alone in the trade, as J. O. E. returned to the scene after a long break, and Mithrandir, a Swedish member of a formerly unknown Holland group, Acme had also left his mark. Cougar of D-Tect, Fairfax of Andromeda also delighted many Amiga fans with their excellent drawings and beefed up the aestetics of both demos and diskmags. R. A. W., for example, would have been unimaginable without Fairfax’s splash graphics. Interestingly, two of this era’s prized graphists were colorblind, one was Archmage of Andromeda, the other was Red Devil of Dual Crew

The first great party of 1991 was Anarchy Easter Party, where Phenomena’s Enigma took the first prize – 6,000 Swedish crowns. There were 23 demos entered at this party’s compo, and with its 500 visitors it was one of the largest sceneparties at the time. However, the record was broken just one month later at Horizon Easter Party, where 730 visitors gathered, although it was primarily a Commodore 64 party. Some weeks later the Static Bytes and Prologic Party, also remembered as Summit ’91 or Amiga Convention Summit set another new record, not in the number of visitors, but the quality of compo entries. The winner of the party was the Danish section of The Silents with a trackmo titled Global Trash. The second was Substance by Alliance Design, the demo section of the French Quartex. Both demos were built around vector routines, and their similar outfit gave a hard time for the jury when they had to choose the winner. They were both bringing the winds of change, as neither featured difficult code or new routines but rather hinted towards a more spectacular look, based on old ideas. Hence both were forerunners of the later design-demos like most new demos in the second half of 1991.

Quartex – Alliance Design: Substance. This great filedemo had more attractive routines than some full-disk trackmos. Stencilvector, as seen on the second picture, grew popular by late 1990 as a forerunner of texture mapping and was a characteristic element of Amiga demos for years.

Not just demos, but parties also mushroomed in 1991. Almost all groups considered it to their duty to organize at least one demoparty. Organizers raced on the field of party features, overall compo prizes or the number of visitors much like coders did with their programming. Higher prizes resulted in more serious products. As earlier it took one or two months to finish a demo, major groups now spent up to five or six months with their newest creations.

The greatest parties of 1991 took place in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, but Amiga scene gatherings became regular also in other countries. More than 800 people, representing 150 different groups assembled in July, at the Amega Party organized by Cryptoburners, FairLight, Dexion and Violence in Porsgrunn, Denmark. Although this party had not become world famous for its excellent organizing many demos were still released and some of them are remembered today as ancient masterpieces. The first prize of 10,000 Norwegian crowns, was taken home by Thomas Landspurg for his demo titled Virtual World. (However, according to some rumours, he only got 2,000 crowns from the quite pompous main organizer.) Runner-up was Pure Metal Coders, the makers of the R. A. W. Diskmag, with Alfa and Omega, reportedly receiving 2,000 crowns, while the third placed The Silents was prized with 1,000 NOK for I. C. E. The Norwegian Andromeda occupied the fourth place with Decaying Paradise and the fifth was an almost unknown Norwegian team, Spaceballs, with their first ECS trackmo, Spasmolytic. The ranking can be debated, as it actually was in contemporary diskmags but it’s still a fact that no audience had seen so many excellent compo entries at the same party before.

Pure Metal Coders: Alfa and Omega

A commonality of these works, as with almost all demos by the summer of 1991, is that they set a new quality standard not only on the field of graphics but also for music. Musicians were now much more experienced than a year ago and now they composed modules not only for demos but also as independent releases. Music compos appeared at parties. Some module musics were just as cherished, even to the present days, as famous demos. Music disks were also frequently released. The best music disk of 1991 was Turmoil by Sanity followed closely by Phenomena-Scoopex-Rebels with Crystal Symphonies I–II and The Silents with The Sound of Silents.

Probably the most popular musicians around 1991 were Tip of Phenomena and Mantronix of Razor 1911 who wrote a lot of music together. Mantronix also composed modules for Maniacs of Noise (MON) and since MON worked on several commercial game projects an ethical delima often arose since sometimes it was Razor 1911 that cracked the games which had music composed by their own musician. Mantronix tried to avoid this situation but if it wasnt Razor 1911 then it would be another groups who cracked the game. Maniacs of Noise had the same fair name on Amiga as on C64 thanks to their most talented members: Oinstein Eide, Chris Hülsbeck and Charles Deenen. The 1991–1992 years was also the most productive period for Jester, the musician of Sanity and later Rebels, Jesper Kyd of Silents and Firefox of Phenomena. Interestingly, despite the graphics and music boom, most famous coders, who won recognization during 1990 – like Slayer of Scoopex, Delta of RSI, Tec of Cryptoburners, Promax of Kefrens, Kreator of Anarchy or Metallica of Skid Row – almost all disappeared by 1991. Their places were taken over by other equally talented programmers, like Chaos of Sanity – also famous for his merciless, however rightful critics over other coders’ works – Sunjohn and Ronan of Anarchy, Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll of Andromeda, Cocy of PMC or Zevs of Shining.

The great Scandinavian demos woke up the spirit of the demoscene in several countries. Mainly where there was already some computer underground but no strong cracker scene perhaps due to not having anything to crack. Such countries were Turkey, Yugoslavia, Spain, Poland and Hungary.

Both the Amiga and the Commodore 64 scene has just appeared in the first three countries, and it took almost a year until activity reached a significant level but Hungary was in a fortunate situation because its already existing C64 importer and demoscene. Chromance soon appeared on Amiga and blazed itself away at importing with the same pace as on the old platform. Their main swapper, Jean was soon in contact with half of the world and became one of the most active mailswapper of the Amiga scene. Some new talented demogroups also popped up like Cerberos and Majic 12, and with them the first Hungarian Amiga demos appeared. Majic 12’s Ray of Hope filedemo and its sequel, the Ray of Hope II trackmo were an international hit. Ray of Hope II won first prize in September 1991 at a great copyparty organized at the Budapest Technical University. This was the Cerberos & Chromance & Computermania Copy Party, or C. C. C. C. P. for short, where five hundred visitors testified that serious demoscene events are not the monopoly of Scandinavian countries any more. This party had an international flavor as some known groups also arrived from Austria, Germany and Poland – like Scoopex, TRSI – since Tristar and Red Sector Inc. had set up their Austrian section which included J. O. E. – Agnostic Front, Acme and Katharsis. The main organizer of the event was Jean of Chromance who soon also became a member of TRSI and Scoopex.

Majic 12: Ray of Hope II. Notice the exceptional design of the scroller on the second screenshot!

Ray of Hope II. was not very strong codewise hence this is usually remembered as a mediocre demo. However, it displayed some unique copper magic routines and plasma effects. It was mostly known and recognized not for the routines of the two coders, Avantage and Version, but Rack’s brilliant graphics and Dr. Bully’s music. Rack soon rocketed to the top on all international charts and kept his position for several years. Majic 12 also published a diskmagazine titled Top Secret which also became popular continentwide. The diskmag was taken over by the Danish section of Majic 12 in 1992.

The Polish Amiga demoscene also showed itself early 1991. The first known, but not yet too active groups were Zack Team, Hell Order Team and G-Force. A member of Hell Order Team, Musashi later became one of the most successful Polish democoders.

The scene boom reached Poland in 1992, dozens of new names mushroomed out of nowhere: Katharsis, Joker, Alchemy, Action Direct, Grace, Suspect, Old Bulls, Future Revolution, and the list goes on and on. The first Polish C64 group, Quartet also migrated to Amiga, and started the first Polish Amiga diskmagazine, Kebab. Katharsis was not only making demos, but because of their swapper, S. S. Captain, they were the fastest importers of the country. This group boasted the first female Polish scener: Agony, a graphic artist. Joker Team (later just Joker) was noted for their demos, musicdisks, and Rys, their graphic artist. Katharsis was the first Polish group regularly visiting foreign parties, particularly Hungarian ones.

The first Polish copyparty was organized by Luzers and Joker in 1991 in the city of Gdynia. The party was simply called Gdynia ’91. The second one with around 150 visitors was hosted by G-Force, Action Direct and Katharsis. Warszawa Party was held in April 1992 in Warsaw, and the demos displayed during the compos well mirrored the great advancement of the young Polish scene during the recent year. The winner was Deformations from the group Deform. This was the first work and victor of Musashi who would later become another world famous coder. Even some known foreign sceners like Chaos of Sanity visited the Warszawa Party, A party that was repeated the following year with equal success.

A picture from Katharsis Megademo from 1990. It was released at one of the Grzybowska Meetings.

The Polish scene walked a different way then their Western counterparts. It was similar to the Hungarian scene in many aspects mainly because of the similar cultural background. Modemtrading was not widespread and there were very few BBSes since phone fares were extremely high. Most groups maintained contact via regular mail. This method however fostered the development of an inward almost familiar scene community. The members of the strong and cohesive Polish scene have not felt the necessity of keeping contact with foreigners hence only the largest groups had a few foreign contacts. For this reason, and because of the absence of modemtrading, Poland had almost no contact with West European groups and the Polish scene finally grew a little bit inbred. This led to Polish diskmags all being written in Polish, Polish demos rarely making it abroad, and even Polish sceners rarely traveling to foreign parties. Most of them did not speak any languages which posed a further obstacle. They were not interested in cracking for the same reason as Hungarians, because fresh games were not sold in the country. There were some importer groups, but not much, as the Polish scene never had any strong warez groups like the Hungarian Chromance. For this reason democoding and other legal activities gained priority from the very beginning. The growing Amiga demo scene was also solidified by the already strong local Commodore 64 and Atari scene. The Polish scene developed in relative isolation up until around 1994 and only the advent of the Internet broke the barriers.

Most Polish importer groups sold pirated software for money. There were flea markets in most major cities where one could buy illegal copies. The most known was the Grzybowska in Warsaw. There was a very similarly working flea market in Hungary in the Petöfi Hall, a community cultural center. The first Warszawa Party was held right front of the Grzybowska marketplace in a school building, which has already hosted several copyparties before – the so-called Grzybowska Meetings. The computers which the pirates used to copy their floppy disks were also operating in this building. The Polish police launched many raids on the Grzybowska market but only managed to squeeze the pirates out around 1997. Until then, the Polish courts, considering the low social hazards of the cases acquitted the defendants in every single case. This changed in 1995 thanks to the campaign of Microsoft and Business Software Alliance.

Despite Poland’s isolation from the international scene, Western scene products still reached the Poles, but it took up between six months to a year after their release. Polish demos however, almost never made it abroad, and if they sometimes did, they failed to gain attention. Polish demos were still at a low quality level in 1992 and although some groups were very popular inside the country these names wouldn’t have stood a chance on the international scene.

Yugoslavia was more or less independent from the Eastern block of socialist countries so the Amiga was available immediately as soon as it was released. Indeed, not many could afford it, but at least they didn’t have to travel to Vienna to buy it like the Hungarians who were not allowed to buy Western computers in their own country until 1989. A strong importing and warezscene was formed in Yugoslavia. Several great groups, like Transcom and Myth maintained a Yugoslavian section. There was no shortfall of demogroups either: the most know labels were Corrosion, D-Version Team, Pasmaters, Hitchhikers, and the most active was Enemy. Unfortunately the Yugoslavian civil war dispersed these talented groups and many sceners ended up in the military which was part of their duty as citizens. Some activity still remained but the Yugoslavian scene never became what it could have been.

A screenshot from a cracktro by the Yugoslavian group Enemy. They ususally made such small, single-file intros.

To give a complete picture of the Easter block, we have to mention that there was a small Amiga scene even in the German Democratic Republic. When Germany was unified, these early teams dissolved into the great German scene. The most active East German group was The Code Killers GDR who maintained mail contact with some major Western groups despite the strict observation by state security authorities. The monitoring of mail traffic was by far not as superficial as in Hungary! The GDR secret service, Stasi, took its duty dead serious even a few days before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In spite of their vigilance The Code Killers GDR were still able to reach such elite teams like Quartex and they were just as efficient importers as their Western fellows. They even made some decent intros. Leipzig City Cobra was another importer group but they never made intros, just “enriched” the games’ title screens with short messages like early crackers on the C64. Deffpaccers showed up in Magdeburg around 1991, making packdisks and a simple slideshow. Finally Berlin also wasn’t without its own local scene. A cracker group called Endless Piracy worked in West Berlin but they had a member on the other side of the Wall: Marc, their cracker. The guys on the Western side had everything they needed: fresh originals, spreaders, fast modem connection. Unfortunately their cracker lived in the hermetically isolated East Berlin and according to East German laws no citizens under 65 years could cross the border. The solution was Marc’s grandmother: she frequently went to West Berlin to pick up the software and couriered the crack back.

In Turkey, like in so many countries, the Amiga scene developed on the base of the Commodore 64. The group Bronx appeared on the new platform soon transformed into Clique, which later had foreign sections in many countries. The excellent C64 group Accuracy also came to the Amiga, but they failed to repeat their success on the new computer. The Turkish section of the German Pirates, TST operated the first Turkish BBS. Razor 1911 also had a Turkish member. Another great name of the local warezscene was Chaos. However, not much happened on the Turkish scene until 1991. The local Amiga scene had a slothful start since Turkey was far from the center of the scene, the Scandinavian countries, and lower living standards also did not endorse the rising of a strong community.

Surprisingly, there was an Amiga scene even in Jordania. Computer culture was generally not as widespread in Arabic countries especially underground cultures, but the Amiga even reached there. The first group was Overdrive, with one single member, which operated in the city of Amman. Its main activity, besides of assembling packs, was selling games cracked by European groups. Since Overdrive died in 1990 – the single member went to the USA to study – nobody else imported games any more and the local scene practically disappeared. After a short silence several new groups took over the place of Overdrive, like U. F. O. (United Faris & Osama), Taher, Terrorists, Petra or MEC (Middle East Computers), who were also the founders of the country’s first computer magazine. There was even a small copyparty in 1990 in Amman, in the Plaza Hotel, organized by Petra, with a few dozen visitors. It might sound funny but in spite of the stereotypes about Arabic countries, Jordania was not some high and dry state but an enlightened, advanced country, with strong commercial ties to the West and wealthy citizens. It may sound really surprising but there were some warezgroups even in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. Western computers were put on the embargo list after the war so the already weak scene soon disappeared.

Far from Europe, in Australia and New Zealand, the first demo groups were replaced with new names however, the quality of demos still had not raised much. The leading Australian groups in 1991 were Mystix and The Punishers, both specialized in importing and bashing each other. The legal demogroup side of things was occupied by I. M. X. Their products were comparable to the East European ones but they did not care much about contacts so they weren’t very well known. The first Australian Amiga diskmagazine was titled Blipverts, issued by Decay. They soon climbed to the top, earning recognition with not only the magazine, but also a few demos. A number of packmakers and importers were also active, but they rarely gained fame or made demos. The only exception was Biotech, who made so many high quality packs that their name was recognized even in Europe. The Australian and New Zealand scene was still short on contacts with others in the world and although European demos and diskmagazines easily reached them due to modemtraders there were almost none productions going the other way.

The history of the European scene reached another milestone at the end of 1991. Astonishingly the community still had space to advance. Countless demos, dozens of diskmagazines and growing parties projected a quality leap coming soon. As the groups got more professional, demomaking, first treated as a mere fiddling, started to grow into a form of art. Finally the result of all this great work peaked in one huge event in December 1991 called The Party.

The story of The Party started in Summer 1991, when the Danish sections of Quartex and Rebels announced a large copyparty between 27th and 29th December 1991 in Denmark, in the market hall of the city of Aars close to the German border. The date and the location was kept but organizing was soon taken over by Crystal, Silents, and Anarchy, since all the original organizers left their groups and migrated to these groups. First the event was simply called Crystal-Silents-Anarchy Party, following the tradition, but it grew so huge that sceners rightfully started to call it The Party. More than 1,200 Amiga sceners gathered in the huge pavilion of Messecenteret Aars – more exactly 1,252, according to an organizer, Trix of Anarchy – to say goodbye to the fertile and successful year of 1991 in the company of all the renowned demo groups of the world. Almost all European groups were represented. Even some American visitors were present. The huge array of previously unseen features just enhanced the great partymood: food bar, cafeteria, live presentations and all the pleasure-grounds of the nearby city. When there was nothing to see MTV was projected on the big screen with announcements and planned programs of the event layered over the video. This special mixed program was also aired, and anyone in the Messecenter was able to watch it with his own TV set. Unfortunately a few drunkards broke the satellite receiver and some funny fellow also pressed the fire alarm button. Yet, all these happenings still couldn’t break the party atmosphere nor the quality of compo materials. The demos were just as exceptional as The Party itself. They were all products of a new era. The groups competing already figured that they had to invent new, never seen before effects, and seeked new ways to raise the quality of demos. This usually meant blending already known routines in a new way, following alternative design ideas, trying to give a content to previously meaningless demoeffects.

The most spectacular example of experimenting was the winning demo of the party, Odyssey by the Swiss Alcatraz. The demo took ten months to make and was sprawling on ten floppy disks, which was not uncommon but already astonishing at the time. The makers of Odyssey radically broke earlier design traditions and did not treat the demo as just a collection of l’art pour l’art coder stunts. Odyssey was a sci-fi cartoon, combining pixelled backgrounds with vectorgraphic objects – like starships – and other effects. The hero of the somewhat silly story was Zork, the main character of a contemporary adventure game series, who has to solve different tasks to save peace in the galaxy from the evil Kryllions. He escapes alien captivity, steals an experimental starfighter, happens along different planets, engages the enemy in space combat, and finally assembles the super-weapon which destroys the Kryllions’ planet. This was all served to the viewers in the form of a fourty minutes long realtime movie, still considered the longest running demo ever. It was a cinematic demodesign.

Despite the success of Odyssey it did not spread well. PGCS, the leader of Alcatraz even predicted the advent of such sci-fi demos a few weeks after the party, in early 1992, since, as he said, they’re much easier to make than regular demos and the audience apparently prefers watching a movie instead of meaningless, rotating vector objects. This actually never happened although the cinematic design was rediscovered some years later resulting in a few cartoon-like storydemos but none were similar to Odyssey.

Not everyone liked Odyssey though as proven by the heated debate that broke out after the party: was Alcatraz supposed to win or rather Crionics and Silents should have taken the first prize for Hardwired, their joint demo? Hardwired was an oldschool trackmo with each part built of different routines while Odyssey showed the same ones for fourty long minutes: rotating and moving vector objects – moreover the same objects, like Zork’s spaceship – starfield, virtual world and landscape. As a matter of fact these were all nicely done, spectacular routines, and were necessary for storytelling but when Zork landed on the third planet and the audience saw the same landscape for the third time with different colors, and the same spaceship pulling away to space, with just a different planet in the background, many expressed their serious displeasure. Actually Odyssey could have been much better if it weren’t strung on such a childish, silly story. If the screenplay would have been written with more fantasy and cutscene texts weren’t written with such terrible English it would have fostered the proliferation of cinematic demos and perhaps even crowded out traditional demos like with what the trackmos did to megademos.

Alcatraz: Odyssey. Not many know that the makers never got the promised $ 2,000 prize. The main coder of the demo, Hornet, unfortunately died in 2000 of a heart attack.

The second place demo at the part was Hardwired which was the work of four coders (The Spy, Deftronic, Murphy, Saxs), three graphists (Mikael Balle, Sionic, Zycho) and Jesper Kyd, the famous musician of The Silents. It was a well balanced two disk trackmo mainly built on arithmetic routines, especially vector graphics. It started with a short movie-like intro in which the passenger of a spaceship is woken up by the computer detecting an intruder on board. The passenger is soon eaten by an ugly space monster of which only its shadow is seen – cf. Alien. The breathtaking demo starting right afterwards was like a “summary” of all known routines at the time, already seen in other demos, but on a much higher level, in a somewhat advanced manner. Hardwired presented, for example, glenzmorph, a glenz vector object constantly morphing into others, a twist scroller, in which the running text was twisting with a spatial illusion, or the vector space with shadow casting, moving lightsources and two cubes revolving around each other. This was the first time the audience has seen a jellyvector, elastic vector objects, both cubes and planar shapes, twitching and springing like they were made of soft rubber or jelly.

Críonics & Silents: Hardwired

Razor 1911: Voyage

The third placed demo, Voyage, by Razor 1911 also deserves to be remembered. The debate that arose about the placing of Odyssey and Hardwired was further heated up when some proposed that Voyage should have won or at least it should have beaten Odyssey. The Norwegian group walked the same way as the makers of Hardwired, trying to assemble some new spectacle from old routines. Sim, the coder, garnished his effects with simple design elements, sometimes just a pinch of them, finally resulting in one of the best trackmos of the ECS/OCS era. Parts were not just roughly changing but with smooth transitions. The routines had not just demonstrated themselves but obviously the entertainment of the audience was also a regard. Often two quite different effects were combined to one. A good example is the planevector part. In most of the earlier demos planevectors just meant a flat object turning around in the middle of the screen with something like the group’s logo on the top and the usual scroller on the bottom which was already a very over used routine. In Voyage, the planevector shaped an animated man figure running around in a wireframe cube. Soon the cube disappeared, and the figure ran across the screen several times with different effects: mirroring under its feet, like if it ran on water, then with a shadow vector effect, like followed by its own ghost image, and so on. Hence the combination of two quite different routines led to something pretty new. Graphics (by Drake and Murdock) and music (Codex, Tip and Mantronix) were also an integral part of the whole design. The demo took almost a whole year to make.

Hardwired and Voyage were the forerunners of a future demo style. Their polished outfit became a primary design principle and later productions were made with a lot of caring about tiny details, smooth niceties, avoiding blatant changes or effects. One could barely see vector objects rotating in the middle of the screen without any purpose after 1991 or a plain fade transition, the darkening of the currently running part, and brightening up a new one. More often an element of the currently running part did not disappear, but morphed into an element of the next one. For example, the characters of the displayed text shrunk to a pixel’s size then became part of a starfield or a rotating cube “jumped” out of the screen and the next part appeared behind it. These innovations became important during the making of later demos.

An uncommon production also appeared at The Party ’91 but did not participate in the demo compo because it did not follow the rules. It was shown outside of the competitions. This production was the Global Trash II videodemo by The Silents – a joint effort by Jesper Kyd and Mikael Balle (Kyd & Balle Productions) in cooperation with Sionic. This was the first attempt to present a non-realtime computer animation at a demoscene party. Global Trash II was a dashing video clip, synchronized to a techno track. The rendered animation parts were not made on an Amiga but a high speed Silicon Graphics workstation so the result resembled the videoreel of a professional studio instead of a contemporary demo. The aim of the creators was to amaze the viewers with visual effects that are impossible to generate realtime, surpassing the possible quality of programmed demos giving a glance of the perspectives of professional computer graphics industry. The experiment was a stunning success. Later other groups tried to make animations and the wild demo category was born. In fact few such high quality productions were made and much fewer wild demos were created during the years as “conventional” demos. Global Trash II was even aired on MTV as more than a thousand viewers asked for it in a single month. Later some short-lived pop bands unabashedly stole some of its parts for their own video clips along with fragments other demos. Jesper Kyd and Mikael Balle made some more clips. Their next one was titled Ghando Trance, but it was not released at a demoparty, and much fewer people saw it.

The Silents: Global Trash II

The organizers of The Party ’91 create a special rule for the demo compo: the entries must not contain greetings scrollers or other long messages. This rule came about to help keep the audience from being bored with conventional demos which often filled the space between different demoparts with never ending scrolltexts. However the rule did not become commonplace and there weren’t such restrictions at other parties but perhaps as a result scrollers got shorter and demos became zippier and more dynamic.

In 1992 the era of the design-demos came into its own. This only needed a few more new groups to come.

“Why does anybody code demos? Because only demo coding is fun-coding!”

– Chaos of Sanity, 1991

4. The beginnings of design

Heated guessing about the future of the scene was the main topic in disk- and paper magazines during the first weeks of 1992. Everybody agreed that The Party’s demos will bring radical changes, but what will change, and how radically was beyond prediction. Truly many clues pointed towards an artsy scene as demomaking became an artistic activity. Smooth transitions came into fashion after Hardwired. Musicians used their own samples more often and some productions were already coded for enhanced Amiga 500s, requiring 1 megabyte of memory instead of 512 kilobytes. Trends were changing.

The Amiga 500 was the monarch of both the scene and the home computer market. Although there were also a plenty of new demos made on the old Commodore 64 – and quite good ones as we showed a few chapters ago – but a good portion of newschool C64 demos were also based on Amiga trends. These two platforms were in a funny interaction: while a few years ago the first Amiga demos were mocking contemporary C64 works, the flow turned by 1992 and C64 coders gathered ideas from the newest Amiga demos.

The scene was dormant at the beginning of the year. The party dump of late 1991, especially The Party resulted in a heap of demos, graphics and music which provided enough to write about in diskmags for months. Meanwhile larger, successful groups assimilated smaller, local groups en masse, or recruited newly appeared talents. Anarchy annexed the Finnish groups Rednex and Gate, Alcatraz was enhanced with Coma and Strange members, Andromeda liquidated Motion, Silents took over Fantasy Force and Aero, and Complex devoured Offworld and Adept. Sometimes things went in the opposite direction with members departing and forming new groups. For example, TRSI’s demosection, the Austrian Surprise!Productions, founded by TMB (The Megabrain), earlier the Austrian section of Rebels, has left the group, and migrated to Scoopex. They shot off and became independent in 1993, soon becoming an internationally renowned team. TRSI founded a new demosection soon thereafter, named Masque. FairLight’s demosection was Virtual Dreams, Skid Row’s was the Holland Jetset, but also these groups detached themselves from their mothergroups after a time, and went independent.

The splash screen of the second issue of the No. 1 diskmag, R. A. W. with Fairfax’s graphics, and how the editors saw the ranking of contempory diskmags in the third issue at the end of Summer 1992.

The separation of cracker and demoscene came to an end around this time, and the main reason of the above disjunctions was that cooperation between legal and illegal groups did not really work anymore. The Demoscene became independent from the warez scene since most commercial utilities were already replaced by freeware that were occassionally more versatile and advanced than their commercial counterparts. For example nobody was using the original Electronic Arts Soundtracker by late 1991 as there were plenty of better trackers that had been released by different demogroups. Nobody used compressors or file converters since democoders released much better ones. Nobody paid for utility libraries since there were freely available ones. Only graphic programs and source code compilers were still copied illegally, being the only way to acquire them, but there weren’t many of these, and users rarely changed these applications. A good example is a graphic artist could’ve used Deluxe Paint for years without reaching the programs limits. Demogroups demanded less support from crackers, while less and less teams felt the necessity of being a cracker group’s intro workshop, living in the shadow of a great label until they could someday enter the limelight and become famous with their demos.

Crionics and Sanity broke up in early 1992. Some decided to write off the German demoscene for the breakup of Sanity as they were the only worldwide recognized German demogroup. Chaos and Jester went to Rebels, or more exactly Jester went to them, and then told Chaos that they’re both Rebels members now. Cougar became an Artwork member and the French Sanity section became independent under the label Ozone. They nevertheless did not exist for long and soon merged into Hemoroids, a group also active on Atari ST and later on PC – one of the leading groups of the newly forming French demoscene.

There wasn’t much of an Amiga scene in France until around 1992. Although some cracker and importer groups like Transcom, Iris, Quartex and Agile were in existance activity was low partially due to France having the most efficient software police – the APP. Most illegal groups were sooner or later liquidated. The French software lobby even managed to procure the Holland police to launch raids at Holland copyparties despite Holland laws which did not prohibit software copying! For this reason there was only a legal scene in France which didn’t take long to develop. More and more great foreign labels founded their French sections – The Silents, Anarchy, Melon Dezign, Scoopex, TRSI – and the French demoscene was born. The first French founded, legal groups appeared by mid 1992, like Dreamdealers, Mentasm, Willow, Eremation, Syntex or Drifters, and Alliance Design, formerly associated with Quartex also got independent. France soon found its place on the international scene, and its demogroups proved their abilities at several international parties. Among them the strongest was Dreamdealers, boasting members like Moby, the musician, the three best French graphic artist Antony, Zebig and Ra, and the coder-musician Gryzor. Members of Hemoroids reformed Ozone in 1993, then Gryzor moved to this group. Gryzor later assembled the first demoscene CD-ROM collection, Mods Anthology, a collection of several thousand module musics on six discs.

There was also plenty of activity on the diskmag scene. Some great magazines disappeared in into oblivion during 1992, giving their way to new ones. Zine, I. C. E., Hack-Mag all ceased, Cracker Journal had lost its quality and popularity, but among those who survived were the likes of Stolen Data, R. A. W., edited by Lord Helmet and Kingpin of Pure Metal Coders, Maggy by Complex, Magbox by Balance, which merged into Upstream by Frogs early in 1993, keeping the title Upstream. Eurochart was taken over by Alcatraz and then Static Bytes. Dreamdealers tried to launch another magazine with the Hungarian Absolute, titled Cult, but Absolute decided to relase it themselves on PC instead of Amiga. Dozens of nameless groups tried to make their own magazines most of which only lasted for one or two issues. Lord Helmet rightfully wrote in the second issue of R. A. W.: “A diskmag must be good to survive, and must be perfect to be successful.” He probably was on to something as his magazine was the only of the old ones to still top the charts. It wasn’t just the style of R. A. W. Which influenced the mood of diskmags to come, but many of its user interface functions were also copied – like the keyboard layout or the structure of the menu. This was actually a good thing because it provided a standard for dismagazines and help put an end to the ergonomic experiments and different interfaces users had to learn. Diskmags were not only magazines but also greeted the readers with spectacular intros upon running. Such an intro for R. A. W. was the first work of Lone Starr of Spaceballs, a coder who would soon become world famous, and Fairfax, the great graphics artist who published his first graphics in this magazine.

Messagebox magazines were a novelty. They did not contain articles and news but served as a message wall where different scene members addressed each other, published ads about their BBS, made announcements, and looked for new members. The first such magazine was Chit-Chat edited by the French Mirage, soon followed by Live from Special Brothers, another French group, and many more. The idea of messagebox was widely criticized, many doubted if it’s the right way for the sceners to maintain contact, but meanwhile even the greatest groups resorted to their services.

The dynamic advancement of demos continued in 1992. A new group has begun its winning streak, the Danish-French Melon Dezign which at the time was a section of Crystal. In April 1992, at Eastern Conference ’92, organized by TRSI in the city of Louvain, Melon Dezign won the competition with the demo titled Humantarget. This demo later proved itself to be a principal work, along with other products of the group, like the The Party ’92 invitation intro. The group’s founders were Paleface and Seen, two former Quartex members. They recruited several new members in 1992, like Walt and Performer (code), Hof and Mack (graphics) and Audiomonster (music). According to some rumours, their most known coder, Bannasoft, was also the main cracker of Crystal.

Melon Dezign: Humantarget. The second picture shows the so-called jellyvector, a vector object quivering as if it was made of jelly.

Melon members shared the recognition of late 1991 that demos were starting to look all alike, and there’s no way to advance on the field of design in any traditional manner. Neither new demo effects, nor the complication of old ones could change the flatness because technical perfectionism is futile, if the demo lacks the beauty that can be appreciated without expertise. They were looking for a radically new concept, which they soon found and polished into a characteristic style during the years.

The basic principle of the Melon-school design was that their demos were built around a single graphical theme, not divided to squarely separated parts, like other groups’ demos, where each part contained something else. They were the first to employ the color principles, which are considered basic for any web designer or computer artist nowadays, and broke the tradition of black backgrounds. They used bright, high colors in their productions, keeping contrasts in mind and took care of cold and warm colors to create harmony among the elements on screen. This was quite a novelty as most coders picked their colors rather randomly depending on ones taste.

Melon Dezign’s coders were not aiming to create difficult routines but to combine existing elements along a uniform concept. By this way they met success even with technically simple effects. Some sceners did not like this new fashion called design-demo right away because of the lack of programming stunts and world records but some saw the way of the future. And this design-demo concept was to be the next phase in the evolution of demos. The fact that the makers of design-demos were not forced to copy routines of older demos any more, trying to add ten more bobs, or a dozen more polygons, allowed them to concentrate on combining their effects as they liked even if they don’t outdo the competition. The result can be observed in Melon Dezign demos, or the products of any other group following their footsteps. As the demos of the traditional school – Kefrens, Alcatraz, The Silents or Sanity – were somewhat “calculable”, the viewers approximately knew what to expect before running the demo. Melon Dezign’s demos and dentros were always different and the viewer would never know what would appear on the screen. Perhaps this is the reason Melon members called their demos melonstrations, as they did quite different things from the typical demo-groups. These melonstration were sometimes breathtaking, sometimes funny, minimalistic, or kinky. Sometimes we saw great coding tricks, sometimes it was so simple that it even surmounted the Budbrain Megademo series. However, melonstrations never lacked humour, either in an intellectual, infantile or abstract form. To summarize, Melon Dezign valiantly stood up to the doctrines and principles of traditional demo design and their experiments weren’t without appreciation. During 1992 they received more than a thousand fan letters from all over Europe. Of course, there were not only fans. Rok-DaZone of Infekt, a prized columnist of R. A. W. gave them harsh critism a year later, when their style was already mainstream.

“Melon showed up with Humantarget and besides design and routines started off being witty, performing jokes. Not funny remarks or stuff. No, they began to become infantile – and with them the whole scene. Nowadays demos look like a drawing competition at a kindergarten! Here one dot, there one flash … and that’s what they call design! Little fishies, small cows. Everyone can pretend to be a painter by doing this. Everything like Sesame Street. I wonder when the first demo will be released, teaching us that Ernie is written with ‘E’ and one plus one is two? Everyone thinks it’s funny. Simple mistakes are regarded at as a new style. The most pervert kind of this is what Melon and Pornos (how fitting) produce. HEY, DUDES WAKE UP, YOU’VE REACHED THE CLIMAX! There is nothing funny in doing unreadable childish taggys.”

Many shared RokDaZone’s opinion, and he was right when he wrote about many groups copying Melon Design’s style with more or less success. However, the scene never became childish and this new style never drove out the traditional demo style.

Humantarget is noteworthy for a new demoeffect called the dragonball. It was a descendant of the jellyvector, which – as the illustration shows – displayed a gelatinoid, flexible vector object. The dragonball was a similarly behaving, star-patterned ball, bouncing on the screen. As a matter of fact, as revealed in the third issue of R. A. W., this routine was not made by Performer, the main coder of Melon Dezign, but another guy living in the same city, whose name remains unknown. Melon Dezign later warned R. A. W. editors in their intro titled Bomb to stop talking nonsense, but never said if they meant this information or something else. As a matter of fact, those who grew up with the demoscene had already seen countless examples of someone starting false rumours to diskmag editors to ruin a group’s reputation. Also, just to hold the scales even, it needs to be mentioned that although Humantarget is remembered as the first example of the dragonball, the idea actually came from a Polish group, and Melon Dezign only perfected it. The name of the routine came from the Japanese anime toy story, Dragonball Z, in which the heroes have to collect seven such star-patterned balls from around the world.

Melon Dezign: Bomb. This intro was to send a strong message to R. A. W. editors.

The winds of change also blew from somewhere else. A new music style, labelled computer disco, by Blackstar, the musician of Cryptoburners in the McDisk diskmag by Alcatraz, was gaining ground. Actually that’s what it was: disco music composed on a computer. It was usually based on a simple drum rhytm, varying with snare, and at each eighth beat a hihat, a clap or some similar effect followed. Chords were changing fast, in a quite predictable way, and it was all treacled with a simple, easily remade main tune. Musically educated readers might have already recognized the recipe of the cheapest mass pop music. This way five minutes was all it took to lump some music together and amaze the musically illiterate audience. The main reason for the success of this genre was, as also written by Blackstar, that it lacks any trace of artistic experimentation and is without any uncommon tone thus it sounds rhytmic and melodic for the average teenager. It’s easy to understand why this style became so popular on the scene which consisted of mainly teenagers. The most known representatives of this school were 4-mat of Anarchy, Lizardking, Tip, and Mantronix.

Alcatraz: Memorial Songs. This double disk musicdisk contained Lizardking’s best songs. The sequel, Memorial Songs II, was released by Razor 1911.

Lizardking of Strange – soon became a member of Anarchy, and also turned up in different other groups during the years – was the one who found a new form for computer disco. The genre was called doskpop, after his module, Doskpop Intro which founded it. This short music was probably composed in 1993, and was never used in any intro. Doskpop, sometimes called europop was technically based on computer disco but it was not always dance music, more often it was a slow-paced, peaceful ambient song which was often perfect for diskmagazines. It was totally without aggressive elements and was built of soft synthesizer tones without sharp drums or extreme overtones. These “typical Amiga musics”, computer disco and doskpop were tightly bound to the era between 1991 and 1994. The most noted master of the genre was naturally Lizardking, whose style was copied by many, but without much success. The best and most characteristic doskpop modules were released by him, and actually he was the only one able to produce the real doskpop feeling. He wasn’t called The King of Doskpop without a reason.

Of course not everyone liked the simple doskpop. Lizardking is still a subject of heated controversies even today, as some doubt he was really deserving of all the attention he received. Many think he was the most overrated musician of the scene, only producing dilute, lousy synthpop.

A new musical genre called “techno” appeared in the world around 1991. This new kind of electronic dance music broke the disco traditions of the eighties and consisted solely of computer generated rhytms. The result was jarring machine noise for some, and a futuristic, new style for others. A new sound to replace the worn out and boring disco songs. The techno music, of course, immediately appeared on the demoscene, as what would be more appropriate to compose computer music than a computer itself? The grounds of this new genre were discussed within the scene just the same as in the music industry. There were DJs who denied playing techno in the discos, claiming the audience wouldn’t like it, there were Amiga musicians who resisted techno and stood their ground supporting traditional styles. Despite of all of the resistance techno and rave, a style that grew out of it, took root in the demo scene. Techno musicians soon climbed the charts and found their places among the old names. For example, Jesper Kyd, Plauze of Alpha Flight, and Static of Melon Dezign were techno musicians, the latter graced as the uncrowned king of techno. Jester of Sanity also composed a few techno modules. In the forthcoming years, pro-techno and contra-techno articles were filling the pages of diskmags and if song of either style won a compatition somewhere the other side immediately started lamenting about the “flat machine noise” or the “cheesy disco crap.” Meanwhile demos were playing techno more often and eventually the traditional styles were defeated.

Jesterday, the first production of the reformed Sanity from 1992 is one of the most known Amiga musicdisks. It won first prize at the Shining 8 Easter Party demo compo. the graphics from Cougar and Havok and the intro routines from Chaos garnished Jester’s excellent modules. The intro picture (Cougar: Dog) was reused in many more demos, not only on Amiga, but also on PC and C64. The third screenshot shows the menue: the box in the middle was to be rotated with the mouse or the joystick in order to select a song.

Besides the doskpop and techno fans, there were musicians composing extraordinary songs that did not following either of the two tried and true formats. We can call them experimental musicians. There were only a few since creating something new and original is always difficult. Most experimental musicians favored acoustic samples instead of techno instruments and sythesizers. The first of them was Romeo Knight, but he had already disappeared by 1992 and his style was considered obsolete.

Moby of Dreamdealers, who took part in creating Dragons Megademo earlier, was famous for his funky jazz songs. He always aimed to compose something lifelike, as far from electronic and computer sound as possible. His famous module, Arkham Asylum, which was played under the Dreamdealers demo of the same title, is a good example. Audiomonster of Melon Dezign followed the same track. These two were the masters of funky jazz on the scene. Jogeir Liljedahl was also an upholder of acoustic music. His most known tunes were made for Virtual Dreams Full Moon and Love demos. He composed in several different styles: rock, ambient, soft rock, romantic rock, and jazz. Dr. Awesome of Crusaders was also a rock musician and the first to experiment with electric guitar, bass guitar and other rock instruments on Amiga. Petroff, the musician of the Hungarian Absolute! and Virgill of Sanity followed the same path along with Mr. Man of Andromeda, Nuke of Anarchy and Blackstar of Cryptoburners.

Heatbeat, a member of Rebels Finland, later a founder of Carillon was in a separate category all by himself. He was the most confident explorer of all trying all styles from heavy metal through synthpop to techno. Not many had the same far-flung theoretical knowledge. He created excellent sound samples and also had a particular speciality. Often he worked with so such silly samples that most musicians would have thrown away in disgust, but yet he managed to weld them into the finest modules that made even the most cold-hearted critics nod with appreciation.

These experimental artists were almost all qualified musicians and worked in the musical field some years down the road. These days most of these composers are playing in their own bands or making music for games and movies. Some have even released their own albums. Moby’s works, for example, are to be found under the name El Mobo, his band’s name is Plug-In. Dr. Awesome uses his real name today and releases many albums as Bjorn Lynne. He currently composes music for a game company and runs his own publishing company and scene CD shop. Lizardking kept his handle and sold plenty of his albums worldwide. Jester of Sanity’s musics can be found under the name Oddjob. These were the first scene musicians whose works were published commercially and many have followed over the years.

Anarchy: Legalize it I and II. Plenty musicdisks were released in 1992. One of the most successful was Anarchy’s series containing Nuke’s musics..

Finally, as special products of the era, we should mention the so-called chiptune music. Just like doskpop, it is another music genre known only to the demoscene. Chiptunes are songs composed solely of clear mathematical sounds, like sine, square or triangle waves. They are quite similar to the old Commodore 64 SID music which is not a surprise, as implicitly all C64 musics were chiptunes since the C64’s sound was based on generated waves, not digital sound sampling like the Amiga. The idea to use clean sound waves as the samples for a song module came from 4-mat of Anarchy who composed the first chiptunes. A significant advantage of this innovation was that chip sounds took a lot less storage space than traditional samples. Saving a guitar twang or the sound of a piano requires much more information than a simple sine beep, of which a tenth of a second is enough to store. Besides, such clean waves can be compressed much better than digital samples. These were both important advantages in the world of the scene which was surrounded with tight size limits ranging from the capacity of floppy disks to the size limits of special compo categories, like the 64 kilobyte intro. Such categories, however, had not been introduced in 1992.

Graphic charts have also changed. New names appeared with the rapid growth of the scene. Holland Facet of Anarchy, formerly a member of Rebels and Vision, who worked his way up to No.1. in Worldcharts with his exceptional activity. Mack of Melon Dezign became famous after the Prism slideshow. Many other names followed: Sauron of Equinox, Bridgeclaw, Scuba of X-Trade, R. W. O. of Kefrens, TMB Designs of The Silents, Rhah of Dreamdealers, Fairfax of Andromeda. Red Devil of Dual Crew is of special interest as he became a worldwide recognized pixel artist while being colourblind. There were hundreds of prominent artists of the period whom we do not have the space to cover. Instead, we will take a look at the changes of graphical styles and trends during 1992.

The Silents: Xposed. the groups’s new coders, Master and Bionic, introduced this demoeffect in their first demo. It its an advanced copper bars routine later called Silent-bars. The bars were twisting and bouncing. On the top of the screen the group’s logo is varying with the demo’s title.

Graphic artists were not only drawing logos and scroller fonts but full screen graphics were already commonplace. High resolution video modes, like interlace modes and HAM were used more often. Copying a famous graphic artist artwork became a widespread method of creating graphical art on the Amiga. Most copies were made after fantasy painters’ works, especially Elmore, Clyde Caldwell and Boris Vallejo. There’s probably not a single scene graphic artist who has never repixelled any of Vallejo’s paintings. Sometimes they only copied parts of the original, for example a character and the background was painted after the pixeller’s own concept. Many pictures were drawn showing a naked girl and/or a dragon. They were the main theme for at least half of the drawings released at demoparties even to this present day. According to some malicious sources, it is because computer geeks think both dragons and naked girls are legendary creatures.

Another innovation was the use of sketches. It required a scanner which was a rare and expensive device at the time so only those seriously devoted to graphics and good in hand drawing had one. The method was to scan a hand drawn sketch and finalize it on the computer. The sketch was not always an original piece some graphists scanned photos from magazines some from their Vallejo albums. Finalizing the graphics required good abilities, as the pictures scanned in 256 colors were usually low quality and noisy, and pixel graphics was supposed to be harmonic and demanding. It’s a pushover with today’s image processing software but it was a quite laborious process in the age of primitive hand scanners.

Melon Dezign: Prism. Mack’s excellent slideshow displayed his works between 1990 and 1992.

The demoscene passed its early stage in 1992 and evolved to a true branch of art from the half serious competition of teenagers that it used to be. One could collect graphics and module musics besides demos and there probably aren’t any old veteran sceners without a few old floppy disks packed with .MOD files stashed somewhere in the house. Different ripper programs enabled users to extract modules and graphics from games and demos adding them to their collections. Coders sometimes implemented measures against ripping but they often didn’t think it was necessary. However, if a ripper encountered some protection – if the demo did not store the module in the common format or the graphics was not in the usual Deluxe Paint LBM format – he was sometimes forced to use cracking-like methods of decompiling the program and extracting data by hand. Sometimes ripping required such in-depth cracking knowledge that the extracted files were released as a pack however not as the ripper’s own creation even though he sometimes put his name in the extracted module’s instrument list.

It was also a widespread fashion to digitize music and convert them to computer format. Anyone with a sound digitizer module and a tape deck or a CD player could do this. All he needed was to choose a commercial piece of music available on cassette or CD, plug the audio output into the Amiga and digitize the music in 64 kilobyte chunks. There were appropriate programs for this task. The sample sequence was then dumped into a module file and then it was possible to have Depeche Mode, 2Unlimited, or any other song playing from the Amiga. This was somewhat the ancestor of MP3 files. However, sound quality was far worse than today’s MP3s since the meager capacity of 720 KB floppy disks forced serious concessions at the expense of sound quality since there was no compression. Assembling correct modules also needed some skill. Still, digitizing was a popular activity along with collecting and releasing digitized modules. Interestingly enough the RIAA did not have the jitters about their lost billions back in these early days before MP3’s took hold.

In the medley of such changes and novelties, the most intensive party series of the scene had started. Almost each European country had a copyparty during Easter, from the Netherlands to Hungary and each was called “Easter”: Anarchy Easter Party, Easter Conference, TRSI Eastern Conference, Majic 12 and TRSI Easter Conference, and so on. The biggest of all was organized by Deadline and Crusaders in the Norwegian city of Lillestrøm. This event was named The Gathering ’92, as the goal was, undoubtedly, to match the similarly named The Party. They did succeed and The Gathering – or TG for short – along with The Party were remembered as the world’s two largest scene events. The Gathering lasted for five days instead of the usual three and the number of visitors surpassed the Danish megaparty by just a little despite no C64 compos. Actually, The Gathering was surpassed by The Party at the end of the year by a small amout. This was mainly due to a few organizing faults contradictions around the jury of the music compos and the poor quality projector but the atmosphere was generally very good and the demo quality was quite high.

The winner of the demo compo, by surprise, was the previously little know Norwegian group, Spaceballs. Their demo, Wayfarer only beat Andromeda’s D. O. S. (Demonstration of Superiority) by 19 votes. It was a tough run, but in the end nobody debated the victory of Spaceballs and hereby a new star demo team stepped into the limelight. Spaceballs got their name after the very successful Mel Brooks movie of the same title and the members also beared names of different characters: Lone Starr, Yoghurt, Major Asshole, President Screw. One of the most important names, Lord Helmet was missing, since the main editor of R. A. W. already reserved it, but the problem was solved a year later when he was invited to join Spaceballs after The Gathering ’93 and accepted. Thus R.A. W. fell into Spaceballs’ hands.

Wayfarer was a vectordemo, with nothing else but 3 D vectors and excellent graphics. The main attraction was a little bit of an odd story about an F-16 fighter being chased by two MiG-25s, which flees into a tunnel but soon pushes back to avoid crashing with a truck. Lone Starr also carried out an interesting experiment in the endpart, titled Weirdworld. The camera was wandering around a set of primitive objects – boxes, pyramids, cubes – while dynamically altering the perspective angle. Nobody had ever tried this before. The distorting perspective was a previously unseen and amazing effect. Those who did not turn giddy and throw up while watching the big screen immediately scribbled Wayfarer on their voting forms. Another novelty was to move the camera along Bezier splines, softly curved paths, eliminating the twitchy movement experienced in older demos which used linear paths.

Spaceballs: Wayfarer

The duel of D. O. S. and Wayfarer was a fight of equals. While D. O. S. was better codewise, Wayfarer was more spectacular. It was not the first and certainly not the last case where the placing of two great demos on an international megaparty was decided by small margin. Wayfarer won, even with this little advantage, and as we’ll see, it was of special significance.

The Hurricane-Brutal Summer Party took place in Samsø, Denmark, in June 1992. According to the organizers there were 900 visitors although other sources remember 600 Amiga and C64 users, who occupied two separated halls. Major groups had their own VIP rooms to work on their demos. Unfortunately, the party slipped through the unexperienced organizers’ fingers. The projector broke down, compo organizers displayed unmatched incompetency, votes had to be recounted on the audience’s request, and the elite groups were ordered out of the VIP rooms in the middle of the party. Andromeda was even forgotten and locked up in a room the entire day until a member of 2000 AD released them by kicking the door open. There were no lights in the building during the night and top it all off the income from the ticket sales turned out to be insufficient for funding the prizes, although the invitation promised total prizes over 100,000 Danish crowns. The winner of the music compo was a previously disqualified module. The author first appeased the prejury with a carton of beer, then bought a drink for everyone who voted for him. That’s how he managed to push Jesper Kyd to the second place. He had to give away more than a hundred beers, hoping to get a grandious prize, which turned out to be nothing. The outraged audience almost demolished the building, and someone broke the organizers’ car. The fair bidding event ended in awkward way and the organizer Hurricane was later mocked as Hurrilame. They were harrassed even after the party. Someone, for example, ordered a truckload of different goods from a dozen companies for their address, among them a pallet of Amiga 3000s, ten thousand sunglasses, and so on. Fortunately the C64 organizer Brutal did their stuff correctly and were not blamed for the main organizers’ problems. The total cost of the party was 160,000 Danish crowns but the income was only 10,000. This was the highest party deficit and the biggest flop ever. However this could not fade the glory of the excellent demos seen and heard at the compos. One of them was Guardian Dragon II demo by Kefrens.

Andromeda: D. O. S. The AmigaDOS window is actually only graphics, the demo did not run in a window. This demo featured excellent design and diverse effects along the fastest convex vector routine ever seen at this time. Rotating convex objects require different methods from non-convex ones.

Kefrens: Guardian Dragon II. It’s perhaps worthy to compare this vectorworld with Thomas Landspurg’s on in Trip to Mars, introduced a few pages earlier. These two demos ran on the same hardware, an Amiga 500 without any expansions. The difference difference shows the great advancement of demos in a mere two years.

The Danish Kefrens has already been mentioned somewhere beford on these pages since they were one of the most successful groups on the Amiga and the demoscene in general releasing their most remembered demos during 1992–1993. The group was initially formed in 1988, originally called Starlight Project, but soon changed it. The name Kefrens came from the name of the ancient Egyptian king, Kefren, often referred in their demos as some patron saint, and for the same reason the symbol of the group was an Egyptian ankh, a grain cross. Kefrens released three megademos in succession during 1989 which was a record for many years. They broke up in 1990, due some misunderstandings between different members.

A year later six of the old Kefrens, after spending a mere two weeks in Rebels, formed a new group named Hydronic, with members like Laxity – not to be confused with the Vibrants member of the same handle – the graphic artist R. W. O., the musician S. L. L. Promax, the coder of Kefrens was missing from the memberlist, but his absence was justified because he was working on AsmOne, an assembly compiler, which later became the most preferred coder tool worldwide, used for hundreds, if not thousands of demos, games and other software. The members of Hydronic soon decided to go back to their original name and became Kefrens again.

Interestingly enough, the word “Kefrens” is actually incorrect. The name of the Egyptian king was to be written as ’Chephren’, but the group followed Danish pronunciation when referring him as “Kefren”.

Anarrchy: Flower Power. This demo won the Digital Symposium ’92 in Rottertham and was one of the most successful creations of Anarchy UK, the editors of Stolen Data. Despite of its success, Anarchy’s leaders were pissed by the demo and kicked a few members out for making it.

The Guardian Dragon demo series was the opening of the new Kefrens’ hit series. The first Guardian Dragon was released in September 1991, at Static Bytes & Light-Lowlife party. The guardian dragon mentioned in the title, as Laxity wrote in the endscroller, was provided to the group by King Kefren himself, to protect them during the “dangerous times”. The second dragon, as written at the beginning of Guardian Dragon II, the king sent because they won the fight, but the remaining forces of the “enemy” attacked again, and they needed an even more powerful vindicator. Regardless of reptiles, Guardian Dragon II really surpassed the first one, both technically – however compatibility was not its strong side, it did not run if any expansion units were connected to the Amiga – and visually, and became a true classic within a very short period of time.

But who did Kefrens refer to as “enemies”? Actually nobody. The text was made up in a bored moment, when nobody felt like writing a scroller, and Laxity was in charge. He always liked romantic patterns, graceful words, and hence the legend-like rows of the great war were born. Still many thought that the enemy was none other than Melon Dezign, who were constantly in a strange “cold war” with Kefrens. It all started at Hurricane-Brutal Party, where Melon released a little intro, in which a melon urinated on an ankh. From then on, for many years, he two groups always picked on each other, making malicious comments about each other in their demos. Despite all of this there was no actual opposition between them, they were good friends, just their opinion of how to make a good demo was quite different. While the primary concern of Melon Dezign was artistic outlook, thumbing their nose at difficult routines, Kefrens were on the side of technically sophisticated code and traditional design. Understandably both were giving harsh critics about the other’s work while accepting each other’s abilities. The obvious Melon Dezign-Kefrens opposition never existed rather it was just spectacular rivalry between two exceptionally talented groups and not a real war.

Reflect: Sound Vision. An old-fashioned, hard code trackmo with brilliant routines and difficult, but lightning-fast algorithms and coding stunts. In the vectorworld part, the moving lightsource – the small, white cube over the house – illuminates the streets, the buildings cast shadows and the car drives around! It would be hard to demand more out of an Amiga 500. This was the first ever flat shaded vectorworld. It praises the handwork of Overlander and Zeque. The music of the demo was composed by Jellybean, the graphics were drawn by Nighthawk and Red Baron.

Moving forward on the storyline of 1992, we soon witnessed the birth of another important party, this time in Finland. This new party was Assembly ’92, organized by Rebels and Complex in the city of Kauniainen, 15 kilometers from Helsinki. Around 700 people attended the party, mainly Finns, including the leading Finnish groups. This was the biggest Finnish demoscene party, soon falling in line with The Party and The Gathering, and becoming another one of the world’s largest leisure computer events. As a special novelty, they held not only Amiga and Commodore 64 but also an IBM PC demo compo. The PC, as a demo platform, was still treated as a curiosity, a marginal program, so that the PC demos weren’t even shown on the big screen, only the visitors copied them to each other to watch them on their own computers. The PC demos are not discussed here; their history is being saved for the second volume of this book. At Assembly ’92 there were, of course, a set of great Amiga demos, for example, Sound Vision from the unknown Finnish group, Reflect, which won the compo. Also there was Delirium by Complex, ending up with second place, while Nikki Corruptions took third place with Piece of Mind. For the first time they held a separate compo for intros which are simply small sized file demos. There was no size limit yet although a limit was introduced the next year. Here Vectra became first, the runner-up was Complex, and the third prize was also taken by Vectra with another production. The entries of the music and graphic compos were also of the highest quality. It’s worth checking the results textfile for that time as unknown, but later world famous names first appeared at this demo party. For example, Groo of Black Robes came second in the music compo, while the Stargazer of Sonic was placed third. To sum up, Assembly was a success and started the long journey to become the world’s largest scene party withing a few years. In fact organizing was a little bit behind that of The Party. Perhaps it was similar to The Gathering, but it was actually because much more visitors arrived than the organizers expected.

Anyone who ever visited the Assembly parties with open eyes probably knows there is always an unofficial side event in a nearby park, known as “Boozembly” for the insiders. It’s perhaps not too hard to guess what’s going on there. This popular feature was already held at the first Assembly, although yet without the name. The organizers, learning from The Party’s mistakes, forbade the consumption of alcohol in the building, but there were no such annoying restrictions in the nearby park. Still, people entering the party building were subjected to an alcohol test and the intoxicated visitors had to spend their time outside for a while.

There were around a dozen smaller parties during Summer and Autumn 1992 throughout Europe, but no significant productions were presented at either. The first Spanish demoparty, Darkness & Fifth Generation Party was held in Valencia on 28th and 29th September a week later than originally planned because the original place burnt down. The two groups organizing this event were the first pioneers of the country. Darkness has started the first Spanish scene magazine, Fanzine. Energy and Cosmos has thrown another copyparty in Gleisdorf, Austria, but alas there were only 120 visitors and no Amiga demos. Fortunately graphics and musics were nothing short of amazing and the Austrian C64 scene also did not let the party down. Warszawa Party II attracted more visitors in Poland and also there was the Digital Symposium ’92 in the United Kingdom. It would take a long list to mention all the parties during this summer, ranging from fifty to three hundred visitors, generally all passing the good scene mood, forming their own traditions, sharing experiences. Small scene gatherings became regular in almost all countries and everybody eagerly waited for the periodical megaparties where the really great masterpieces were presented and where the audience met those living legends who made the best demos.

TRSI: Wicked Sensation. Take a good look at the first screenshot, one can hardly believe they were seeing such a message under a TRSI logo …

The scene has already piqued Commodore’s interest although at first they could not decide what to do with it. They wondered who were these teenagers copying games, covering Commodore’s booth with stickers at the annual CeBit computer fair in Hannover and how they could display such coding and artistic abilities that easily beat the largest developer companies? Finally the management of the European branch summed up the situation and found that almost hundred percent of the Amiga’s European customers were members of the demoscene and the audience of demos. Back then, the word hobby computing simply meant collecting demos, reading diskmagazines and visiting copyparties. There were very few who only used their computers for gaming and most Amiga users took it for granted that their machines were to be used for programming, drawing graphics, composing musics, and that there is a swarming international community living its fascinating life behind the flashy screen. Commodore soon realized that legal and illegal activities do not necessary overlap. That the cracker and the demoscene are separate subcultures. Finally they came to the decision to support the demoscene, to endorse the most important customers, while distancing themselves from groups that engaged in illegal activities. Commodore showed up at a set of parties as a sponsor and soon the demos from these events were demonstrating the Amiga’s abilities at commercial computer fairs. Finally in November 1992, at the World of Commodore exhibition they even organized a compo, although halfhearted, with not much promotion. Only two demos competed and were displayed on a television to a small audience. But what demos they were!

The first Amiga rotzoomer and the praise of the Amimga in World of Commodore ’92 by Sanity. The scrollers of World of Commodore heralded the “coming soon” of a new, never seen, superior demo titled Broken Promises, allegedly “ending the competition among Amiga demos once and forever”. it indeed earned its name and it was never released.

The winner was TRSI with their Wicked Sensation two disk trackmo. Of course it was Masque but their name was not even displayed in the demo. Wicked Sensation is not really remembered for its exceptional code or design – although they were both very good – but rather for Peachy’s excellent graphics and Romeo Knight’s music – especially the ragtime piano piece, Bösendorfer P. S. S. that was played during the endscroller part.

If it was Germany and an Amiga competition then chances there was Sanity competiting. The group reformed around 1992 Easter and showed up at the World of Commodore ’92. Their second placed demo was titled World of Commodore ’92 – probably a result of countless hours of thinking. It was completed in just five weeks for the express purpose of winning the compo prize which was a brand new Amiga 3000 computer. The result was a somewhat obsoletely designed but was a notoriously Sanity-quality coderdemo. Besides of the usual spectacles – part of them were routines recycled from older demos – it featured a novelty. Chaos was experimenting with rotating the contents of the screen while magnifying or shrinking it. It seemed impossible consider the Amiga could do both rotating and zooming but not at the same time. There was a solution, but it only worked with fixed values: zooming with a √2 ratio at each 45 degrees of rotation. It was displayed in the demo, but just as a marginal feature. The real solution was manipulating the screen contents by single pixels, which was an unorthodox method recommended to be avoided on the Amiga. This method resulted in the birth of the rotzoomer – later also in the news as rotozoomer, with an extra o – or zoomrotator, first presented by Chaos in World of Commodore ’92. But in fact, it was not the very first one ever. It was the first on the Amiga but Chaos got the idea when he saw the intro of Delta Force on an Atari ST, at the Atari Fair ’92 exhibition. There were even earlier rotzoomers in some Atari demos, but more about them in the Atari chapter. Essentially, World of Commodore ’92 was not the first demo with such a routine but it was the first full screen rotzoomer and it got its common name after this demo.

A curious innovation during in 1992 about the Videodat system should be mentioned here. It was an interesting experiment for spreading software to a wide audience. Computer data chunks were mixed among the broadcast signals of the German television channel Pro7, transmitted along with the TV show. This did not interfere with the picture quality, as only every 30th frame was replaced with a special signal and human viewers could not perceive it. Videodat subscribers had a special reception device, similar to a modem, which was able to decrypt and save these signals on disk. This meant that every viewer of Pro7, from Poland to Portugal was able to acquire a piece of software without even turning their computer on. They could even record it on videotape and extract the encrypted data later since the embedded signals were saved with the recording. When introducing the service, they planned to broadcast one Amiga, one Atari ST and one PC program every day; naturally only freeware. A great fraction of this would have been demos, packs, and diskmags. Unfortunately the Videodat did not survive more than a few experimental broadcasts, but this service did provide a lot of nice demos to the greatest satisfaction of the few subscribers.

As a matter of fact, the Videodat was not without competitors. The Hungarian state television had a TV show in the late eighties, Mikrovilág (Microworld), in which they broadcasted ZX Spectrum programs to the viewers as sound sequences. The viewers could record these funny noises to a tape cassette and load them to the computer as programs. However, it only worked for the ZX Spectrum, because its cassettes’ low density signals were readable even if there was a heavy noise among the data. Even the Commodore 64 datassette could not tolerate the noise.

LSD: Jesus on E’s. This demo was also presented ad the Digital Symposium Party in 1992 and although it won no prizes, it was one of the most known and also contradictory productions of the scene. It consisted of very primitive, almost ridicules effects, but its blasting rave music made it many sceners favourite demo. It resembled a raveparty’s flashy laser show more than a computer demo.

That was the end of 1992 which was the golden age of Amiga 500. Only the year’s biggest event was to come, naturally that wold be The Party! No party had as good of a turnout as the Danish megaparty. Sceners flocked to the city of Aars from all around the globe. There were 2,400 visitors gathered in the Messecenteret which was almost twice as much as a year before! This time alcohol was strictly forbidden inside the hall, which helped to avoid unpleasant incidents. Besides, some visitors made a nice profit by illegally selling liquor they managed to smuggle inside although this also happened at other parties. The organizers were again The Silents, Crystal and Anarchy, with Commodore 64 compos run by Camelot, and there was also a PC demo compo, however it was taken very seriously similar to what occured at the Assembly party earlier in the year. The demos and other productions were projected onto a gigantic 8 meter diameter screen and the sound quality and volume of the PA system were sufficient for even a rock concert. Mr. Hyde of Andromeda was aggrivated by the system, finding it too loud and ended up stuffing his ears with a bread pellet. Fortunately they managed to remove his “ear protection” at the nearby hospital. Again the compos and the big screen contents were broadcasted to everyone’s television, this time not only in the party hall, but even to those within a fifty kilometers range of Aars. There was a separate hall to watch movies from laserdisc – for those who might not remember, the laserdisc was a data medium similar to the DVD, aimed to replace the VHS in the early nineties, but failed. Jesper Kyd and Mikael Balle had a 45 minutes techno gig, with lights, smoke, lasers and everything needed for a professional live act including their own animations which they projected on the big screen. A cafeteria was serving the visitors round the clock, although not too cheap, and the organizers also sold party t-shirts for the first time in the history of scene parties. Despite there being only two showers for the 2,400 people, and a quite noisy sleeping room, the visitors left with good experiences and even better demos after the party.

The best was naturally the winner of the demo compo, State of the Art by Spaceballs. The Norwegian group managed to win both great parties, The Gathering and The Party in the same year. This time their victory was not by a narrow margin but rather they walloped Anarchy’s 3 D Demo II, TRSI’s Ecliptica and the other twenty-one entries. This high number of competitiors reinforced the popularity of The Party.

State of the Art was an unorthodox work of art from many aspects. Just like Wayfarer, it was coded by Lone Starr and Major Asshole, the music was composed by a new member, Travolta, and the graphics was the work of TMB Designs. The excellent techno module, Condom Corruption was finished first, already shocking the others, since not many demos had techno music at the time and even less of them were of such high standard. Then Lone Starr asked a few cute disco dancer girls, members of a dance band Behind the Mask to dance to the music. After recording an hour long video material, the guys digitized the dancers’ silhouettes, transformed them to vector animations, and the demo was built around these dancing female figures. They were combined with a few simple demoeffects, mainly interference circles, colorful image noise, distortions, and transitions. The result was a flashy, dashing, videoclip-like, special demo, with excellent techno dub, something never seen before.

Spacceballs: State of the Art.

State of Art reheated the old debate whether a demo should be about spectacle or technical stunts. It’s however hard to dispute that State of Art met both requirements, even if it did not break the latest polygon count record. While everybody wished for something new among the many rotating vector objects, vectorworlds, and starfields, Spaceballs found their way and met world success. Their demo deserves being remembered as a milestone in design demo history.

Size limited intro compos were first introduced at The Party 1992. The rules accepted one file minidemos, which were not to exceed a 40 kilobytes filesize. These were naturally not trackmos but filedemos. The winner was Melon Dezign with Tetris, in second place was Shining with 40K intro, and third place went to The Silents with Intro. There were many more entries with the same title as many competitors did not give a specific title to their work, just called it Intro, and most of them did not even take this compo category seriously. Intros were just side products, garnishment for other products – diskmags, cracks, packs – and no one ever had the idea of releasing an intro alone, trying to stuff as much as possible into it. Later, after other parties also phased in the 40K intro compo, the genre too root and intros as minidemos became just as commonplace as regular demos. They were not always 40 kilobytes, at some parties the size limit was sometimes set to 128K, or similarly to PC scene custom, 64 K. The 40K size however was considered a standard and many coders eagerly faced the challenge of the limited filesize.

A very long list could be written about further winners, intros, graphics, music, and demos from The Party ’92, but even mentioning the best ones would take pages. Just in the graphics compo – winners, in order, were R. W. O., Fairfax, Groo and Rufferto – there were 53 entries, and exactly 99 module musics were competing in the music category, bringing victory to Moby, Gurra, Alf of Virtual and Doh of Delight. Browsing the rest of the results list brings up all names and groups that rated even a little bit at the time. These names led the charts and different parties’ result lists for many years.

Melon Dezign: Tetris Intro. Fake raytracing on a moving sphere, reflecting the Melon logo.

“C64 rulez! Amiga rulez! PC rulez! Whatever, but the scene rules …”

– Leon of Singular, before dropping dead drunk

5. The AGA emerges

The following year, 1993 did not differ much from 1992. Mostly the same names, same trends and styles kept ruling. Demos were following the same design customs. The Amiga 500 era continued, although the model was discontinued at the end of 1992 and the 500s soon disappeared from shop shelves. The number of Commodore 64 users were also dropping and some already predicted the death of the scene with the disappear of these two machines. It never happened. New names kept blasting into the scene and the Amiga scene kept growing. This was not just a result of the obsession of sceners but also the introduction of new computers.

The ECS chipset Amiga 600 did not pay off but the Amiga 4000 and 1200 appeared at the end of 1992. These two models packed a serious punch compared to the Amiga 2000 and 500. It took a while until the 1200 replaced the 500s in the home but the first demos and games written for the AGA chipset have already appeared at the end of the year. The Amiga 1200 was first introduced in Europe at the CeBit ’93 computer fair. Another platform was also on the rise, the IBM compatible PC. As already mentioned, some parties already featured a PC demo compo, but just as an aside, to show that there are freaks who try coding demos even to platforms that are completely unsuitable for the purpose. With a little exaggeration, even an ironing board stood more chance to become a demoplatform than the half-baked, yet expensive IBM PC. Still some PC demos were released during 1993, like the legendary Crystal Dream II. and Second Reality that astonished even the most fanatic Amiga users. Finally there was also a third alternative to replace the old Amiga 500. The world of 16 and 32-bit game consoles, Sega MegaDrive, Super Nintendo Entertainment System and others had just been released offering new perspectives for game pirates and crackers. This way was chosen by just a few, as a game console offers way less than a computer. Most people bought the new Amiga 1200, a few purchased a PC, and some kept the good old Amiga 500.

The first AGA productions appeared around the middle of 1993. The first ones, Planet Groove (also known as HoisAGA after the filename) and Mindwarp filedemos were made by a Holland game developer team, Team Hoi, in February. Programming documentations were not yet available so the coder of Team Hoi, Metin7 blindly experimented with the new machine and called Planet Groove “the first illegal AGA demo.” Neither were exceptionally spectacular works. They more resembled the first early demos and 1989 releases. The first demo that really took advantage of the AGA – at least according to the critics of Upstream – was Smells Like Chanel No.5. by the German group Arise. The Sound Barrier 2. musicdisk by Balance was supposed to be another AGA production but it was never completed. The first AGA demos shared brilliant colors, rainbow gradients and using the 256 colors to the limits. There weren’t any innovations yet, practically everybody continued the old design school, and the coders did not rely upon the new Amiga models’ features yet.

Several moral and phylosophical questions arose about the scene during 1992. The most important one for everybody was that where will the activity of cracker groups lead. Even crackers shared the worries about the decline of Amiga’s software support if the developers see that their product is unmarketable because a cracked version is being spread right after the official release date. A computer is of little use without software, hence piracy will cripple the scene in the long run and also the Amiga itself. A slogan was born, today owned by all worthwhile warezgroups: A game worth playing is a game worth buying. Software copying itself was condemned by no one but many thought games might be copied for trial purposes, so that one can decide not only by the game magazines’ articles what to spend money on. User programs and utilities were a different matter. These often cost so much that an average user could barely buy everything legally so they continued to be copied without much sympathy.

Another philosophical question raised by old faces was if the scene in 1992 was still worth as much as at the beginning. The world changed a lot since 1986. While in the eighties there were only a few cracker groups keeping friendly contact with each other and making productions just for fun at the end of 1992 there were millions of Amigas worldwide with hundreds of groups and thousands of individuals in the limelight. Demos were more and more made for party prizes and crackers made big money on pirated games. Good and bad modules, graphics, intros and demos flooded the swappers and through them all the other Amiga users resulting in many people getting disappointed with the scene. The popularity of packs was dropping because of the mass of crappy collections. Many old artists left the Amiga and the scene to try their luck in the professional game or the music industry. Life kept going though. Many stressed the scene was dead and it was not what it used to be but those who were introduced around 1992–1993 experiencing a different era and were of the opposite opinion.

Finally a lot of heated controversies erupted about chartmagazines and party votings. Voters often boosted dead groups, year old demos to the top of the charts, while neglecting new teams and fresh productions which ended up at the bottom of the list, despite being better in all aspects. A famous graphic artist or musician often won a party compo even if his work was not even half as good as a less known artist’s. This phenomenon was called namevoting. Public voting debunked the results anyway as most of the audience were not artists and often voted for more popular, less thought-provoking, compo entries against quality ones. Pictures of naked women usually received more votes than unique themes and cheap pop music often outmatched technically superior, higher quality modules. A stereotype of the era was the drawing of a naked woman and a dragon. These were said to be the two indispensable requirements to win the compo at The Party.

The East European Amiga scene was undergoing rapid advancement during 1993. After the C. C. C. C. P. copyparty and the popular Castle Conference, organized by Live Act during Summer 1992 in the medieval castle of Boldogkõváralja, even bigger copyparties followed. The first sceneparty of 1993 was Hammering ’93 at Kecskemét, organized by Absolute!. This party was soon followed by True, In Bloom, and JAM parties. Plenty of new Hungarian Amiga groups were formed after Majic 12 and Chromance and many of them already started a PC section, although it was not a common fashion at the time. There were also mixed groups, often making the graphics and music of PC demos on Amiga. At this time the names of Live Act, 23 Celsius Crew, Fi-Re Crew, Muffbusters, Faculty, Cerberos, Absolute!, and Planet Organ became widely known. Majic 12 soon made their debut on PC and Absolute!, formed by older Soc. Brigade members, followed suit. Pixel, the graphist-musician started a new group called Impulse. The entire FiRe Crew and two valuable members, the coder EFT and the pixel artist Rendall joined. Impulse soon carved its name into the Amiga scene history with plenty of excellent demos. Soon they became an international team, but they kicked out all foreign members in 1994 and continued as a purely Hungarian group. During this short period, Device, the great Italian swapper and most active correspondent of South Europe was also a member. Later Impulse also acquired Dr. Device, the former musician of Majic 12, creating some confusion, but it was soon rectified when the Italian Device member was kicked out.

The Hungarian scene was still not very big, only consisted of a few dozen members, but this small but elite group of people already outdid the activity of a few leading countries. Hungarian parties were atmospheric, friendly gatherings, usually with 150–200 visitors, equally using Amiga, C64 and PC computers.

Interestingly enough it was a Hungarian demo that first featured a routine blinking the Amiga’s LEDs to the rhytm of music. It was Boxer by Comiga, a coder working for multiple groups, released as a Soc. Brigade demo in 1990.

Broadly speaking, Amiga users of Poland and Hungary walked the same way as they did in 1992. Although there was a strong importer scene and plenty of BBSes in Hungary, Poland was without both. Demogroups were a clear majority, and only few were specialized in swapping. Still, the similarity of Petöfi Csarnok and the Grzybowska market was the single common element in the history of the two countries as both lived through the same events. After the first shy steps, parties with 400–500 visitors appeared in Poland and the few Polish demogroups that stood the comparisons with their West European competitors rose up withtheir demos drawing attention abroad. The Mountain Congress ’93 party in Uywiecz, May 1993 was won by such a successful demo, Technological Death by Mad Elks, while the runner-up was Hallucinations and Dreams by Union, a coalition of Katharsis, Action Direct and Deform – the three organizers of Warszawa Party. The latter was called the best Polish demo ever by R.A.W. Poland climbed to the front of the international ranks and outmatched its East European competitor, Hungary in many aspects. Several dozen Polish groups were operating at least twenty different diskmagazines which were released regularly. In addition countless talented newbies kept appearing. One of them was XTD, Poland’s best musician of the time, who made world class module music without the expensive synthesizers and samper equipment of Western musicians. Unfortunately his music was used in way too few demos to bring international fame to XTD. Only his three music disks brought him a little recognition. Animal, the graphic artist ended up the same way, his drawings were mostly known only within the country. The Polish scene was still isolated and the real outbreak wasn’t to come until a few years later.

Crusaders, Deadline and Exile arranged The Gathering between 7th and 10th of April 1993 again, attracting more than a thousand visitors. The event passed in the usual great mood, further enhanced by the internal TV channel of Spaceballs, relaying movies and different shows during all four days. The program was commented and narrated by Nightshade, with the help of a custom-built television transmitter. The winner of the demo compo was well deservedly The Desert Dream by Kefrens, this time not only coded by Laxity, but the music and all sound effects were also arranged by him. This was the peak of Kefrens’ history, and also their last megademo. But what a fitting end to a legendary group’s career! If we asked an old Amiga scener today to name a few famous Amiga demos, The Desert Dream will probably be the first.

Laxity’s superdemo was built around three effects: vector graphics, bitmap distortion and dot vector routines. As usual, there were plenty of record attempts in the demo, mainly about separate points animated as individual objects. However, most of them were only smart tricks. For example, the routine dismantling a rotating cube into ten thousand points was only cutting the picture into pixel sized pieces with the copper. The most remembered part of The Desert Dream was the vectorworld intro in which an alien spaceship tried to bomb the Kefren pyramid, the second of the three big pyramids, with a slice of a melon. The building remains intact, a twin cannon is pushed out of its side and it shoots the brazen attacker down. Yes, it was for Melon Dezign again.

The 40K intro and other compos weren’t boring either. A new group, the Danish-Norwegian Lemon. – with period, pronounced as Lemon-point – introduced themselves by taking the first prize with their 40K Intro. The second was TRSI with the well assembled, shifty No Pain No Gain, and the third was Andromeda’s Lost in Legoland intro, more of a joketro than a serious product.

Lemon. was formed from members of the disbanded Anarchy and although the group had a short history – from February 1993 they only existed until The Party in December – they were still recognized as one of the leading groups of the world. This isn’t a surprise for a team boasting such members like Facet, Dan, Nuke, Hannibal, Slash, Mad Freak, Paradroid, Danny, Nao and a dozen others. The musician Nao later changed his handle to Supernao and Nuke also renamed himself to Spaceman. Lemon.’s general style was mocking Melon Dezign, being similarly humorous and following the similar design principles, but they were technically superior and not as “childish” as the Melonstrations. Even their logo was imitating Melon’s black and white emblem. Facet wrote about the reasons in the fifth edition of R. A. W.

“It started with a joke, as a lot of things started with jokes so did our group. About half a year ago Dan, Nuke and It had a joke idea to use a logo by Walt/Melon Dezign. But instead of Melon, I changed it to Lemon, and added a little lemon to the bottom. After various chats and ideas we named ourselves LEMON.”

The original trio of Dan, Nuke and Facet were soon joined by a few Anarchy members and many others, and the fungroup soon found itself among the leading teams of 1993. Years later three members of Lemon., Dan, Del, and Spaceman created the character of Lara Croft, the heroine of the world famous Tomb Raider videogame, and they also appeared in the Tomb Raider movie for a second. But they weren’t the only ones participating in the creation of world famous videogames after their scene careers. One can find plenty of famous sceners’ names in many of today’s video games’ credit lists.

Lemon. was not the only new name on the charts of 1993. Most of the newcomers were new labels formed from the ashes of old groups, and only a few new teams were really new. No wonder though, as while at the beginning, around 1988 it was relatively easy for a beginning group to gain fame, it was much more difficult in 1993, since to win a compo – and gain attention – they had to beat opponents like Kefrens, Complex, Spaceballs, Scoopex or Sanity, along with facing the rigid obstacle of namevoting. Despite all of this, new faces kept coming to replace the old. Rebels broke up and its members formed a new group, Movement. Melon Dezign went independent, leaving Crystal. Razor 1911 came back at the end of 1993. Actually it was the Swedish group Illusion, changing their name to Razor 1911, claiming the patented group name because one of their members, Colorbird, formerly used to be a Razor 1911 member. He was the only one who was a member of both the old and the new Razor. Some of the other original members did not like the use of the name again, especially because Colorbird had no permission from the old leaders. To add to the confusion the old Razor still existed on the PC scene and some game consoles as a cracker group. The debate soon settled, and the new Razor 1911 proved their right for the label’s heritage with plenty of great demos like Perception of Reality, Quite Unusual, and the Chaosmaze intro.

Two, previously not particularly well known groups, Carillon and Cyberiad, united in Finland, and called themselves CNCD for short. Their memberlist featured names like Groo, Heatbeat, Destop and Major Tom but despite all of this they did not any meet real success until around 1995. They were strong on music and graphics but they never had any really good coders. Dual Crew and Shining also united at The Gathering ’93, creating Dual Crew Shining. Their first serious release was Chromagic, the first musicdisk of the excellent German musician, Chromag, who became as well known as the likes of Jester, Audiomonster, Nuke, Moby, and the others. We can find Red Devil, also in Dual Crew Shining during 1993, who became a world famous pixel artist while being colorblind – just like Archmage. A few years later some other scene celebrities, like Muffler, Feather, and Carebear also started their carreers in this group. Plenty of demos, intros, and other productions were associated with the DCS label during the years, although their activity significantly dropped towards the end of 1993 and there was not much news about them until 1997.

Two months after The Gathering, between 29th and 31st of May 1993 was the Computer Crossroad ’93 party held in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. Amiga organizers were The Silents and Phenomena, C64 compos were arranged by Light and Horizon, Atari ST ones by Electra and Omega, and PC ones by Cascada and The Codeblasters. This was the first demoparty to treat the four major demoplatforms as equals with the PC and Atari users not just “marginally” let in. There were 1600 visitors gathered and it seemed that another Scandinavian megaparty would join the likes of the big parties: The Party, The Gathering, and Assembly. Alas, despite of its success, the Computer Crossroads was a single occassion, and the next year Swedish sceners had to travel to Denmark, Norway, or Finland again if they found their homeland’s smaller parties insufficient.

This was the time the Swedish group Rage to appear on stage and won two major Swedish parties in a row. They took the cake at The Computer Crossroads with Alchemy, and later in August they did it again with Neural Assault at the European Computer Conference in Örebro. Unfortunately they never managed to repeat Spaceballs’ stunt, they never won an international competition. They either did not compete at the international megaparties – The Gathering, Assembly, The Party – or could not place among the first three. Still, they remained the best Swedish demogroup, and their demos were favored Europe-wide. They could be extra proud of their Computer Crossroads trophy, as their Alchemy demo won even with some serious opponents. Kefrens’ D.A.N.E. was pushed to the fifth place, and Melon Dezign’s How to Skin a Cat also came in third, overtaking World of Confusion by Vomit. It was FairLight-Virtual Dreams who placed second with the demo titled Illusion “under their arms.” Some might also raise their eyebrows hearing the familiar name of the winner of the music compo: Probe of Razor 1911. The world heard a lot about him later. He released only two modules during his entire scene career and later made music for demos and intros only but it was enough for global fame.

Some smaller parties followed The Gathering, for example the Sun’n’Fun Conference in Germany, Hellenthal, with 300 visitors from almost all European countries and even the United States. Spain’s first demoparty, The Southern Party, rejoiced at the same number of attendees during 24th and 25th of July in the city of San Fernando. Actually it was the second The Southern Party but the first one, organized by Fifth Generation and Darkness, a year earlier only attracted about thirty visitors. Rendezvous ’93 in Norway occurred between 30th July and 1st August, was the first party to enable graphic artists to exploit the possibilities of the AGA chipset, drawing 256 color graphics instead of the 32 colors ECS/OCS standard.

This bigger color depth had not only enabled displaying nicer, clearer images but also made a set of established methods and tricks unnecessary, changing the general style of graphics. For example, if we take a good look at an ECS picture, we will see rough gradients as the small color depth does not make the creation of smooth color gradients possible. The graphic artist is forced to create such gradients through an optical illusion by mixing different colored pixels. That is, if he wants to create a gradient from black to red he can only use 3–4 color shades and has to “pointillize” the transition, raster by raster blurring color borders. This method was called dithering. The 256 colors of the AGA let the graphic artist create real gradients without dithering pushing image quality towards photorealistic level. Dithering was a typical mark that clearly distinguished graphics made before 1994 from later ones. Actually, some artists weren’t exactly happy about the advent of AGA because they felt that nobody would be able to tell scanned graphics apart from real artwork. Still, pixellers were already changing to AGA en masse and the new DeLuxe Paint 5 drawing program was very helpful since it already supported 256 color modes.

Faster processors and greater color depth enabled the proliferation of previously sparsely used raytracer programs. Soon more than half a dozen of such software programs appeared on the market and countless raytraced images started to show up in demos. The most common raytracers were Imagine and Persistence of Vision both first released in 1992. These were easy to use and incredibly versatile 3 D tools. In their best times, there was no limit for spatially extruded texts, group logos spanning behind glowing lens flares and other graphical effects which are considered very primitive today – and actually they were also back those days. Many groups used these 3 D tools to replace a missing pixel artist since a raytracer created something in minutes that took days for a good graphic artist. However, soon many recognized that a simple, angular object, a marble textured sphere, or an empty space illuminated by ten lightsources, although might look good, is far from having any artistic value and indeed 3 D graphics also needs style and skill. People interested in this previously marginal area were on the increase and a new term was born: raytracer graphic artist. Only a few were specialized in 3 D graphics in 1994 as the possibilities of available software tools were limited. It took quite a few years until the technical barriers were broken and the best raytracer graphic artist achievements could be compared to the best pixel artist achievements. The first raytracer graphics compo was held at the Hungarian JAM ’93 party which was won by Ninja of Abaddon. From then on, Hungarian and Polish parties always had a raytrace category. However, it was not until the Assembly ’95 party before an international megaparty took to the idea of including a raytrace category.

Advanced 3 D graphics software had another field of employment. As modelling tools they were used to create the vector objects seen in demos. It was much easier to create difficult objects with Imagine, a software especially developed for this purpose than to code a custom modeller tool. Modelling was usually done by the group’s raytracer graphic artist hence he was often also called modeller-raytracer. Sample objects bundled with 3 D software was also often used in demos. Everybody remembers, for example, the galleon model that came with Imagine, the triceratops or the cow that was originally called cow.iob. These objects showed up in a few demos spiced with different visual effects.

The slowly but snugly spreading AGA machines did not change only the graphic artist life for long. Coders were also happily received the Amiga 1200 and its fast, 14 MHz Motorola 68EC020 processor. They wondered what fantastic routines could be coded with such a lightning fast computer, not mentioning the possibilities of 256 colors and 2 megabytes of memory! The Amiga 4000 was capable of even more, sporting an even faster CPU and more RAM. Not many could afford the high end model, but it was a luxury anyway, since even 1,200 owners could hardly exploit the full power of their new machines. The greatest groups one after the other announced they would abandon OCS/ECS machines and code for AGA only. Musicians, meanwhile, were happy about the fair sized memory of the Amiga 1200 since 2 MB of ChipRAM enabled them to use more and larger sound samples even if the Paula chip remained unchanged, disappointing those who expected higher mixing frequencies and clearer sound. One third of all sceners already had an Amiga 1200 by the end of 1993 and the first AGA demos were released at the same time. Only a few were still using Amiga 500s by the middle of 1994.

HD, High Density floppy drives were another novelty. These disks stored 1.44 megabyte of data, unlike the old DD, Double Density ones, which had a capacity of only 720 kilobytes. This was good news for the swappers who could now buy a separate HD drive to replace the built-in DD one. Unfortunately HD disks not only stored but also cost twice as much as the DD disks. This made swappers thinking about what is it worth for floppy manufacturers to sell two products with almost the same production cost, but different parameters, for a drastically different retail price? The only visible difference between HD and DD disks was a rectangular hole on the bottom right corner of HD disks to let the drive distinguish between the two disk types. It did not take long for someone to try drilling a similar hole into a DD disk and see if it worked as a HD disk. The suspicion was right. HD and DD disks were completely identical, made on the same production line, except that there was no hole on the DDs. Soon everybody dropped into the habit of “tuning up” DD disks with a drill, and the same custom also appeared on the PC scene.

The widespread Amiga 1200 machines had a bothersome side effect. Since AGA chipset machines were not entirely compatible with older models a set of old demos and games did not run on them. For a while it seemed that old classics would soon fade into oblivion. Fortunately Amiga users were not the kind of folks who just let their world fall appart. Soon, ECS emulators were coded one after the other allowing the execution of old programs on Amiga 1200 and 4000 computers. The most successful was WHDLoad by Wepl, a shareware program first released in 1994 and is still being developed these days. WHDLoad lets an AGA machines run old floppy-based games and demos from a hard disk. Each program needs an appropriate slave file which serves as a connection interface between the program and WHDLoad, and enables Amiga 500-specific routines running on the different environment of the Amiga 1200. Creating such a slave often requires serious coding or cracking abilities as demos often used undocumented tricks and routines. It’s no wonder we can find well known names among the authors of the most difficult slave files, like Sir Galahad, the legendary C64 and Amiga cracker, who used to be the mentor of Strider of FairLight when he was a beginner, or Graham of Oxyron, one of the best coders in the history of the C64 scene.

The next megaparty of 1993, Assembly ’93 in August, brought an unexpected turn in the life of the Amiga scene. This event was organized by Amig users a year ago and PC compos were just incidentally held. This time a PC group named Future Crew took the lion’s share of work, and many more PC users arrived than anyone expected. Still they were fewer than Amiga visitors and only a few of them participated in the real community event which was the outdoors boozing party. Despite this there were more PC demos at the compos than Amiga ones and the party’s most successful production, Second Reality was also one of them. There will be more about this demo later in the PC chapters of the second volume of this book. Amiga sceners finally left Helsinki with mixed emotions as this was the first time to see the previously ridiculous PC scene showing up something never seen before on the Amiga. Additionally, just a few months earlier there was another PC demo that dazzled the audience at the Computer Crossroads called Crystal Dream II from Triton, a Swedish group. Another demoplatform was apparently emerging next to the Amiga, but it had no palate for the Amiga users to see IBM’s ridiculous creature – the immature, dumb PC – aspiring to the honors of their lovely electronic girlfriend. So that Assembly’s visitors did not entirely lose their spirit, a set of lovely Amiga demos were also shown during the compos and introduced plenty of new groups, mostly Finns. To their astonishment, the winner was also a newcomer Finnish team Pygmy Projects with a demo titled Extension. The runner-up was Virtual Dreams with 242, and Melon Dezign was handed the third prize for The Romantic Demo. Two demos duelled in the 40K intro category, Bananamen by Stellar and Cyberdance by Tsunami et Dean who were actually the two coders of Virtual Dreams.

Pygmy Projects was founded by two coders, Coconut and Flame, former members of the short lived Finnish section of Silents. Extension was their first demo and they were probably the most surprised when first prize was handed to them. They indeed deserved it, along with Jester of Sanity, the composer of the demo’s soundtrack, and Cenobit, the creator of the single, yet excellent, piece of pixel graphics seen in the demo. Jester himself became a Pygmy Projects member in 1995, but he never made any further music for the group after Cyberride, the music for Extension, but concentrated on his professional musician carreer instead.

Extension was excellent work and an epilogue of an era hallmarked by flat shaded vector objects, vectorworld, and dotvector routines. A lot of these were shown in their demo but each in some new presentation spiced with new ideas. The most interesting was probably the vectorworld part. The camera was moving around the usual city made of boxes and sometimes fly thru the streets. The number of these alone boxes would have been respectable but this was taken a step further by using a special image noise filter resulting in a visual effect as if the city had been filmed with a broken video camera. This was all topped off with another spectaular effect of a rotating and morphing two dimensional shape which was transforming into new shapes all the time. This was really a burden for the Amiga 500 but it was still running oneframe! Describing all the other parts – lightning fast dot vector fractal landscape, flat shaded vector objects casting shadows on each other, and pixels splashing as water drops from the surface of a rotating cube – would take a lot of pages. Suffice to say Extension is fortunately one of the few demos which discretion and technical excellence is obviously recognizable even on still screenshots.

The demo 242 by FairLight-Virtual Dreams is interesting for another aspect. This was not primarily built on demoeffects but on Dr. Skull’s powerful video compression routine. The demo was a considerably long video film recorded with a handheld camera, mixed with a set of effects known in the film industry like solarization, artificial image noise, and distortion and dubbed with classic “computeric” techno music by Papa Smurf. The result was a weird “videoclip” which was a rare tidbit for underground techno fans. Such a demo, entirely consisting of an animation was never made before. Global Trash is an exception, but it hardly fits the demo category. According to the endscroller, the makers of 242 stuffed 29 MB of video material on a single 720 kilobyte disk or actually even less, since the code and the music had to also be stored somewhere. Furthermore, the engine had to not just play the animation but also had to contain a command interpreter, programmed to mix video effects with a predefined script! This extraordinary product has gone somewhat unrecognized at its time since it was nothing similar to regular demos. 242 could probably run for the title of “the most underrated demo of all times” with good odds of winning.

Let’s continue walking past the long path of the history of the scene, and let’s briefly overview the second half of 1993. There was fewer demoparties than in 1992 but most of them were bigger and more up to par than the successive small events one or two years earlier. Almost every European country had a major party. In August Sanity, Complex, Supplex, and White Status set up a large party for Amiga and Atari ST fans in Hamburg named 680xx Convention. Both the location and the date were a lucky hit, plenty of foreign visitors arrived, even from Poland and Hungary. A few days later there was a similar event in Sweden called European Computer Conference ’93, sponsored by the Swedish division of Commodore, which meant that the majority of the prizes were Commodore computers and peripherals. France’s first great demoparty, Saturne Party ran with a swing in Chelles, 20 kilometers from Paris between the 3rd and 5th of September 1993 and reportedly had 366 visitors. The event was repeated several more times with success. This old and sweet memory is now bittered by the news about the sudden death of the main organizer of Saturne parties, Vodka of Saturne, who passed away in 2002.

The Poles followed in October with Polish Autumn Party ’93, with separated Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200 demo compos. Unfortunately there was only one entry in the latter category, Ray World by Deform and Investation. This was the first Polish AGA demo. The Amiga 500 compo was won by Tilt with the demo titled Impulse. There was also a sequel to this demo, released at The Party 4 but the organizers disqualified it for an obscure error – it would not run on Amiga 1200 machines.

Aggressive Party was held in October, in Helsinki, Finland at the location of the Assembly parties. This was the first time the organizers tryed to combine demos running on different computers into a joint competition. As a matter of fact, the real reason was that they did not have enough prizes for each category. Amiga, Atari ST and PC demos competed against each other and CNCD won with Sorry, No Elmers In My World, an Amiga demo, and took an Atari Falcon computer home. The idea of joint competitions was understandably strongly opposed as programming specific visual effects was a different task on each platform. Very few party organizers tried the same.

Finally the end of the year came and The Party ’93 brought the usual high standard demos. The event this time also had a subtitle and the complete name was: The Party III – The Ultimate. Each version of The Party got a different name from 1993 onwards and this custom was also adopted by a few other annual parties. The location was the city of Herning this time around. The organizers, in addition to The Silents were Lemon. and Spaceballs but actually they didn’t contribute much in the effort. The Silents, led by Trix instituted The Party alone, Lemon. and Spaceballs were only nominally part of the staff to attract more visitors with their well-respected names. In exchange they received free entry tickets. It would be hard to measure the exact marketing value of this little trick but it’s a fact that The Party scored another record attendance wise and became the world’s largest demoparty with 2,863 attendees. Of course there were several hundred productions displayed again of which a few dozen are still on the list of every worthwhile Amiga fans list of favorites. Let’s take stock of some of them.

The winner of the demo compo was the Finnish-founded Complex with their demo Origin. This group had an unusual career. Since their foundation in 1990 they were one of Finland’s most well known groups despite not releasing anything groundbreaking or phenomenal until The Party 3. Some of their earlier demos – Vector Preview, Gospel Karaoke, Delirium or the Book of Songs musicdisk – were minor hits, sometimes they won compos, for example with Paradigma at 680xx Convention, and they were also the editors of the Maggy diskmagazine, but neither of these were prominent or particularly innovative. Although they had known and talented members, like Mic Dair, the founder, Saviour, the coder, Jugi the musician-graphic artist and Reward, the former Scoopex member, one of the makers of Mental Hangover, Complex did nothing that astonished the scene like groups such as Sanity, Pygmy Projects, Kefrens or Melon Dezign did with their productions. There is no other group that gained so much recognition with such small productions. Their demos were nicely done and technically up to the standards, but lacked innovation.

Things changed a lot when they created Origin. It’s not easy to win the world’s largest demoparty and the new member of Complex, the French coder Gengis, knew that when he began designing the new demo. He solved the difficult task with lightning fast vector routines and a few bitmap effects. Four graphic artist: Titan, Hof, Mack, and Alex were used and the music was arranged by another Frenchman, Clawz. With such a team it’s no wonder they were triumphant, winning by almost 600 points over the second placed FairLight-Virtual Dreams and their Full Moon demo. The 40K intro compo, however, was won with the intro Chaosland by Virtual Dreams. It was such a colossal piece of art that it received 2,832 vote points from the audience, while the runner-up D by Essence got only 712, and Toyzaerus by Dreamdealers came third with 692 even though this was the first intro to ever contain a Gouraud shading routine. Chaosland was mainly built around bitmap and HAM plasma routines. There were a few serious routines among them, for example the union of a rotzoomer and a swirling plasma. A rotating and zooming image moved over the plasma, and for a while they were visible above each other. It was quite a trick considering the restrictions of the Amiga 500! Furthermore, the module playing under Chaosland was 150 kilobyte uncompressed! Even more interesting that only 40 kilobytes of it was usable data. Tsunami, the coder stuffed a lot of unused sound samples into it, just to demonstrate the abilities of his excellent compression routine.

Virtual Dreams’ other production, Full Moon was an excellent dashing trackmo with music by Heatbeat and Jogeir Liljedahl. Again we could see an animation player routine which was even more advanced than the one in 242 followed by the usual effects of the era: bitmap distrortion, vectors, plasmas, and fractals.

Chaosland was Virtual Dreams’ last ECS production and Full Moon was their first AGA production. After The Party the group decided that they’re doing fine without FairLight since FairLight lost their interest in the Amiga and turned towards the PC and game consoles. They’ve went independent and worked as an independent group until 1996 all the while keeping the FairLight label and kept calling themselves FairLight-Virtual Dreams. They continuted displaying the Fair- Light logo in some of their demos. Rumours had it that Dr. Skull, the main coder of VD, had his demoroutines purchased by so many beginners that he made a quite good living. This way he was the first – and probably the only one – who made a living demomaking. That is, if the rumour is true. It is true that VD members were inclined to copy Full Moon and the rest of their demos to others only for money at The Party. This unfair attitude caused their popularity to drop significantly especially after one of their “clients” wrote about them in the R.O.M. diskmagazine.

There wasn’t a huge point difference between the third and fourth placed demos at The Party 3, but it’s no wonder consider they are considered classics. Third place was Arte by Sanity and fourth place was 9 Fingers by Spaceballs.

Arte was undoubtedly the peak of Sanity’s career. The demo got its title after Arte, a French-German television channel because the demo was also a French- German coproduction. Sanity welcomed its new French members, Ra, the graphic artist and Moby, the musician with this production. The code praised the abilities of Mr. Pet, Chaos and McDeal. The result of their joint effort was a classic Amiga 500 demo which stressed in the endpart that it was not using any AGA functions. Compatibility was an important concern for the coders. Arte worked on every Amiga model thanks to the trackmo framework christened Sanity Operating System (S. O. S.). The demo, containing mostly vectorgraphic and bitmap distortion routines, was given a great mood with Moby’s excellent funky jazz musics, and Ra’s characteristic pastel-coloured graphics also contributed to making Arte another immortal classics demos of the scene. It contained plenty of different routines which they difficulty cramming onto a single disk.

In fourth place was 9 Fingers by Spaceballs which was a sequel to State of the Art.The dancing girls returned, this time not just as silhouettes, but in the form of a video clip converted to a vector animation. This demo did not meet with as great of success as its predecessor. It only came fourth and Spaceballs kept slipping downwards in the charts and they were not able to get among the three winners at any party for more than a year. They lost third place to Sanity by a mere 80 points. Though a fading group, Spaceballs was far from running out of ideas and becoming a dead legend. Their fourth place result was not a defeat at all as they presented the Amiga scene with another classic demo and at later demoparties they proved that they are still not on the verge of splitting up.

The music and graphics compos of The Party ’93 ended true to form. Again anyone ranking with anything on the Amiga scene competed and the first ten places were occupied by the era’s most known artists outranking each other by just a few points. The single exception was the Amiga module music compo where Moby of Sanity received almost twice as many votes for Elektrik Funk as Chorus and Sid of Razor 1911 for the second placed Hideaway Blues. The Party 3 ended and also 1993 which was the last year of the Amiga 500 demos. The next year, 1994, began a new era with the AGA and the Amiga 1200 finally and permanently put the old, slow ECS/OCS machines to rest.

Yes, the days of the Amiga 500 were numbered but those expecting the AGA easily gaining ground were to be disappointed. There were not many AGA productions in 1993 yet and the few that did exist didn’t contained anything particularly innovative. The coders just “snooped around” the new chipset just like the copper and the blitter some years before, and it took a while until really nice and fast 256 color demoeffects began to appear on the Amiga screens. The Party’s winning demos were all AGA ones except for Arte, and the graphics competition was also won with a 256 color graphics, Helge Schneider by Peachy of Masque.

At the beginning of 1994, just like the year before, the scene was silent again. The usual break between The Party and The Gathering commenced, a period when hardly any demos were released. The two huge events sucked up almost the entire demo, intro, graphics and module music yield of the year so there was not much left for small local parties at least not from the great groups doing major demo productions. This custom ruled for years: activity dropped at the beginning and end of each year, while most groups were preparing for the Scandinavian megaparties. There were more releases at these two than in an entire year before. Groups that could not afford to travel, or simply did not want, would compete at smaller parties in Poland, France, Spain, Germany or Hungary. The Finnish Assembly party completely changed. It turned entirely into a PC party with organizing was taken over by Future Crew, and although they kept Amiga compo categories, the main emphasis of the event was pushed towards the PC demos.

The winner of The Gathering 1994 was Sequential, a demo by Andromeda, which beat out Brain State in a Box by Cryptoburners and Friday at Eight by Polka Brothers, a newly formed Danish fungroup. Sequential was the best Andromeda demo up to this point. No wonder it brought one of the most smashing victories in the history of the scene: the audience honored the group’s efforts with 829 points, while Cryptoburners got 371, and Polka Brothers got 347 points. This was the last great Amiga 500 trackmo and the last victory of conventional demo design. According to the message displayed at the beginning, Sequential was being worked on and coded for two years and it really showed. HeadX, the main coder, with the help of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has stuffed an unprecedent amount routines onto a single disk of which maybe only Arte can be compared to it terms of quantity. All parts were perfect, ran smoothly and precisely, and there were no compatibility issues. The routines mostly consisted of difficult arithmetics vectorgraphic elements. The music was the work of Mr. Man, and the graphics was crafted by the big guns of Andromeda, Archmage, Fairfax and Quest, with aditional contribution from View and Decker. The scene truly bid a worthy farewell to the good old Amiga 500 with this demo!

Meanwhile in France, at the Saturne 2 Party, Real by Complex made an impression. This was the last demo of Gengis for the Finnish group. He founded a new group with Clawz after the party, naming it Bomb!, with exclamation mark, after the famous intro of Melon Dezign. Soon two excellent graphic artist, Suny and Trajan joined, along with Roscoe, the Danish swapper. With such a memberlist it’s no wonder that Bomb!, or as often called, Bomb Software, soon succeeded in everything they did. They already brought home the bacon from Sea, Soft, Sun Party (or 3S Party) in September 1994 with their Casual intro and collected a set of additional trophies before the end of the year.

In Hungary, at Hammering ’94, Absolute’s Cream demo met with great success. A new generation of demomakers had appeared at the consecutive parties in Poland, slowly replacing old names until the end of 1995. This was the first year to hear about Anadune, Appendix, Floppy or Venus Art, and to first see the drawings and logos of Lazur, probably the most known scene graphic artist ever. An exceptionally talented musician, Scorpik, also appeared as an Old Bulls member.

As usual, there were heavy comings and goings in every country: new groups were born, and old ones disappeared or were reformed. Quartex broke up just to reform a year later. Rebels was also refurbished. A new group that came into existance during this time was Polka Brothers. This group was founded in 1993 by the Danish members of Kefrens and Parasite, first as a fungroup. Their demos followed the traditions of Budbrain, Melon Dezign, and Lemon., but with the demanding technical standards of Kefrens and this resulted in winning plenty of competition prizes in the forthcoming years. Laxity joined the team in 1995 under the handle Merge and Chromag also got on the memberlist. He probably is a record holder as he managed to be a member of six different demogroups at the same time. Polka Brothers won the prize of the R.O.M. diskmagazine at the beginning of 1995 as the group with the most quality releases in the prior year. This shows that they were one of the most active groups in 1994 and also pushed Denmark upwards in the charts as one of the most productive demo making countries. Besides of Friday at Eight, the silver medal winner of The Gathering, Bobble Trouble, Ariel Ultra, Twisted, No Name, and Gevalia were all their demos and intros, and plenty of more followed them in 1995 and later.

Blizzart, another former member of Kefrens founded another new group, Passion. Soon two coders, Boogeyman of Oblivion and Scope of Balance joined, and later Subject of Balance, who changed his handle to Prophet. Passion also tried to carry on the heritage of Kefrens, with significant success. R.W. O., the former pixel artist of Kefrens meanwhile became a Balance member.

A slow ascension began in Germany, similar to what happened previously in France. Lego, a German group, reached fifth place at the intro competition of The Party ’93 with The Real 40K, and the same group surprised the Amiga world with a fantastic slideshow at Spring 1994. It was titled Never Liked Uno, and contained the drawings froma a previous unknown artist, Fade One. The scene shockedly acknowledged that someone unknown can actually jump onto the top of the charts, right along with the big dogs like Fairfax, Cougar, Archmage and the rest. Fade One immediately topped the charts and stayed there for awhile. In the same year they acquired another famous member, Chromag. Although Fade One soon left them for Essence, a coder, Raw Style arrived to replace him, soon helping the group to some serious victories.

The year 1994 was also the first time for another German group, Haujobb, to make an impact. Within a few years they rose to be one of the most known demogroups in the world with countless members in almost all European countries, and tons of excellent demos on a dozen different platforms from the Amiga, to PC, to game consoles. Their first serious release was their Artcore intro in Autumn 1994. It announced the arrival of two new members, SMT and Black Raven. Haujobb was already a year old at the time and operating half as a fungroup and half as a cracker team but without much perspectives regarding their own future. For a short while after their foundation they didn’t even have a name, the members only agreed that they existed but didn’t have an idea for what purpose. They had some cloudy idea of becoming crackers, because that seemed cool to them but they had no idea how to do that. Finally they became a demogroup and gained a lot of members after their Artcore release.

The origins of the name Haujobb is not entirely known. Some suspect some connection with Blade Runner, the movie and its robot characters. These robots were called skinjobs in the original English version of the movie but renamed to Hautjob in the German version. A German rock band picked this word as a name but changed it slightly to Haujobb for typographic reasons. This name was then taken by the demogroup. There’s nothing peculiar about this, it was not the first example of a demogroup assuming the name of a music band. Scene history remembers groups named Biohazard, Prodigy, and Skid Row, along with people using handles like Metallica of Paranoimia or C. C. Catch of Renaissance. However, there is quite an odd reason behind the choice of the demogroup which I was unfortunately asked not to publish here. This will be left as a mystery or , if you want, research project for some future scene historians.

Finally the level of the German scene was further enhanced by the turnout of a legendary Commodore 64 group on the Amiga – Oxyron. The group mainly consisted of coders, like Graham, TTS, Axis, and Dante, artlessly keeping the usual Oxyron quality on the new platform. A graphic artist, Gandalf, and a musician, No-XS helped with the work as well. The main attraction of Oxyron demos was always their codework. The first Oxyron demo on the Amiga was Killing Time, coming in 10th place at The Party ’94. It was followed by Hopefully Dead, a demo for which Unison of Impact DK wrote the music. His name is also worth remembering as he made additional musicial contributions a few years later.

Assembly ’94 came in August. According to the organizers’ statistics there were 2,800 tickets and 600 daily passes sold which was enough to give the Finnish megaparty the nod of the biggest demopary in the world. Although, as already said, the Assembly party was primarily a PC party, it still played an important role in the life of the Amiga scene, as justified by plenty of impressive creations displayed on the big screen. The winner of the demo competition was the Finnish group Stellar and their demo titled Mindflow. It was a worthy continuation of the series of hits by the many times disbanded and reformed team, originally founded as Equinox back in 1992. The rest of the competitors also need no introduction for old Amiga fans: Breathtaker by Virtual Dreams, Drool This by Parallax. Ilyad by Alcatraz, but the real attraction came with the 40K intro category. It was none other then last year’s demo compo winner, Pygmy Projects and their intro G Force.The first serious work of Silver Eagle, a new member.

G Force created a new trend, giving a flip to demos and intromaking by building the entire production on an excellent Gouraud shading engine, completely ignoring traditional flat shade routines and other heritages of the OCS/ECS era. There was nothing else but rotating, Gouraud-shaded objects, without the colorful, characteristic elements of Amiga intros. It created an atmosphere of quite another order. G Force was technologically far superior to its contemporaries and it had a quite novel view, hence it brought down the house. The runner-up of the compo, Razor 1911 also experimented with Gouraud shading in their Falu Red Color intro, but they shaded only a static object – a Razor 1911 logo – and the rest of the intro consisted of conventional routines.

G Force marked the beginning of a new era. It was the overture of a period in which the Amiga users, transgressing the design era, started making demos needing high capacity processors and a lot of memory, and relied less on the traditional Amiga resources like the blitter, the copper, and the custom chips. However, this demostyle was better suited towards the despised PC much better which won hands down against the Amiga with its brutal processing power. The new Amiga demos started to resemble PC demos and the formerly indispensable design, harmony, polish and oneframe running was not considered essential any more. Instead, hard to code, hardware-critical routines prevailed, and not everyone was happy about this.

A novelty besides of Gouraud shading was the voxel landscape demoeffect, which visualized a fractal landscape using voxels instead of polygon-based vector graphics. The first voxel landscape appeared in Mindflow. The word voxel is the abbreviation of volumetric pixel. Voxel technology greatly differed from conventional polygon-based vector graphics. Instead of drawing the onscreen objects – in this case, a range of mountains – by filling polygons, the routine “covered” the object’s visible area on the screen with colored rectangles. These rectangles are the voxels and depending on their size, the generated view can be nice and detailed, or rough and pixelated. Of course, if the voxels were pixel-sized or smaller, the result could be even photorealistic, but on the contemporary hobby computers this would’ve been utterly slow.

During 1994, the so-called Wolfenstein and Doom routines also appeared. These were simulations of building internals and got their names after the first representatives of the first person shooter game genre, Wolfenstein and Doom, both PC games. The difference was that while a Wolfenstein routine only displayed rooms that were of the same height, on the same level, a Doom routine was also capable of handling floor and ceiling depth, which doesn’t sound a whopper, but is actually a great addition to realism. Doom was a pain in the Amiga coders neck since its release in 1993, since it gave a damning evidence of that there are things that a PC can do, and an Amiga can’t. Let’s be straight: not even the best Doom routine on the Amiga reached the standard of the PC game, and one couldn’t even dream of making such a game for the Amiga. Well, at least not at the time.

Assembly ’94 compo rules required that every entry needed to be executable from a harddisk, meaning that none of them could be “disk” trackmos. It was kind of an innovation, since it changed demo programming philosophy. Thanks to the proliferation of hard disks, trackmos pretty much disappeared by the middle of 1994 and trackloader coding became history. Every demo was now a filedemo from then on although nobody used this term any more, as there was no need to distinguish between the two radically different programming techniques.

Meanwhile there was quite a silence in the world of disk magazines. The domination of R. A. W., which had meanwhile gone independent, was only troubled a bit by the similar styled Upstream, while Abnormalia, Sledgehammer and some other mags were clashing peacefully for lower chart rankings. R. A. W. kept its first place ranking despite releasing no issues in 1994, while Upstream had two disk magazine releases. Sanity also made a diskmag titled Compass, which was released by Alcatraz. Many might remember another magazine, Grapevine, with some nostalgia, but it was actually a file-closer on the international scene, although Watchman’s excellent title screen graphics and the regular monthly issues brandished its popularity a lot. However, many were bored of R.A. W.’s domination, and also that newly appearing – and soon disappearing – magazines all tried to be clones of R. A. W. It was not very hard to notice the lower quality of articles, the more and more frequent flame wars, the mass of outrageous articles filled with false accusations, or that some editors used their magazines to discredit groups or persons they didn’t like. Finally it was Essence, a German group who tried to shepherd the magazine culture to another way early Autumn 1994. After a long project, many promises and shooting up an array of rumours, a new diskmag finally appeared: it was R.O.M., or Rewarding Ortographical Masterpiece, which stood toe to toe with the competition, Lord Helmet’s magazine, both content- and design-wise. Its main editor was a Maltese scener, MoP, Master of Perfection, who first appeared as the editor of Compass, but as he was unsatisfied with the quality of Alcatraz’s magazine, he unexpectedly changed group and became an Essence member. When he left Alcatraz, nobody suspected that he was abandoning the already successful Compass for the sake of an even better magazine, so there were heated debates about the reason for this on different forums for many months. The answers to these debates were relased when R.O.M. was released.

In the editorial of the first R.O.M. MoP raised the same questions as Lord Helmet did in the first issue of R. A. W. What will be the destiny of a this new diskmag? Will it be able to reach the second, third, whatever issue? Will it be able to offer something more than the majority? What the aim of was how they wanted it to be different was answered by MoP:

“Today, disk magazines seem to have become all alike; at least they look so, and after all, who are we to contradict the opinion of the masses? Strangely enough, all new magazines resemble some popular chart topper. Some borrow its design, while others bluntly steal its writing style; in the end everything ends up looking the same.

This was the past. Now we’re living in the present. The scene needs more, but most importantly, the scene deserves more. Not everybody is able to admit it. The ones in power have always tried to inflict their verdict on the masses; in the scene, it seems that most main editors have decided that sceners are a bunch of scholar nerds, who cannot understand any expression which does not contain a good dose of pseudo cool or swear words. Why does the scene, and its inhabitants have to suffer from the often lack of qualifications of these self announced magazine makers? The scener is a bright young man, who needs a good and entertaining guide to this world called scene. He deserves a professional publication, and R. O.M. is here to fill this wide gap.“

This was the ars poetica of R. O. M., well mirroring the mentality of the already mature scene. The magazine managed to get a grasp, and ran nip and tuck for years with R.A. W. Its cultured language affected scene terminology. Just as an example, the word scener was first used by MoP, right in the article quoted above. Oddly enough, this evident term was never used before R. O. M.

R. O. M.’s code was not an everyday piece of common code either. There were few such advanced engines in the history of diskmags. Touchstone, the coder of Essence kneaded the bytes for more than half a year. Besides of a set of innovations never seen before – for example, inserting images into article texts, or the possibility of using 256 different fonts – R.O.M. was the first magazine which needed no tampering with the source code when making a new issue. There was a separate editing utility to mold articles, graphics, and music into their final form. This crafty tool generated the new issue of the magazine as an executable file.

Also R.O.M. was the first diskmagazine to approach the scene from a quasi-scientific point of view. While other magazines discussed the current goings of life in different groups, sniffing for secrets or rumours, R.O.M. explored the grounds of the phenomenon of the scene, trying to uncover the background of different styles and temporary trends, trying to find logical connections. The editors called this “science” scenology. Not everybody was happy about it though. R.O.M. editors regularly got their information from rival magazines. In spite of the bad mouths, many supported R.O.M., not only as readers, but also as columnists.

The Amiga scene first met the Internet in 1994. Its advantage over BBSes and the increase of communication speed is obvious. While the greatest BBSes only operated with 4–5 nodes, serving the same number of callers at a time the Internet was operating around the clock and its services were available for a practically unlimited number of users at any time. Keen articles about new acquisitions, the IRC, where many users can chat with each other at the same time, the FTP, a fantastic alternative of BBS download zones were filling diskmagazines. The first Amiga FTP site with 50 MB storage capacity, running on a computer lent by Commodore was already set up in 1991 in a club maintained by Swiss university students. In January 1992 it registered an average of 40 downloads a day and this soon started to increase. The high traffic burdened the little machine so much that they had to declare download quotes and upgrading became necessary. The Swiss server had been connected with another in Sweden and Aminet, the main FTP network of the worldwide Amiga community was born with this connection. Several new members joined within a little while and Aminet had already consisted of 30 nodes by 1997. Storage capacity was enhanced by donations from the users. An American company, Walnut Creek Corporation supported the acquisition of Aminet’s first hard disk with a larger sum and later the centre of Aminet moved to this company’s server. This company has also operated the first online demo distribution network of the PC scene, the hornet.org FTP. Aminet still exist at the time of this books publication in 2005.

After reading the earlier chapters it maybe easy to guess how 1994 ended: Naturally with The Party. The demos of the fourth occassion of the Herning superparty were beyond all expectations. Although a year earlier the organizers declared the end of The Party, a new team finally carried on, and it took a couple of years until the series actually ended. In respect of compo entries, it was the best party in the history of the scene. No other party had so many and such great demos and intros, not to mention the high quality of graphics and musics. Compo rules were modified and had been significantly restricted. Now, only those who were personally present at the party were allowed to enter, or at least one of the group’s members. One artist or group were only allowed one single entry in each category. General rules were also changed. Anyone breaking the restriction of alcohol or any of the strict rules heralded on posters and on the big screen was quickly thrown out. It’s true that particular regulations were necessary for such a huge event, and they also had to constrain the unmanageable amount of compo entries but most visitors weren’t happy about the loss of the original party atmosphere, and turning their favourite annual bash into some precisely organized, boring commercial event. Some Hungarian visitors were so upset about the staff confiscating their beers that they plotted an evil revenge. They quickly made an entry for the intro compo which did nothing but format the hard disk. The organizers tried to test run it before the compo, just like the rest of the entries. As a result, the compo was delayed for several hours because they had to copy everything over from floppy disk. Don’t mess with the Hungarians’ beers! Contemporary diskmags remembered the evil – and let’s admit, quite tasteless – freak, and the “intro” titled Surprise later even showed up on an official list of known Troian programs.

If we tried to discuss all entries of the demo and intro categories in detail, it would take at least a dozen pages to introduce all the breathtakingly beautiful pieces of digital art, which made the audience clap their hands until they turned red and burned the images of the big screen into their minds forever. Those three thousand people were crowding in front of the big screen for a reason. What an experience it was to be there at the first screening of a legendary demo, when nobody knew what they would see, but an hour later everyone would be talking about the same thing. And their pens feverishly carving entry numbers on voting forms while everyone eagerly waiting to see if another legend would be born. To know if their favorite demo, intro, etc. would win and which new star would rise or which old one would shine bright? A movie fanatic could best understand how it felt being at the premier of Star Wars when it was first shown back in 1977, or a sports fan can tell how it felt to be there at the Olympics when a new world record was born. This is how it felt being at a demoparty in the mid-90’s, watching the compos, rampaging with the crowd at the end of an electronic art composition, cheering the living legends who were also amongst the crowd. Everyone together, feeling the same vibe, thinking the same, doing the same as three thousand of their mates – no, there are no words for this, and it’s impossible to explain without being there and experiencing it for ones self. Only those who were there can understand, because this feeling will never return.

But what stirred the souls of sceners in December 1994, in the city of Herning the most? As usual, rumours were circling well before the compos about the plans of Sanity, Bomb!, Virtual Dreams and other great names of the era with their forthcoming productions that will supposedly make history. But the winner of the demo compo became the least expected Andromeda! They repeated the success of Spaceballs’, their compatriots’ success series, winning The Gathering and The Party in the same year. Nobody expected the Norwegian group to release anything at the part, especially not the biggest demo of their career. Their participation in the compo only came to light when the demo was shown. Any old Amiga fan will appreciatively nod upon hearing their demo’s title: Nexus 7. It was a new masterpiece from old masters: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, Archmage, View and Interphace, the old Andromeda posse going full speed to the top of the charts in the saddle of an Amiga 1200. Nexus 7 was an excellent design-demo, well ahead of its time in several aspects. The so-called motion blur, blurring the image of a moving object, or turning the entire screen inverse, like if we’ve been watching the negative of a photographic film only came into fashion years later. This was the first demo to feature realistic realtime character animation displaying the famous jumping table lamp of Pixar Animation Studios, Luxo, jumping up a row of stairs.

Nexus 7 was one of the best demos of all times, not only on Amiga, but all platforms. All design and technical experience gathered during the seven years of the Amiga scene was cumulated in this demo. There are very few demos that receive positive critics exclusively, on any forum. Nexus 7 is one of them. One simply can’t appreciate the fantastic result of Andromeda’s work in code, graphics, music, and most importantly design.

Unfortunately Andromeda disappeared from the row of active groups after Nexus 7 and lived on only as a legend. Namely their leader, Hydra had a rumpus with Lord Helmet, who called him “Stalin of the scene” in the 6th issue of R. A. W., allegedly because of his autocratic ambitions. This ended up in a huge flamewar. In the last part of Nexus 7, the infamous raytraced scroller Andromeda spoke their mind about Lord Helmet and his style. Finally Lord Helmet apologized to them in the next issue of R.A. W., but Hydra grew bored of the demoscene by this time and sold his Amiga leaving the group for Archmage to manage. Although he was an excellent graphic artist, he utterly failed as an organizer. Andromeda never released any further demos and although they never announced the group’s termination, they slowly and silently disappeared from the scene. Through this Norway also slipped a few places down on the nations’ charts since Spaceballs was the only active and world famous Norwegian group left.

The second prize of The Party went to Virtual Dreams for Psychedelic. This demo started with a plain starfield, followed by a quite conventional voxel landscape, and the audience already started to squirm, as they expected much more from Virtual Dreams. Suddenly a brilliantly elaborated 3 D animation appeared, which many thought to be realtime for its smooth and slick movement. This was the most remembered part. A few more excellent effects followed: environment mapping, Gouraud shading, and plasmas. This demo was originally planned to be the farewell of Virtual Dreams, as a last production, and Dr. Skull actually gave up democoding after it. His progeny, Alien, carried on with the VD label. Another curiosity is that the music of the demo was originally composed for Kefrens’ first AGA demo, Evolution by Mad Freak, but as this group was disbanded and the demo was never finished. The music itself was also spread separately and its filename – kefdemotune.mod – also implied its original purpose.

Third place of The Party ’94 demo compo went to the French Bomb!, the new group of Gengis. Their demo Motion: Origin 2 was the sequel for the last year’s Origin, and it really ran tough against the two winners. It was a tight race, as Motion was a masterpiece, both code- and designwise, and also in respect of music and graphics. Gengis’ work was supported by the French graphic artist elite, Suny, Zebig, Titan and Hof, and the music was of course arranged by Clawz. Besides plenty of voxel effects, it contained a true novelty: it was the first Amiga demo with a real Doom routine and it was immediately special since after the endpart the user could walk around the virtual space himself using the mouse. According to Gengis’ account, this routine was coded in a single week. Anyone who ever programmed such a thing can imagine Gengis’ abilities. This demo was the greatest international hit of the French scene ever, bringing true fame to Bomb!

And it’s still not the end of The Party’s demos. The latest demo from The Silents, Soulkitchen made fourth place, and then Whammer Slammer, a jazz demo by the reformed Rebels, often criticized for being “a single endpart, without a demo,” but it’s no wonder, as it was entirely made at the party. Many didn’t understand how it made it to the fifth place. The Rebels demo was followed by The Prey by Polka Brothers and the somewhat lunatic Ninja by Melon Dezign, a cartoon animation in which a ninja awakes from his thousand years sleep and strikes off a bloke’s head. Next was Roots by Sanity, the single successful demo of the German-French group in 1994, then the Polish group Union followed with Beyond the Future and Oxyron with Killing Time. This is the list of the ten highest ranking demos of The Party 4, and at the same time the list of the first great demos of the Amiga 1200 era.

Many did not understand why Roots consisted of so few routines or why have they reached such a low ranking, and generally, why Sanity has dropped in their quality. The reason was that Chaos was waiting for the arrival of Mr. Pet at the party but he did not show so his parts had to be left out of the demo. Even with the setback, Chaos could not let Sanity leave without entering a demo at the world’s largest demoparty! The missing parts were replaced with a raytraced animation and the hacked Roots got onto the organizers’ desk just before the deadline. Chaos, however, continued polishing it, revising most of it, and he asked the organizers to spread the fixed version after the competition. They refused, but also didn’t spread the compo version either so Sanity’s demo was missing from the entry collection. Since the entries were released right after the compos so visitors could watch them again on their own computers and decide about their votes, Roots was forgotten by many, and that’s how the interesting demo only made it to 8th place. However this demo was worth remembering as it contained a true novelty, which was quite a headliner in 1994. It was another enhancement of the rotzoomer, the so-called tiltzoomer, which was not only rotating and zooming an image but also spatially tilting the image.

Experimentally, The Party 4 also had a wild demo category for animations like Global Trash II.The winner was a group named Wilders, their animation was titled Wild Demo. It was a 750 MB animation, gigantic at the time, played by an Amiga 4000 from an 1 GB hard disk. Its maker called himself Mr. Wild, and was a professional computer animator working for the Danish television channel TV2, so he had both the experience and the equipment to get in the ring for the 1,000 dollars prize with good chance of winning. Mr. Wild never turned up again in the history of the scene.

The case of the group Legend is also associated with the wild compo. They arrived with great plans, but as they heard what serious opponents they would face – there were 14 more competitors besides of Wilders entry – they came up with a daring idea. They brought some “ladies” from the nearby red light district, who had to perform as strippers during the compo, while their demo was playing. They gained the money by selling hash during the rave party on the first day to the ravers who were quite often consuming such things. Unfortunately the organizers were against the idea and finally their wild demo was never shown. The pissed Legend members finally gave the girls some more conventional task and then kissed them a sad goodbye.

The Party’s music and graphics compos caused a revolt. There was strict preselection in both categories, but it resulted in trashing the majority of entries, only showing 62 out of 149. The disappointed pixellers protested in such large numbers the organizers accepted their complaints and displayed the disqualified entries in a second compo. There were plenty of really demanding works among them. Now the only thing that ruined the competitors’ mood was that only a few were watching this second compo and that the voting software only allowed two digit numbers to be entered making it impossible to vote for entries over entries number 99.

Those who were able to withstand the music category would have witnessed 22 average, flat techno modules. The prejury trashed modules from musicians like Vocal, Lizardking, Chorus, Clawz, and Jogeir Liljedahl. Noted sceners – not only musicians, but also coders and graphic artist – handed over a petition to the organizers demanding they start a new compo. But the organizers stated that they listened to all the 143 modules they received and picked the lucky 22 based on “serious professional opinions.” In the end there wasn’t a second music compo. Many said that these two disappointing incidents ruined The Party’s feeling. Years later others assumed it was the beginning of The Party’s decline which later led to a catastrophic result. But all of that will be discussed in later chapters.

“I’m not in the scene … I am amongst those who founded it.”

– Irata of TRSI when a newbie asked about his position on the scene

6. Peaks and downturns

The scene has never seen such a development in quality and technology as in 1994. According to a poll by R.O.M., 96 % of their readers thought it was the best year of the scene thus far. Demos have completely gotten rid of their old heritage. Just as bobs, starfields and spectrum analysers disappeared, now flat vector routines and classic Amiga 500 demodesign vanished. Demos received a professional outlook, routines were coded on a higher technical level, and the scene has “settled down” since the average age of sceners has increased. Those taking the pains of patching up their first raytracer or vector routine around 1991, at age 15–16, were already college or university students in 1995, and their years of experience in visual effect programming was well perceptible in their works. Most of them already realizing the demoscene was more than just a teenager hobby even though these sceners would eventually abandon their involvement. Just like the devotion to a rock band that also fades with time, the demo creators eventually grow up, get jobs, but yet can always look back to these times and smile upon their great accomplishments. No, the scene was more. It never was nor even today be called just a plain hobby: it’s a way of life, a form of art, a lifetime experience which keeps demo sceners company for a life, even for those who get out and do something “serious” instead.

Despite all of this the situation in 1995 wasn’t very bright. Commodore died and the development of Amiga computers was ceased. The fantastic Amiga 5000 model remained in prototype stage. The great Jay Miner, father of the beloved Amiga machines, had even died. Although some smaller companies continued developing Amiga peripherals and devices, and Amiga Technologies successfully escaped the sinking ship, it was obvious that the Amiga could not stay one of the best computers in the world for long. Their biggest competitor, Atari was also getting to grips with bankruptcy, so the great opponent, the Atari Falcon had also disappeared from the stores. Everything collapsed and the price of the Amiga 1200 had just dropped, and many users just wanted to switch to it from the Amiga 500. Prices then increased on the news of Commodore’s liquidation. After 1994 it cost a smaller fortune to build up a serious Amiga 1200 or 4000 system – much more than a similarly equipped PC. Besides Amiga users couldn’t even hope that parts, peripherals and accessories would be available for their machines in a year or two, not mentioning service support. Those who purchased a PC would be guaranteed this support through many parties supporting the platform. Escom, the company that acquired Amiga, was still manufacturing the best selling parts, but in much smaller volumes than Commodore. Software companies startedly scuttled from the declining platform and it seemed that the Amiga would soon meet the same fate as the Commodore 64. Interestingly enough it was Amiga Technologies which resumed the production of the old C64 in 1995 for Chinese export! The People’s Republic of China had just reached the level of economic and social development where a mass demand has risen for a home computer with such ability and price. It’s unknown whether there was a Chinese C64 demoscene or a similar community, but there were probably user clubs, and people who tried programming visual effects on the old-new machine. Maybe someday some light will be shed on this.

The IBM PC meanwhile grew fully fledged. The instable and ineffective computer, tinkered up from cheesy parts remained alone on the market, offering the single alternative for replacing the Amiga 500 – besides, of course the older computers like the Atari ST, Apple Iie, or the Commodore 64. The road for Amiga users branched. Some of them yielded and replaced their faithful “girlfriend” with a PC, but compulsive Amigans wouldn’t even hear of deploying an “Intel-based trashbin” into their living rooms. These people stuck the Intel Outside logo on their computers, mocking the Intel Inside trademark logo on branded PCs, proving that the CPU is a genuine Intel part. This logo soon became the symbol of a spotaneous resistance movement. It appeared in demos, was used as a desktop wallpaper, was given away on little stickers at parties, printed on t-shirts and so on. Even a party was called Intel Outside in Poland. As a protestment against the overwhelming flood of PCs, Amiga users often destroyed PCs publicly, burning or smashing them to pieces. The Hungarian group named Crimson Jihad was especially born to fight against PCs. They often displayed creative ways of killing the “tin box” at Hungarian Amiga parties and the annual summer Amiga camp at Parád: burning it with high voltage electricity, smashing it with a sledgehammer, blowing it up, ramming it with a car, and so on. They weren’t alone, at every major party there were at least one or two video clips showing the spectacular destruction of an Intel-based computer. There were parties with PC smashing or Windows hanging compos. PC sceners often watched this movement uncomprehendingly, and didn’t understand why Amigans were so “primitive.” Actually, it’s pretty easy to understand if we imagined an old biker who has just been told that Harley Davidson was liquidated, and only Japanese electric scooters will be available from then on. The growing superiority of the PC was common talk in Amiga circles worldwide, and Amiga users soon found themselves in a similar situation as Commodore 64 sceners when the Amiga became widespread during the early 90’s.

The advancement of the PC and the radical change of demo styles put the coders on the horns of a dilemma. While earlier the Amiga was much better suited for programming visual effects than the PC, now it was the other way around. While demos mostly consisted of scrollers, starfields, bitmap effects and other routines that were easy to realize with the blitter and the copper, the Amiga was more expedient than the PC, lacking any graphical coprocessors. Gouraud and Phong shading, voxel effects and complex fractals were much easier to code on a PC, not just because of its brutal processing power – 40–66 MHz instead of 14 – but the basic difference between the screen management of the two different computers.

The Amiga handled the contents of the screen with the so-called planar method, assembling the visible picture from bitplanes. It can be imagined as if we laid a set of transparent planes on each other, each containing a detail of the image, and we get the full picture by looking through the entire array. A bitplane is a two-dimensional array of bits, like a grid, in which each square can be 1 (filled) or 0 (blank). The more such bitplanes we lay on each other, the more colors we can display, exactly 2 raised to the power of the number of planes. If we use just one bitplane, that enables us to use 2 colors, 2 bitplanes are 4 colors, 3 bitplanes are 8, and so on. The maximum is 8 bitplanes, where we can use all the 256 colors of the AGA, which is 28 colors.

The addition of overlapping bits of individual bitplanes specify the color of the displayed pixel. To get a given color, we have to add the binary values of these bits, each meaning 2 raised to some power. The values of the first plane’s bits are 1, the second plane’s are 2, the third plane’s are 4, and so on. Our example explains how a sprite from the game Bubble Bobble is displayed. This little dragon consists of 6 colors, so we need 3 bitplanes (8 possible colors). The last 2 colors of the palette will not be used, as they are not used in the graphics. The size of the dragon is 16 × 16 pixels.

The eye of the dragon, the pixel at coordinates 10; 8 is black. This is the fifth color of the palette. So if we want the 8th pixel in the 10th column to display the value of 5. We have to turn on the 10; 8 bit on the 0th and 2nd bitplanes. The bit on the 0th plane is a value of 1, while the bit on the 2nd plane is 4. Thereupon the overlapping bits result as 1 + 4 = 5. This way we displayed 5, the black color on the desired screen position. The red pixel on the figure shows this addition.

If we wished to display the yellow color on the little dragon’s crest, which is the 1st color on the palette, we turn on the appropriate bit only on the 0th bitplane. This results in the value of 20, which is 1, while the rest of the bitplanes all add 0 to the same pixel. If we need the white color number 4, then we turn on a bit only on the 2nd bitplane, which will give 22, and the rest of the planes will again add 0 each.

The apparent subtility of planar mode actually doesn’t obstruct easy programming. The blitter and the copper makes it easy to program a scroller or a bob. The blitter provides aid for filled vector routines with its line drawing and area filling abilities. But a textured object can’t be displayed that easy. Each pixel of the screen has to be painted according to the color of the chunk of the object that is projected there. It means that the program has to set each bitplane before every screen refresh. This pixel-by-pixel manipulation is not supported by any of the coprocessors. Since a nice texture requires at least 32 colors, it needs five bitplanes, which means that the routine will be very slow, since it has to set the bits alone, without the aid of the blitter. Basically it means that the program has to perform the same operation five times to get the result once, and meanwhile it also has to compute a set of other things.

The PC’s screen management is following the simpler chunky method. Pixels can be directly set to a given value in chunky mode, the program just has to write the value to the appropriate video memory position. Staying with the above example, if we wanted to set the eye of the dragon black, that is, setting the pixel to the 5th color, then we simply have to write a value of 5 to the 10; 8 coordinate in the VGA video memory array, and we don’t have to amuse ourselves with binary addition. That is just one operation. This is the reason why the PC was more suitable for running complex vectorgraphic programs, because texture mapping requires direct screen management, and without it, the possibilities are quite limited. This is also the reason for having fewer flight simulators and other vectorgraphic games on the Amiga. PCs made rings round the Amiga in 1995 not only in computing power, but also graphical abilities, and it made sense for many to choose it as a demoplatform.

Those who stayed with the Amiga were forced to invent some way to bridge the barriers of planar mode. The simplest solution was a quasi-chunky method, to generate the picture not on the screen, but in the memory, and then break the picture down to bitplanes and copy them onto the screen. This was called chunky to planar method, or c2p for short. Such c2p routines were increasingly popular in Amiga demos from 1995, and finally there were very few demos that still operated with the blitter and the copper.

Programming style also became more elegant, more demanding till 1995. Coders rarely used undocumented functions, hardware specific routines. Compatibility problems were on the increase during the end of the Amiga 500 era, some demos did not run properly on enhanced Amiga computers. The reason was that often the coders ignored the existence of nonstandard configurations, and did not care how the program will run on another machine. It often happened that a demo didn’t even run on an enhanced A500, or that a routine written on an A1200 did not work on an A4000. Commodore always endorsed programmers to use the built-in basic routines of the operating system instead of following the method of hardware coding, or as they called it, illegal coding, programming the machine with direct commands, although it’s slightly faster it might cause compatibility issues. A shining example of this inappropriate approach is the melon bombing part of The Desert Dream. If we run the demo on an Amiga 1200 instead of an Amiga 500, the melon will fly across the pyramid and blow up behind it. It happens because Laxity timed the explosion to the fixed speed of the Amiga 500, and did not think about what would happen if they ran the demo on a faster computer in the future. Actually not all “illegal” technologies were problematic. For example, the trackloader was one of them and it happened to work very well on any Amiga computer. Still, more and more coders took Commoodore’s advice until 1995, and then stopped their habit of timing routines to their own computer, assuming that everybody had the same configuration.

The year was 1995, Commodore, the company, was dead and the Amiga demo scene was about to step it up a notch.

As the title of this chapter suggests, despite of the liquidation of Commodore, the seeping of users and other difficulties the Amiga scene entered a new period. The inspired push of Nexus 7, Motion, G Force and other pieces brought new groups and new names who continued writing the already rich history of the Amiga scene. The original groups that gained a name in the OCS/ECS era most disbanded by this time and were followed by new names, usually to groups and artists who were running as “lower league” players during the earlier years if they exisited at all.

Poland prided itself in producing quite a lot of excellent newbies. The isolated Polish scene grew quickly, showing off more and more serious releases. Still there were only a few really good Polish demos, as there was a relative shortage of good coders, but the Poles still had some names to boast. The greatest star was naturally the The Party-competitor Musashi, the coder of Union, usually followed on the charts by Sputnik of Freezers, Miklesz of Damage, Dak of Mad Elks, and Ranger of Ladybird Design. Naturally their groups also led the top list of Polish groups. The readers of contemporary diskmagazines usually voted Freezers to be number one, followed by Mystic with a few points less, the demo section of the similarly named warez- and swapper group, founded by XTD. A few more names from the top bunch of the Polish scene: Flying Cows Inc., Illusion, Amnesty, Appendix, Damage, Tilt, Anathema, Applause, The Edge, Anadune, Floppy, and it could be continued, as there were at least 100–150 known and unknown groups at the time in Poland.

Fortunately the country had more musicians and graphic artists than coders. Before Lazur would have started his way to worldwide fame, he was anticipated on the charts by Seq of Absolute!, Animal of Union or Yoga of Mystic. The best musicians of Poland were XTD, Scorpik, and Dreamer, but Snoopy of Union, Beethoven of Freezers or Magiel of Ozone Free have also made it to the charts. Scorpik was elected to be the best musician of the year in 1996 by R.O.M.’s readers, after he won the four channel music compo at The Party ’95. At the time that was the greatest Polish victory of any foreign demo scene party.

Plenty of diskmags were operating on the extended Polish demoscene. Most of them were written in Polish language, so naturally only Poles read them. A whole revolution started after Kebab, the first diskmagazine was released. Just like in other countries, beginner groups thought that the easiest way to success is to start a magazine. The difference was that the Polish standards were lower and diskmags did not have the deep traditions the magazines in West Europe had like R. A. W., Zine or Stolen Data which had already set the standards. Hence in no other country were so many diskmags being released at the same time as in Poland. At the end of 1995 The Knight, the main editor of Gedan has estimated the number of diskmags released since Kebab was around 40, including ceased ones. There were about 25–30 still active at the beginning of 1996. Quantity, however, has nothing to do with quality. Most of these magazines only existed for two or three issues but there were some true gems which lasted for more than a dozen issues. These mags were not entirely demoscene oriented, although some of them had a scene section, but some of them wrote nothing about demos or the life of groups. Most of their articles were dealing with general everyday life or they published short stories, poems, and jokes. The most popular such magazine, after contemporary Polish charts, was Silesia, edited by Illusion. According to the today’s opinion of the founder of the mag, Mr. Zeb of Illusion – later called Jazzcat of Pic Saint Loup – Silesia was actually mediocre, but it was widely known because of its regular issues, and that’s why it was always voted for the best. Plenty of other magazines were known and popular, for example Pocytaj Mi Mamo (“Read for me Mommy”, after a kids’ book series in the 80s, Ladybird Design), Nie Z Tej Beczki (“Something Completely Different”, Lamers), Imazine (Saint Group), Barbapapa (Pride) or Telephor (Flying Cows). The few scene-oriented magazines included Kebab, Zig Zag or Fat Agnus, which was the most successful such Polish scenemag with its 16 released issues. One of its numerous publicators, Lifter is still remembered as the best columnist of the Polish magscene. Most Polish diskmags still ran on ECS/OCS machines in 1996, as Polish sceners couldn’t afford to replace their old machines as easily as West Europeans.

A very high quality diskmag had appeared out of nowhere in 1993, which could have stood the competition even with R.A.W., if it did not happened to be written in Polish. The magazine was released by Alchemy, titled Zasmashka, but unfortunately it lasted for only one issue, although there was no lack of supporters, everybody would have gladly written articles for the excellent magazine, which showed up on charts even years after its release. Zasmashka was noted for its fabulous code, music and graphics already, but the real spice was the collection of excellent articles shot with gentle humour. Its readers had remarked that this magazine can’t be compared to any of its contemporaries, that it was a very unique diskmag and no one had ever made anything similar to it. As a matter of fact, with the exception of charts, Zasmashka contained nothing related to the scene.

The first English language Polish scene magazine was Thing by Applause. It existed from 1992 to 1994, with 15 issues during this period. Although quality-wise it stood its ground, it had fewer articles than its foreign competitors. In order for Poland to finally have a world class scenemag, Obsession launched Gedan in October 1995. The originally planned title was Polish Charts, because the main aim of Obsession was to assemble a publication exclusively about the Polish scene, but in English. Gedan editors took the burden of international communication on their shoulders, and they indeed did a good job. Their magazine stood its ground on the international scene both design- and content wise. Thanks to their special proofreader, Mamret of Independence, who supervised grammatic quality, Gedan’s English was exceptionally good. They also had quite a few foreign columnists. The last issue came out in 1996. The reason for ceasement was somewhat prosaic: The Knight got bored of being a main editor, and stopped it without any particular fuss.

The glass wall separating Polish groups from other countries slowly started to crack. The first internationally significant Polish group, TPD, later called TPDL was born in 1994. They came in 6th at The Party 4 with their intro titled Hollywood Mood. The name TPDL referred to the four members: Tom, Python, Dreamer and Lazur. They were already well known in Poland. Tom and Python were noted after the Hallucinations and Dreams demo, Dreamer gained fame by his excellent music, and Lazur attracted attention as a particularly talented graphic artist. TPDL was disbanded after The Party, but then Dreamer ran into Magic of Mirage in Holland at the Somewhere in Holland demoparty in Roosendaal, 1995. They had already known each other since Magic was the first Western scener who often went for trips to Poland, to learn about the life of local groups. They winded up at Magic’s place after the party and soon decided to found a new group. The story on how they easily picked their name is described as follows: Dreamer suggested the short word “Nah”, while Magic put forward “Kolor”, after the label on a volleyball lying on the floor. That’s how the new team came to be known as Nah Kolor. It included all four former members of TPDL and Magic. They became TRSI’s demo section in the same year, and acquired a bunch of new members soon afterwords. Virgill, Danny, and later Muffler, the Finnish musician, joined and a good dozen more from different countries. Nah Kolor was Poland’s first international group and Polish diskmag editors finally stopped moaning about their country having no contact with the Western scene. Their swapper, Norby, was Poland’s most active international correspondent. Nah Kolor only boasted some musics and graphics in 1995, and a packmagazine titled Speed, edited by Qba, but soon came out with demos and intros. At the end of 1995, at The Party TRSI offered a few members to either become exclusive TRSI members or leave the group and keep the Nah Kolor label. Some accepted the offer, but most of them left TRSI, and thus Nah Kolor became an independent label again.

By 1995 not only Mystic and Nah Kolor had foreigners on their memberlists. A fashion wave emerged at the end of 1994. Every Polish group wanted at least one foreign member, even if he is doing nothing, but just to let them be international. Almost all Polish sceners dreamed about joining some noted – or not so noted – foreign group. The most successful was undoubtedly Mr. Root, who became a member of Sanity, and participated in a few Sanity productions as a musician. But the coder of Sanity, Mr. Pet was also of Polish nationality, and a Polish citizen although he lived in Germany since his childhood. The reason for this newly risen fashion was that the word “foreign country” still sounded a bit exotic for Polish ears. The teenagers of this period had grown up in the dull world of socialism. Travelling abroad and getting to know foreigners was a special privilege and adventure. It was the same in every ex-socialist country, like Hungary and Slovakia.

Interestingly enough, the word elite was a taboo on the Polish scene. While in other countries it was a custom habit for the greatest groups to carry it high, and only maintain contact with other successful groups, despising beginners – it was especially common in Finland – the same attitude deserved severe disdain in Poland. Successful artists were expected to be humble and friendly towards beginners or less successful groups.

To get the full picture about the state of the Polish scene around 1995, we have to mention the huge number of Polish parties. During 1995–1996 there was some events almost every month. There were 950 visitors crowded at Intel Outside II Party in September 1995, organized by Mystic and Union, making it the biggest Polish demoparty at the time. Such an attendance is noteworthy even on an international scale. Despite its popularity, the party failed to attract foreign visitors and competitors, because the organizers only advertised it in Polish diskmagazines and on Polish BBSes. They did not release any English language invitation intros or information text files. The demo, intro and video competition were all won by Union. Their demo Tear Down the Wall was an improvement of Beyond the Future, their The Party demo, with a conversion of the soundtrack from Pink Floyd’s The Wall movie.

One might wonder if such a Polish party had a different atmosphere from a similarly big West European one. Was Intel Outside different from The Party or The Gathering? We can ask the same about Hungarian, Czech or Slovak parties. The answer is obvious: yes, it was. East European parties were somewhat more liberal in that they weren’t so precisely organized, and the visitors also tended to have an easier time letting themselves go. For example, the stereotype that everybody is drunk at Polish parties and the entire thing looks like a mass boozing event instead of a computer conference is not far from the truth. Actually it sometimes caused several problems because not everybody can get drunk and maintain their calmness. Course the same happened incidents also at Western European parties – just think about the damage at the first The Party. However, the real difference was not this drunken disorganization. The real difference between Eastern and Western European party culture was that in the East the organizers were usually also partying, not taking either themselves or the rules too seriously, while at Western parties they were usually bent on arranging everything professionally. Well, sometimes these loose parties ended up a bit more vehement than expected. For example at the first Intel Outside party the organizers tried to stir up the already sparkling atmosphere with a live striptease show. The stripper got rid of her pieces of clothing on the stage one after another, but when she was only wearing a thong and stepped too close to the edge she found herself in the arms of some illuminated TRSI members in no time zealously trying to help her get rid of the rest of her apparel. Fortunately her bodyguard rescued her from the “fans” before something bad happened, although the guys apparently wouldn’t have done anything harmful to her.

The Polish ASCII scene was a unique phenomenon. Since Poland had no serious BBS network, nobody needed menus and user interfaces. Hence the ASCII scene followed a different path. Character graphics was not just to decorate file_id.diz files, although they were also used for this purpose, but to enrich information files, diskmag voting forms, sometimes diskmag articles. The Polish ASCII scene followed way different design aesthetics then the West European scene, that the result of this was the Western ASCII groups often despised their Polish counterparts. Polish ASCII collections were not simply collections of logos and drawings but they often connected the figures with stories, texts and other motives into a homogeneous piece of art.

While life was swarming in Poland activity decreased in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Barely half a dozen of Amiga groups carried on with the dash of previous years. Only a few groups stood on their feet after the liquidation of Commodore. Among these groups one would find the founding fathers of the entire Czech scene, Vectors, besides of Harmoni, Division, Raptors or Crazy Boys. The best Czech diskmagazine, EXiT was edited by Vectors, and Raptors was running another one titled A-Gate. Czech demos were very rare, and the local scene also lacked parties. The single noted Amiga party was the Reset Party organized by Vectors, probably in 1996.

The situation was better in Hungary but not by much. While the Hungarian PC scene grew rapidly, the popularity of the Amiga dropped, mainly because the high price and poor availability of the machines. The biggest ever Hungarian demoparty, SCEneST ’95 was held in Budapest in April 1995, with Impulse as co-organizers and responsible for the Amiga demo and intro compos. This was the year’s single Amiga event, not counting the flop festival called Liqid ’95 in December, which became Hungary’s Hurricane party. There were over ten significant scene parties in Hungary during 1996 but all without considerable Amiga participation. The best demo of SCEneST was Man on the Moon by Faculty, the second prize went to Promise Home Entertainment for Voices from the Dark.The intro compo was won by Therapy, a group that transferred from the Commodore 64 scene, with their Zombie intro. These works were considered mediocre on the international scene, similarly to the contemporary Polish productions. There usually weren’t any Amiga compos at the rest of the Hungarian parties, or if there were, they were not very high in quality. Still there were refreshing exceptions, but the Hungarian Amiga scene did not produced much of these in 1995. The leading group of the country was still Absolute!, who got rid of their foreign sections, and continued purely with Hungarian members, except one French member. Later they accepted Scorpik, who joined in 1995. Finally ADT, the leader of the group sold his Amiga and left the scene, allegedly because his reputation was heavily damaged by some business maneuvers regarding the sale of commercial games developed by Hungarian demogroups. His successor was Lord, one of the most active Hungarian swappers, also operating his own BBS, Nimber of the Beast. Their diskmagazine, Sledgehammer had been ceased from 1995, but Frame 18 and Promise revived it in 1996. Majic 12 was dead, or at least they didn’t make Amiga demos any more. Lord of Absolute! wrote the following about the Hungarian situation in the middle of 1995 on the pages of Top Secret.

Five years ago, when I bought my first Amiga 500, almost all of my ex-64’er friends changed to the Amiga with me. The Hungarian scene lived its halcyon days in 1991. Groups like Cerberos, Live Act, Soc. Brigade, 23 Celsius, Majic 12, Muffbusters, Fi-Re Crew, Red Rats marked this era. A new Hungarian product was released almost every month, and the Csoki became the place for some kind of pilgrimage for sceners. It was not just a meeting place on every Friday, but many intros and demos were first released here. The Amiga scene was almost a lifestyle. There were 4–5 parties annually, where everybody who just slightly counted on the scene had shown up. (…) But what do we have in Magyarland today? There was one single sceneparty in 1995 (the second is coming up now in December), and activity seems to have ceased. Dudes are going to the Csoki with daddy’s Pentium, I can count this year’s demos on a single hand, intros are much fewer; more and more sceners are leaving the scene, although their group is formally preserved, but practically with zero activity. New people don’t really come to the scene, so replenishment is also zero. (…) If we keep going like this, probably there won’t be a Hungarian scene by the end of the year?

Lord’s bitter prediction was unfortunately right, the Hungarian Amiga scene practically died in a year. Only a handful of people still cared for the Amiga in 1996, and the release of every demo made a splash. Impulse kept the grounds for a while, and some less significant groups like Frame 18 or Promise. Hungary was the first country where the Amiga scene disappeared. Lord had a remark at the end of the article cited above: “To be straight, reserving prejudices, the PC scene looks more promising than the Amiga.” He was right again, and the Hungarian PC scene soon experienced a similar upswing as the Polish Amiga scene.

At the time of the Polish awakening and the Hungarian declination, Amiga activity has also dropped in West Europe. Few saw future for the Amiga in early 1995, and sold their computers or transferred to the PC. Tsunami, the coder of Virtual Dreams said, after he bought a Pentium: “I just wonder how old coders like Chaos still want to go on coding on the Amiga. They are wasting their talent.”This remark well mirrors the then mentality. They smashed and scorned the PCs to no avail, the tinpots conquered a growing slice of the Amiga scene.

Few quality demos were made in the first half of the year, and it impressed its mark upon most parties of the year. A little recovery was only observed at the end of the year. The “few releases syndrome” was a common topic in diskmagazines, discussed as the first symptom of the scene being sick. The reason was not only the decline of the Amiga’s popularity, but also that the respected and popular groups have all reached a point where game developer companies noticed and offered well paid positions for them. The Norwegian company Funcom for example sucked up the entire Norwegian scene, of course starting with Spaceballs. Sceners working at the company later founded the group named Scoop. But sceners were also employed by Ocean, Infogrames, SSI and other leading game developers. Demomaking and visiting parties is much harder while working a full time job, hence a lot of great names disappeared during 1995. Sanity had been permanently disbanded after releasing the final version of the ill-fated Roots, titled Roots 2.0. Chaos left the group, Jester was a Pygmy Projects member for a while, but he also left the scene soon. Chtulhu and Mr. Pet remained members, and the French section was willing to continue for a while, but they also soon turned towards a professional career and became game developers. The Sanity superdemo, Broken Promises, which had been vowed to be released soon, was never released. Another promising German label, Masque also vanished at the beginning of the year. Rebels also died, but it was at least the third occasion, and they were soon reformed again, and here we will stop caring about their further putrefactions and revivals, as there were plenty of them. Quartex ended up the same, they ceased for a year. The German section of DCS also fell apart, and although nobody announced the death of the group, they remained inactive. Propaganda, the diskmag of Razor 1911 was discontinued, and also the popular Upstream. Its main editor, Cesium enlisted in the R.O.M. team.

Andromeda was also silenced by Funcom. As Norway’s leading demogroup, they were also proposed fat offers, which some members accepted and some didn’t. This was already enough to disable the group since the ground of Andromeda’s fantastic performance was the well organized internal communication. Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, HeadX, Interphace, Fairfax and Archmage were attending the same university and they could meet any time. This was impossible when some of them went to jobs instead of the university. Archmage could not replace the lost key persons, and Andromeda was never able to produce demos again.

Fortunately not everybody disappeared. The two oldest labels of 1995, continuing old traditions were TRSI and Scoopex. Both teams possessed strong positions in Germany and France, and Scoopex has even risen to be the leading label of both countries for a short while. The pivot of the scene was moved to Germany and France, while Scandinavian nations have slipped down on the charts. Scoopex was circulating rumors about the return of Slayer for a while, allegedly working on the sequel to Mental Hangover titled World of Vodka. It was supposed to be released at The Party ’94, but it never happened. Actually Slayer was not interested in the scene, and it’s doubtful if he worked on any demo at all. Finally Scoopex kicked him out for inactivity, but TRSI reset him. Uyanik, the main organizer of TRSI announced that World of Vodka was 80 % completed and it would soon be released under the TRSI label. This also never happened.

Scoopex was gradually growing from 1995. New members joined, among them such celebrities as Made, the graphic artist whose slideshow titled Artcore, released in June 1995 was voted for the best by R.O.M. readers. (This demo has nothing to do with Haujobb’s similarly titled demo, it’s just a coincidence.) Meanwhile the new organizer, Antibyte kicked out all inactive members, and the result was about 100 members was decreased to around 20. Thanks to the efforts of the new members, Scoopex demos and intros came out one after another. Their demo Alien, coded by Antibyte, with graphics by Made and Absurd, music by Laxical and Fred, came in second at the Abduction ’95 party in Finland. The same autumn, at Remedy ’95 in Sweden, their last trackmo, Iso won the third prize. The NoName musicdisk, arranged by five musicians – Oxbow, Vegard, Laxical and Daddy Freddy – was the first chiptune musicdisk ever. The hit series continued in 1996, with productions like Cyberia, Quantum and Phorce, but they did not win first prize at any party until 1997, the Wired ’97 party in Belgium. The French section, along with Made has left the group in early 1997, but the most successful period of the group, reclining on the work of two coders, the Austrian Antibyte and the Danish Boogeyman, has just started.

Big changes were going around TRSI. They celebrated their 10th anniversary in 1995, as the first group in the history of the scene. Now they were the longest existing group ever. Interestingly enough, RSI was born on the same day, at the same party as the also legendary, but already dead Skid Row. They made some reforms on their birthday. First they removed all members under 20 years of age and announced that they will only accept candidates over this age. Still they had over a hundred members. The same time they announced the foundation of their own record company, TRSI Recordz, aimed to publish music albums arranged by scene musicians. They released a row of excellent albums in 1995, including CNCD – The Album, containing tracks from Groo, Dizzy, Heatbeat, Prime and Dan, the musicians of Carillion and Cyberiad. It was first presented at The Party 5. The repertoire also included the trance album of TRSI musicians, Sky’n’Walker – Altered States, or the Cyberlogik and Cyberlogik 2.00 – The Follow-Up music anthologies, containing classic Amiga module musics professionally remastered, in dolby surround. One Ampere Upon End was a video CD with a videomix medley of TRSI and FairLight-Virtual Dreams demos, with some effects never seen before. The demo section of TRSI, mainly consisting of Polish members was also very active. They dazzled the audience with pearls like Cubic Dream, Anhalonium Lewini and Artifice demos, the Victoria musicdisk, or the Honeycomb and Sun slideshows, with Fiver’s and Lazur’s graphics. Fiver was noted as “the newcomer of the year,” who appeared just as unexpectedly as Fade One some years ago.

The first megaparty of the year, five days long, The Gathering, which is held in Norway, was close to being a complete failure. Although some smaller glitches already napped the visitors’ nerves at earlier TGs, like a too expensive buffet, power failures or a sleeping room with a -10°C temperature, but it was more or less compensated by the excellent atmosphere and compo entries. This time even the partymood was broken, and the organizers, who were not Crusaders this time, but Spaceballs, Scoop (PC) and Safe Hex International (Atari ST), were also hunted by bad luck. Perhaps they were the most unfortunate organizing team of written history, who were working diligently, but all possible disasters found them. They survived a pretty huge series of setbacks.

First there were only half as many visitors as a year before, only a thousand of them, and just very few foreigners. The five technicians supposed to maintain the power supply had forgot to bring their tools and when they borrowed some they started to hack cables helter-skelter, doing more damage than a team of saboteurs. There were some tables where they only laid a naked cable end, without any connector, but sometimes not even that. The voting disks turned out to be unusable, so they had to quickly fix the program and distribute them again. The security guards set their duty according their own discretion, they did not patrol where they did not felt like it was needed or where nothing interesting was happening, for example in the sleeping rooms. Taking advantage of this, some uncultivated visitors urinated everywhere in the sleeping area, even on the sleepers. This place was very cold because there was no trace of the promised electric heaters. It was because the owner of the location wanted to raise the rent just 24 hours before the party and the organizers had to dissuade him from it. It took so much time that the team could not get the already ordered heaters. Then they received a different projector from the one they ordered and the much smaller device did not support many of the Amiga screen resolutions. When the organizers tried to raise a complaint they found that the entire company had already left for their Eastern holiday and only a few of the employees were accidentally in the office that afternoon just a day before the party. Finally they somehow dug up some signal converters and cables, so they finally managed to get the Amiga’s picture on the big screen, but only through the worse quality composite video output, since they were unable to connect the RGB video port. Additionally there were some demos changing PALDBLPAL modes while running, so during the compos an organizer had to pull out a cable and replace it with another in the right moment, lightning fast. Another demo was totally messed up, only a quarter of it was visible. Surprisingly enough, there was no problem with the music compos, although chaos was overwhelming the poor organizers behind the scenes. The pre jury first found that they have nothing to listen to the compo entries, so they had to borrow an amplifier. When they finished with the pre selection, it came to light that all three sound technicians went to sleep, because they had been up for three days already. Finally Lizard of Spaceballs, the main organizer slowly turning grey had to stand behind the tablesized mixer, which he has never even seen before, and figure how it works on the fly. Fortunately nothing disturbed the compo except of a broken cable. Well, not this compo. The demo compo was delayed 15 hours because some funny guy damaged The Big Blue BBS through the network, which also stored the compo entries. As a response, the security team hermetically locked the building, and did not let anyone out till Lizard accurately checked all the computers on the network and located the Amiga 4000 from which the attack was launched. The owners of the machine confessed the hacker attack, and the police arrested them, but meanwhile someone stole their computer! How the thief managed to smuggle it out of the strictly strangulated building remains a mystery. Fortunately the organizers videotaped the examination of the computer, so they had the necessary proof. Still they couldn’t find who was the other funny guy who connected the 220V mains to the network, constantly jamming The Big Blue.

To top it all off, to further delight the organizers, on the last day it turned out that the party’s Danish financial coordinator embezzled most of the income, and there was no funds left to pay the rented services and the location. This became another police case and they issued a warrant of caption against the thief but it was of little use.

After all of this, naturally everybody bashed the organizers in diskmags, on BBS forums and on the Internet. They got at least as much as the ill-fated Hurricane, and the fact that they were actually not the ones to blame for most of the failures changed nothing. Obviously the audience is never in consideration of the organizers’ actual efforts if a party goes haywire. Additionally, if a party’s atmosphere goes below a certain level, the visitors often damage the party building, breaking doors or windows, cutting cables, sometimes even starting fires.

The competitions of Gathering ’95 fell behind the previous years’ ones. Musics and graphics were all right, but other categories brought somewhat flat, stereotyped productions. The only exception was the winner of the demo compo, Deep by two Finnish groups, CNCD and Parallax. The bright pastel colors of the demo were selected by Destop, the excellent graphist of CNCD, the music was arranged by two previously lesser known Finnish musicians, Yolk and Legend. The code was the work of Debug, Simply and Bandog.

This very stylish demo opened CNCD’s hit series. The key to its success was not just the unique color scheme, the spectacular routines or its high technical quality, but also the coherent design and the harmonically attached parts. But it would not have been the streak of quality without Yolk and Legend’s music, a tune without the usual demo music cliches, different from the usual style. Deep’s music was described as a moderately experimental techno at its time, today we’d call it a kind of breakbeat-drum’n’bass. It was unusual, but it has not yet broken the borders, just extended them a bit. But the two musician genii soon unleashed their creativity. Two months later, at the Abduction ’95 party in Finland they came up with an unusual idea: they “remixed” their demo, and converted it to a quite different thing by using the same routines, but different music and graphical design. They replaced Deep’s pastels with bright, contrasty palettes and dubbed the new colors with psychedelic, aggressive alternative techno. This demo was titled Deep – The Psilocybin Remix.There wasn’t any example of altering a demo like this, and the uncommon artistic experiment met success. Psilocybin Remix won the second prize, although many criticized the reuse of old routines, and some feared that soon it’ll come into fashion to re-release the same demos several times, just slightly modifying them. Although some actually did it, these fears were generally without grounds and Deep brought more than just a few compo prizes. CNCD’s demos have established a new school and soon plenty of demos of the same style were born on both Amiga and PC. They usually say that Deep and its successors, the The Party ’95 winner Closer and the 1996 PC demo Inside were ahead of their time. That’s right: this kind of powerful design and psychedelic-progressive music became a general trend only years later, around 2000, and gained fame for plenty of other groups besides of CNCD. The Finnish group’s works can be considered pioneering. Not everybody liked this new avant-garde, but the majority did, and hence it had gained quickly notoriety.

Yolk and Legend were such an abut duo that their names practically became a trademark in the forthcoming years. They hardly released any musics without the other’s help. Often they assembled world hits in a single night, ping ponging the half finished module to and from by modem. Deep’s music was made the same way. They are probably the most experimental vanguards ever in the history of the scene. They don’t have two similarly sounding sounds, or even use the same techniques. As they were radical innovators, many liked them, but some didn’t. The fans of newness idolized them as demigods, but some old sceners did not like them. One is still for sure and that is Yolk and Legend, along with Dune brought fresh blood to the Amiga music scene. They had plenty of followers, for example, Muffler. I talked with Legend about these changes and the scene world in 1995.

A bunch of experimental musicians have appeared on the Amiga scene around 1994–1995. Among them, besides of you, Yolk, Dune, Muffler, and so on. You reinvented the way of tracking – at least that’s what they say. The style you, Finnish musicians came up with around this time, was greatly different of everything ever heard from the speakers of a computer before.

I’m quite sure we were the first to bring the so-called IDM (intelligent dance music) genre to the demoscene. At least I’ve never heard anything like that before. Well, it came out of boredom, I think. We were bored of all the same crap tunes, doing the same things, and demos that were getting pretty lame. We wanted something else.

Did it have a real life background? Were there musicians, bands inspiring you?

Yes. Prodigy, Acen, Cosmic Baby, Mike Ink, Autrechte, Oliver Lieb, Jiri Ceiver, Aphex Twin, and some more. Mostly strange techno. This was in ’93, when I started getting these tunes, they translated into something breakbeatish in ’94. It was like: “Hey, let’s do something freaky!” – and Destop was always in, although telling us a little bit what he would like to have.

What was the first success of this new style?

Parallax’s Drool This had a traditional tune, other than my breakbeat-trasher, that was my last traditional tune. I think it was Deep, the Gathering ’95 winner, and then ZiF, which came first at the Assembly. It had a minimalistic acid tune going all the time.

You and Yolk are always remembered as a duo. How did you meet?

We started swapping disks, tunes and samples in 1992 I think. He contacted me first, he was in some little Finnish group that time. I was really open for swapping, accepting anyone who wanted to. Then we met at Assembly ’92, and became instant friends. Musicmaking together started with Yolk’s temporary brickwall in some tune. I continued it, just for fun, gave it back to Yolk, and he was delighted.

Which was your first joint product, joint success?

The first joint product was a joke tune titled Ksylitol. The first success, so to call, I’d name Deep. But it wasn’t, rather Deep Psilocybin Mix was. I still remember all the environment and feelings during we composed that tune. Was it a hurry or not, and so on. Then there was Inside, a PC demo … or was it earlier?

No, that was later. Deep, Closer, Inside, that’s the order.

Oh yes, I’ve lost the track of time from that period. That tune, titled Eyekaboom was said to contain more than 4 channels, but that’s wrong. It was all good sampling and effecting, plus some jazz chords.

By the way, were you guys consuming hallucinogenes? Some claim it’s impossible to build such musical fantasies without any.

Nope. I don’t know if people thought we had, like, psilocybin mushrooms or so, but no, we didn’t. Well, not until the end of ’97. At least me, can’t speak for others …

How do you remember the contemporary musician legends, like Dune?

Dune arrived almost the same time like us, or a little bit later, and Muffler much later, in ’97 or so. Dune’s songs were more traditional, but with the “duneish” touch. He always had this touch, on every single module he did.

Do you like traditional Amiga music, like Lizardking, Jester, Tip and Mantronix’s works?

Sure. Jester, Dr. Awesome (whose Tunafish module is still my favorite), Firefox, and even some Tip & Mantronix tunes (like Overload), Dan, and many individual tunes from overall good or bad composers. Watching back now, time really flew with demos, musicmaking. Hundreds of productions released every week …

When your music appeared, the scene was in transition again. The old A500-style demos were fading away, and “PC style” demos were introduced. They were heavily technicized, less stylish demos, like Breathtaker, G Force and more. Do you think your music was fitting this trend? Did it help you in gaining fame?

No, I think it was more like our music was inspiring Destop while making Deep, or Mistral with ZiF, and years later, Hyperventillation and Sexadelic. We worked closely with both of them, and they worked closely with the coders, telling exactly what they wanted to see on the screen. This was a well working combination. We wanted to make more than the usual demos, not effect after effect, but more like a piece of art. All the three forces, the graphics, music and code section were joined together, working together.

You weren’t the first to invent this, but you reached enormous success.

Before that, in other groups, it was just the coder calling me, “give me some tune”, and I gave. From then on, I didn’t know anything about what’s happening. The coder also asked for the graphics, and after he got it, he put the demo together alone, resulting in the blatant effect-after-effect thing.

So, was it the CNCD recipe of success?

Yeah, I think … and also arrogancy, to always get whatever we wanted. Somehow it always ended quite well. We wanted to change the format of the demo, and do things like those black people, floating in the middle of the effects in Inside. It has nothing to do with anything, it’s not something that’d make you saying “whoa!”, but it was stylish.

Do you think you’ve changed the way people are thinking about tracking?

I never thought my music would change anything in people’s mind. But however, I remember, we had a gig at Abduction ’97, Origami (that’s me and Yolk) vs. Brothomstates (that’s Dune). There were quite much of the elite Finnish scene dancing for our tunes, and then I thought: “What the hell … do these people actually like our tunes?” Some younger sceners later caught up with our style, like Loke and Muffler.

Have you also received negative feedback about your music?

Yes, from some certain old sceners, like Micron of Byterapers, and some others, who preferred things done the old way. But not too often. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t ever want any change in the music of demos. I mean, the old style is fine, but what the hell, why not some other stuff? This reminds me to racism.

Here I have a story. We were walking around in Oulu, carrying some pizza after the Abduction gig. Suddenly a guy started screaming towards us, from some ten meters: “Yolk! Legend! Dune! Masters …” – then he just fell on his knees in front of us, worshipping us like some gods. We had our jaws dropped, and we just didn’t know what to react. It was a little bit embarrassing, because the streets were full of people, going to clubs and so. Finally we left him to the sidewalk, but he still screamed and mumbled after us. We were really puzzled. Fortunately this was the first and last time ever such thing happened, and I don’t think any of us ever wanted anything like that.

Do you consider yourself, or your musician friends legends? Regardless your handle …

Hm … I am not sure if we’re legends. No, I don’t think so. That’s not for us to decide.

But do you accept it if the scene decides so?

Well … certainly it’s a great honor, if they decide so, but I am still not sure … personally, at least.

CNCD’s innovative ideas came in the best minute for the slowing Amiga scene. It brought fresh inspiration and dash for the apathic demogroups, and finally showed an exit from the trend of overtechnicized demos. Fortunately they weren’t alone. More groups came out with new demos until the end of the year and it seemed that the scene would survive another crisis in 1995, again with new names and labels that would carry on with old Amiga traditions.

There was probably a bad stellar constellation for party organizers in the first half of 1995. The flop of The Gathering was spookily repeated in several countries. The French Saturne party – one of the competitors of The Gathering – was cancelled after several delays, because the already rented location was suddenly taken over by a political party for some election pow-wow. The party named Somewhere in Holland (or SIH for short) was announced as Holland’s largest sceneparty, but the well starting event scandalously fell flat, brought uncritical compo entries, and just for a change, there was another embezzlement case, one of the employees of a sponsoring company has stolen the money and escaped to Germany. It seemed that all parties of the year were cursed, when the news of a new event has spread, just a week after The Gathering, this time in Germany.

The Black Box Symposium party was organized by – back then and still existing – Sanity, Complex and Phantasm in Hamburg, exclusively for Amigans. The first Symposium attracted three hundred visitors, and thanks to the orderly organization and generous sponsorship, all of them left satisfied, despite of the party being only two days long. The Black Box Symposium was constantly growing during the next several years and finally it overtook The Gathering, and became the most important annual scene meeting at the millenium. The 1995 success, which paved the road to the future, was greatly supported by the best of the German demoscene who rejoiced the audience with excellent productions in each compo categories. The winner was a new group, Artwork, their demo was titled Greenday. This production outran Sanity’s newest and last demo, Roots 2.0, a trackmo surprisingly executable also on ECS/OCS machines, a completed version of its ill-fated predecessor at The Party.

Artwork was the newcomer of the year. The group was founded in 1994 by Damion of Platin and Voyage of DCS, and they sucked up almost all available German scene artists in a few months. Cockroach, JMS, Fiver, SMT, Cougar, Virgill, Tron, Noogman, The Loop and many more all quickly became Artwork members. The Generation diskmag, edited by Damion was also associated with the new group. This magazine only contained news and advertisements, it was some transition between a messagebox and a packmag, and some mentioned it as “the diskmag without articles.” Azure, formerly a member of Bizarre Arts joined Artwork after Black Box Symposium, and he soon helped the team to win more trophies.

Greenday was not as polished and well developed as Deep, but Tron, already with productions like Flower Power, Terminal Fuckup, BoggleDop or Arte behind his back, did everything to arrange spectacular and qualitative routines, while Noogman and Fiver added their best to the graphical side. The results were very good, even better considering how rushingly Greenday was finished. First it had no title at all, just Tron was working on it. Later the others joined but sometimes this or that never had time for the project. The music was also a difficulty. The Loop immediately made two modules for it, but Tron did not use them, as they did not fit the visuals. Finally Virgill of TRSI asked to contribute for the big project, and finally he arranged the music. However it was still not exactly what Tron had in mind, it still well fit the routines. Eventually Greenday was finished at the party. The responsive organizers reserved a separated room for Tron, and he has not left it for six hours till he finished, just a few minutes before deadline. This preciptation is the reason for the demo not having any greetings or an endscroller. Many, besides Artwork members, helped Tron with his work. For example, The Twins of TRSI designed the map of the voxel landscape, ATD of Complex came up with the color scheme of one of the parts, Argon of Polka Brothers gave the idea for a routine, and so on. The demo began with a raytraced animation, a futuristic-looking train leaving a building resembling a space station. It was originally made for a commercial videogame.

Some already celebrated the revival of the German scene after the successful Black Box Symposium and the rise of the powerful new group. Indeed, Artwork practically took Sanity’s opening, and started one of the longest hit series of the Amiga scene with Greenday. After its success their musicians and graphists won a set of second and third prizes at different parties, while the coders were working on the next demo for The Party.

Artwork was not marching to success alone. At the Nexus ’95 party in May, just a few weeks after Black Box Symposium, the hardly known Haujobb won its first victory with the Generation X demo. They joined the club of the most promising young German groups and they did not disappoint as their success still lasts to this day. They soon started their own diskmag titled Friendchi, but it lasted for only a single issue. Thanks to Artwork, Haujobb, Oxyron and other groups, and of course the increasingly successful parties, Germany rapidly advanced on the chart of most active countries and already threatened to overtake the positions of the traditionally demo ruling Scandinavian nations.

Unexpectedly Spain has also appeared on the scene. A group named Batman Group has won the little Posadas party in July with an excellent Amiga 500 demo, Batman Vuelve. This was still not enough for the world to recognize Spain but the local Amiga scene soon started to grow, and Batman Vuelve was its first sign.

Meanwhile Scandinavian countries and parties threw in the towel one after the other. Few believed in the success of Assembly after the failure of The Gathering, and even the optimists knew that this party was not for the Amiga scene any more. Unfortunately they were right. While there were excellent demos and intros in the PC categories, the yield of the Amiga competitions was hardly even mediocre. The single refreshing exception was the winning demo, Zif by the Finnish Parallax. Barely a handful of foreign Amiga groups visited Helsinki, and the general unconcern is well indicated by the fact that Amiga diskmagazines did not publish any party reports. This remained the way for the next several years. Moreover, the Assembly part also started to gain a profit-oriented image although the organizers denied gaining profit from the event. It is probably true they did not profit but it did not help the party feeling falling behind the previous years. The spectacular decline of the world’s megaparties made some people think it’s impossible to maintain a decent scene atmosphere and keep the unwritten rules over a certain number of visitors, and the party will necessarily become a boring mass event. It’s still debated whether it’s true or not. Indeed, huge parties slip up more often either morally or financially than smaller parties with 200–300 visitors, but we should not forget that serving a thousand or even five thousand partyfolks is a substantially heavier task.

Nothing particular happened during the rest of the year from Assembly, which is typically held in August, to The Party, which is held in December. Traditionally every group spends much of their efforts for The Party, and a few of them were naturally preparing for this single event during the entire year. One of them was Azure, the new coder of Artwork, whose 4K intro, Dawn and 64 K intro Creep, made in cooperation with Crash of Polka Brothers, have both won first prize. The 64 K intro of Axis, titled Headcase was supplanted to the second place, receiving less than half as many votes, so we can talk about a brilliant victory here. Artwork leaped forward in the charts, however, they still had some positions to climb.

CNCD’s new demo, Closer, the sequel to Deep was proven the best in the demo competition. Its victory was even superior to its predecessor’s, as it beat the Vision by Oxigene, a former Atari ST group by almost triple the score, and also FairLight-Virtual Dreams’ new masterpiece, Faktory. Closer was designed by Destop again, just like Deep, but the team was completely different this time. The music was written by Groo, graphics by Kube, and the coders were Juliet and Case. They used to be Stellar members for a short time, and later participated in other CNCD demo projects, among them the already mentioned PC demo Inside, the third sequel of the demo trilogy. CNCD actually became a fully equipped group by their association, as they always lacked coders, and had to rely on Parallax during the making of Deep. This cooperation however worked quite well, and the Parallax-CNCD duo won the demo compos of all three great parties in 1995.

Today, looking back to the previous decade we can assume that The Party was a watershed again, bringing new trends forward, and suppressing old customs. Although most demos and intros still followed the footsteps of Pygmy Projects, featuring countless pointlessly rotating Gouraud vector objects, noticeably the scene was already bored of the same motives repeating ad nauseam. This is why Closer became the clear winner. The design principles of the Amiga 500 era were unsuitable to support modern demos. Coders selected harmonic color schemes to no avail, graphic artists added nice pictures for no use, because boring Gouraud shaded torii remained just boring Gouraud shaded torii. Obviously the quality of graphics and music was raised along with the code, integration stitched tighter, and demos began being designed by someone who’s not preferring any of the specialities at the others’ expense. A new occupation appeared. Demos were now made by not just coders, graphic artists, and musicians, the term designer appeared. The designer aligned the work of the others, suggested the order of solving tasks, serving as something like a movie director. Most designers were originally graphic artists, but plenty of successful demos and intros were made during the years by designers without particular knowledge of the traditional areas like graphics, music or coding. A good designer was primarily not an artist, but a leader, and the benefit of his activities was the efficiency of the group’s teamwork. Tighter integration between different occupations ended the custom of remembering a demo by its coder, like “a demo by Chaos” or “Laxity’s demo”. Instead, the name of the group became the primary trademark. Only 4K intros were still noted after their coders, but it’s understandable as they were usually one-man projects.

A bright example of seeking new horizons was Faktory by Virtual Dreams. Its third place was debated, as the second placed Vision was pretty conventional, while Faktory was much more interesting, but there was nothing against the audience’s taste. Faktory broke the traditional design trend similarly as CNCD’s demos, flinging up technically sophisticated routines with rich graphical garnishment and spirited colors. This demo, just like Psilocybin Mix was well suited to introduce the innovations in demo design during 1995–1996 era. These fundamental works are the first examples of modern demo design, which influence design principles to our present day.

The word design meant the same since Melon Dezign and the Amiga 500 era: color schemes, graphical elements and motion synchronized to music. These were supposed to add variety and life to the coder’s routines. The new school has not abandoned this thinking, the innovation was something else. Even up to this time, code was the main concern, and everything else was just supporting the demo effects. The coder was in the center, musics and graphics were just spice. The new design trends reversed this hierarchy: the atmosphere of the graphics was mainly defined by the graphics and music, and the code played an inferior or at least equal role. From a certain point it was the survival of the Melon Dezign idea. But in fact it was not about neglecting the coder’s role, rejecting the essence of the demo, but rethinking the hierarchy in a new manner. Coders still made high quality routines, but now as an equal member of an art group of three different specialties, supporting the others, and not just calling on them. As a result, demos became diversified and more flexible. The designer was free to decide whether to let the graphics be the prime, with the coder working under the graphist’s hands, or the music should be the guideline, or even to change these dependencies in every single part, changing the demo’s atmosphere in every moment. Demos now received a character and contained returning graphical elements which became “trademarks” of each production. Such were the bizarre figures of Psilocybin Mix, or the strange humans front of the orange background in Faktory.

Alas Faktory was the last Virtual Dreams demo. The group announced their liquidation, for a quite prosaic reason: someone has stolen Alien’s Amiga at The Party. Unfortunately theft was on the increase at all parties of the world. The name Virtual Dreams however survived as a company name. Dr. Skull and Kerberos started creating games, video clips, and other entertainment products under this label and Alien purchased some of their shares.

1995 was a flat year, with few notable demos and even less successful parties. But before the obligatory moralizations about the death of the scene and the Amiga could have started, and modems has not yet even cooled down after downloading The Party’s compo entries, suddenly a new year started, and all groups started to prepare for The Gathering ’96. Some serious comings and goings began. Celebrated scene members changed groups and others founded new ones, all to the delight of diskmag editors who now had plenty of content for their magazines. Quite a few great scene members became know around this time, like Ephidrena, C-Lous or Impulse. A formerly not really known group, the Swedish founded The Black Lotus has emerged from the big hustle. They were quite active for a while, but only releasing mediocre stuff. Now they recruited such members as the graphists Danny, Facet, Lowlife and Louie, the musicians Azazel, SuperNao or Lizard, the organizer of the ill-fated The Gathering ’95, or Tim, the coder, formerly a member of Spaceballs. The suddenly growing group attracted great attention. They came in 15th place at The Party with their new demo, Mindprobe, but nobody expected it to be the forerunner of a dazzling megademo in the future. In the new year, TBL first appeared at a small Swedish party, Creutz ’96, scoring victory with their Spectral demo. But they saved their masterpiece for The Gathering.

After last year’s massive failure, it seemed that The Gathering’s number was up. The Crusaders thought different. They returned to the scene after years of silence, especially to save the party. The Gathering invited its visitors to a new location in 1996, to the city of Hamar, the 1994 Oslo olympics hall. The building was designed to accomodate three thousand people. Officially the party was organized by a foundation named Kandu, managed by the members of Crusaders, Cryptoburners and Amotech. To restore the good reputation of the party, they gave effect to a row of expensive but effective measures. Besides spending a lot on improving the quality of services, they paid last year’s outstanding dues months before the event. For the first time in history they arranged direct Internet connection for everybody at the party. This was quite a feature in 1996! 1600 computers were connected to the network during the five days scoring a nonofficial world record, and The Gathering became the world’s largest Internet cafe. The organizers even cared enough to dispatch a team of hostesses, “Crusader-girls” dressed in red and yellow to improve the aesthetics. Later they planned to involve these girls in every major sceneparty, especially for the service of female visitors – girlfriends and wives – guiding them during special “women’s programs,” taking them on shopping trips, sightseeing, or to sporting events. Unfortunately this part of the plan never got implemented. Still, the extensive efforts brought back the old shining glory of the Norwegian megaparty. Amigans, PC users, C64 sceners, but also other computers’ owners trooped to Hamar. Just for safety’s sake, the organizers even asked Lizard, the last year’s main organizer not to wear any name tags, so that nobody would think that he’s a member of the staff again. The Gathering ’96 finally became the most successful Norwegian sceneparty to date, not a single organizing glitch happened, everything went smoothly and fluently. Journalists were introducted to the party properly to prevent them making up sensational stories about hackers and software pirates. They had a serious press conference, lead by Dr. Awesome, introduced as Mr. Bjorn Lynne for the press, replying questions wearing an elegant suit and the image of a professional musical artist. Later he was spotted mingling with the crowd in his worn-outGathering ’94 t-shirt. “I think that I showed everyone that once a scener, then you’re a scene freak for the rest of your life, even if you now have a job” – he said to R. O. M. editors later.

On the third day of the party, competitions began and that was the moment The Black Lotus unleashed all their magical powers. “We will win” – said they right on the first day confidently and actually they did. They not only won the demo compo with the demo titled Tint, but also took the first and second prizes of the 4K intro category with the intros titled Gizmo and EQ. Louie, Facet, Rubberduck and Rodney won all the prizes of the graphics compo. Finally the organizers decided to award TBL with the special prize of the party, a Silicon Graphics Indigo computer worth $ 12,000 for the most successful compo entry of all. CNCD was, however, a bit surprised, as their Inside demo won the PC demo compo with a serious advantage, and they felt they were equally entitled to receive the special prize. But the brilliant victory of The Black Lotus deserved a worthy prize, and the CNCD guys never complained.

Tint was the most successful demo ever on the Amiga and an eternal favorite of many sceners. The Black Lotus instantly became a legend and we can say without exaggeration that they are the best known Amiga group to this day. What did they produce that provided them with this instant fame? Well, Tint consisted of routines that seemed impossible to realize on the average configuration of the time, an Amiga 1200 with a 25 MHz 030 accelerator card and 4 MB of RAM, but they made it! The stunned audience of The Gathering experienced a dozen effects that practically exceeded the possibilities of their computers, including some that were never seen in PC demos. After many years, TBL’s coders and designers found a new way to reach beyond the limitations of the Amiga, and boldly go where no man has gone before. But Tint was not only a codewise interesting piece but one of the most spectacular demos ever made on an Amiga. It was primarily codework, inspired by Sanity’s Arte demo. The raw effects were kneaded for two months, and received their colorful textures from Rodney, under the hands of Offa and Equalizer, the coders. Louie, Danny and Facet added the breathtaking pixel graphics, molding the demo into its final form. The Black Lotus practically reversed CNCD’s design principles. It was not the designer who told the coders what to do, but they let them work and do whatever they wanted, and used the result as a raw material, spicing it with the colors that carried the harmony and spirit of the demo. The giddy tints, also referred by the demo’s title, is a basic style element of The Black Lotus demos even these days. In fact, their later productions are almost all stylistically related to the first big hit, Tint.

According to the spirit of the age, Tint only consisted of c2p routines. Equalizer and Offa were really on their mettle. Right at the beginning they started with a novelty: a wonderful voxel landscape in 18-bit true color display mode, 262,144 colors. They achieved this nonstandard resolution by the Amiga’s HAM8 graphics mode with a relatively simple coding trick. In later parts they used it for many other purposes, mainly to interlace different effects with transparency, for example, rotating translucent Phong shaded objects in front of colorful backgrounds. Many times they combined respectively difficult effects which were usually displayed as separate parts in other demos. The main role was casted on the obligatory bump mapped and Phong shaded objects. Tunnels splendouring in different colours have also often appeared. Probably the most remembered one was the “electric tunnel” at the end, also seen on the illustrations above. Environment mapping and bump mapping were also preferred by the coders, along with metaballs or blobs, floating balls, converging like mercury. The jazz-funk music was arranged by Azazel, changing to pop style at the end of the demo. This change determined the overall feeling of the over 12 minutes demo and the mood of the audience accordingly. This mood led straight to TBL’s victory – well deserved. Actually, Azazel said he was unsatisfied with his own music.

Interestingly enough, the makers did not aim to synchronize the music with the effects for the whole demo, but only at a few points. Even the parts were not tightly integrated, their single common element were the rich color schemes. Paradoxically, the excellent design consisted of its own nonexistence. Macno, the reporter of R.O.M. later asked Facet about how he would define their demo with just one word to be written on the scene’s history stone, he said: “Tint is a typical TBL demo: effects placed in a certain line. As I said – typical TBL.” A fitting description, and the reason why not everybody favoured Tint. Some critics held its essence against itself, the lack of coherent design. Many missed the dramatic effect, which just came into fashion, along with murky, deep feelings and emotions. There’s none of these things. It’s just a bright, happy demo, neither less nor more, which deservedly won first prize.

The second place demo of The Gathering ’96 Amiga demo compo went to Triumph for Dreamscape, a demo almost exclusively consisting of raytraced animations. Watching the rest of the competition it’s obvious that Tint’s success was a little bit promoted by the lack of real opponents, as the rest of the demos were all on a different and lesser level. In the 40K intro compo, the two big intro workshops, Stellar and Essence fought a thrilling duel. It was Lights by Stellar which won by just 4 points over Brainbow by the rival group.

Meanwhile Artwork did not get much sleep. Symposium ’96 was held in Hamburg on the same weekend with The Gathering – this time they abandoned the Black Box label – with around 640 visitors. Artwork’s new demo, The Gate won the day, created by Azure, Tron (code), Fiver, Noogman, Argon (graphics), Virgill and SMT (music). From a certain point it was weaker than Tint, it wasn’t that attractive, colors were an atrocity, and its design was nothing more but showing common demoroutines one after the other. However, technically it was superior to Tint, even if it didn’t use any true color modes. These two demos are each other’s opposites on another area. Tint, like many contemporary demos, used the so-called 2 × 2 display method, each dot of the picture actually consisted of a 2 × 2 pixels raster. This halved the resolution, but also the amount of calculations, and c2p conversion routines executed in quarter of the time. This wasn’t a big novelty though, as we can remember, they already used the same trick on the Commodore 64, and it was also common on the PC scene. The Gate used standard 1 × 1 display, favouring precise display and oneframe execution. The use of these two different methods aroused heated debates, just like 4 × 4 mode on the C64 scene, both had supporters and opposers. There was another modus vivendi, often used by upholders of 1 × 1. They left an approximately 50 pixels wide black strip on the top and the bottom of the screen, assigning a cineramatic look the demo. It was The Gate’s technical excellence that Azure achieved the smooth execution of all his routines without any tricks, merely by optimization. The scene kept quarreling about Tint and The Gate for a while. Coders usually preferred The Gate while graphic artists voted for Tint. “Surely the best Amiga demo ever” – said Chaos and Crash of Polka Brothers about The Gate, but Destop, for example, said the following: “I’d rather drink battery acid than watch it again! My dog even died after seeing it.”

The Easter holiday of 1996 was indeed milling, five parties were held worldwide, which is still an unmatched record. Besides of The Gathering and Symposium, there was The Meeting ’96 in France, Proxima Meeting 2 in Belgium and X – The Successor, a PC and C64 party in Holland. After The Gathering, Symposium was undoubtedly the second most successful party in the first half of the year, already anticipating its future megaparty self with its 640 visitors and wide international interest. As the single example among megaparties, Symposium managed to keep its easy, familiar atmosphere and avoid the statuory fate of big events, drowning in commercialism. From all the organizers, the audience probably best noticed the work of Steeler of Phantasm, the cheerleader and compére of the party, responsible for keeping the fabulous feeling. Thanks to his great job for many long years, Symposium still hasn’t lost its character even after it united with Mekka, a PC party, and reached the magic 1,000 visitors as the Mekka & Symposium Party. Naturally it also needed the diligent and accurate work of the entire organizing team, managed and controlled by Raw Style of Lego.

While West Europe was swarming with scene life again, some were susceptible to forget that they know the Amiga also existed in other places on Earth. The Russian Amiga scene appeared around 1996, although it never grew very big, since few could afford to buy such an expensive computer in the poor ex-Soviet countries. Those who did usually did not buy an expensive Amiga, but a cheap Russian- made ZX Spectrum clone – these will be widely discussed in this book’s second volume – or an older PC. Even after the birth of this scene it took many long years until some productions of any value were coming from the lands east of Poland. The only Russian Amiga group marked on Western maps was Looker House, founded in 1995, editors of the Russian B. O.X. messagebox, makers of plenty of demos and intros. Later in 1997 they started the Insomnia diskmag, arm-in-arm with TRSI. They were the organizers of the first Russian demoparty, Enlight ’96 in St. Petersburg, but unfortunately there weren’t any quality releases. The productions of Looker House were smart, a little bit nonconformish, they often experimented with novel graphical solutions, breaking the usual angular design. The result was somewhat Melon Dezign-ish, recalling the Amiga 500 era. Interestingly enough, despite their demanding productions, Looker House was not too popular on the Russian scene. Many said they are writing for Western diskmags and seeking contact with Western groups only for snobbery. Meanwhile in the West many claimed that this mediocre group is overrated only because they came from the remote and exotic Russia.

In its halcyon days, Looker House had only one rival on their home grounds, the warezgroup called Russian Prestige, or RPSG for short. Later they renamed themselves to RamPage, referring to Russian Pride with R and P. The two groups frequently met at the few Russian demoparties, at the already mentioned Enlight, Chaos Construction or Cafe, but their competition remained on a moderate level, since neither of them had really good coders. Another talented Russian group was Extreme, but they eventually joined RPSG.

In another remote country, Australia, Amigans were staring forward at their wits end. In early 1995, just like their European friends, they didn’t know what was going to happen, if the scene would disappear after the liquidation of Commodore or would it continue onward. Many of the smallest and biggest groups disbanded, others changed to PC, and newcomers were scarce, but finally all comings and goings settled, and a new, smaller, but still cohesive and active new scene evolved. The most active of all was Cydonia which seceded from Digital Access, having more than twenty releases in a single year. Among them Australia’s most popular diskmagazine, Defy. This magazine gave a big boost to the scene, as the Aussies were without diskmags for a while, and European magazines rarely wrote about the happenings of their remote continent. Cydonia was divided to two sections, one of them worked on demos in New South Wales, and another in South Australia, editing Defy. Their demos however suffered from the same setbacks as Russian or Polish productions. They took little advantage of AGA’s abilities, still treated OCS/ ECS standards as the top echelon thereover their demos looked a bit outdated. This, of course was due to most Australians still only owned an Amiga 500 and most of their demos were still written for these OCS/ECS machines. Interestingly enough, Digital Access, from which Cydonia members parted, was transformed to a dance- rave record company in 1995.

Cydonia’s number one competition was Devious Dezigns. They had risen from the ruins of a dead group, Kronical, inheriting its strong modemtrading and swapping traditions, but their releases usually fell behind Cydonia’s ones. They started working on their own diskmag, Vision well before Defy, but released the first issue only two months after it. This magazine closely resembled the European Grapevine, even the titles of some sections were identical. Clownmania by Devious Dezigns and Capricorn One by Cydonia were switching positions on the top of local charts for a long time, and sceners entered heated debates about which one being the best Australian demo. Actually both were weak, if compared to the best European demos of 1995, although the drawings of Souri, the graphist of Cydonia were impressive.

A dozen more groups existed besides of these two, each with their own big future plans, usually never realizing any. Some of these groups were Frontier, Sect, Slam! and Dusk. Most Australian groups however never released anything, or only poor productions, at least for the European eye. Demoparties were rare on the Southern hemisphere, and usually fell flat, like the event called Project 1995. Activity remained low also in 1996, and soon Australia practically vanished from the map of the Amiga scene. Knowledge and talent existed, but willpower was scarce to carry out big projects. The story of the Amiga ended the same way in some other countries, although it took couple of years in some places.

The Australian BBS scene was still strong at the time. The first Amiga board, Industrial Accident, operated by Carcass was opened in December 1993, with an outrageous user interface, but as the only one in the country, it managed a constant flow of both warez and legal materials. It existed up until 1996. The list of 15 most active users showed a pretty mixed image. It featured swappers of American warezgroups just like European demoswappers, local modem champions, members of known and not so known demogroups – including some Hungarians. Thanks to the strong modemscene, Australia had good contact with remote continents and the boards collected a tremendous amounts of fresh warez all the time. Unfortunately a bunch of so-called “elite” pirate boards also encroached on the constant flow causing problems not only for the software companies, but also the scene itself, as they soon bread a worthless “shadow scene”, a gathering of loudmouthed, game collecting teenagers. The modemscene was attenuated, and only a few saved the old quality and spirit of the real warezscene until the end of 1996.

Life was going on in Europe. The next important event of the year was Saturne in France, weltering two times in 1996, once in April and once in November. France, as always, was playing a strange role. They provided plenty of talented artists to the world, as we can remember with Melon Dezign, Movement, Bomb!, there was a French Sanity section, and lately Oxygene, a former Atari ST supergroup enriched the long list, as the most active French lions so far. France, however, was only periodically fizzling with life, sometimes it was as if the country hadn’t even existed as part of the demo scene. There were barely any French demos at international parties in 1995. Only Oxygene kept the flame with the Another Dream Now, Cuzco, Control and Vision demos, and a lone coder, Ninja, a future Scoopex member bedazzled the world with his tidbits – for example, the Iso intro at Remedy ’95. But even Oxygene disappeared early 1996, and a cursory observer might have thought that the French Amiga scene was completely gone. For this reason the scene suspensefully awaited Saturne, where 620 people gathered, around thirty of them from abroad. Alas the party was quite flat, organizing was jammed, and the visitors had to find entertainment for themselves. Mass boozing was just a form of this, some threw a spontaneous “computer crashing compo” outside the building smashing some PCs and Atari STs into pieces. Fortunately the event did not turned into a total failure. The organizers flexibly adapted to the people’s demands, and they found some interesting programs to amuse them. One of these was the “State of the Art Show”, which consisted of a bunch of pretty dancer girls, appearing on the stage in the breaks between the compos.

A recently emerged newcomer group, Skarla took the first prize in the Amiga demo compo from this party, postponed many times since 1995. Some legendary French groups like Oxygene and Bomb! also returned, but for everybody’s astonishment, they battled on PC instead of the Amiga. For an even bigger astonishment, Vertigo by Abyss, regarded the best of the Amiga demo compo, has only came sixth.

The frontline of the French scene had been rearranged. Besides of old names, Bomb!, Scoopex, Oxygene and other aces, now they also reckoned the Norwegian-French Gods, Abyss and Syndrome among them, although the latter was disbanded in 1997, but soon reformed. Gods boasted plenty of greatly talented members like Bridgeclaw and Wade, the graphists, Sixpack, the swapper, founder of Jurassic Pack diskmagazine or Ghandy, the popular columnist. Formerly Loop, one of the founders of Artwork was also a member. Gods however, like so many groups already in the history of the scene, possessed few good coders. The talent of the members frittered away, each went after his own idea, but they made a few very noteworthy demos and other productions. One of them was A few good men, a slideshow of Bridgeclaw’s graphics. Other French groups lacked designers, usually still the coders determined the facade of productions, and most French demos were nothing but a display of well programmed but boring routines. The big French resurrection, expected from the two Saturne parties was cancelled, and the country had to wait until The Party at the end of the year. The next hit series was still hiding in the womb of time.

The first half of 1996 was spent in the terms of small but friendly parties worldwide. The Hungarian SCEneST ’96 reached 1,000 visitors in April, but just a tenth of them were Amiga sceners, and foreign interest was very low. Other parties, including the Polish Intel Outside, were all smaller, with around 200–400 attendees: Abduction in Finland, Icing and Remedy in Sweden, Polish Summer Party in Poland, and so on. Plenty of masterful demos, intros, graphics, and music were released at these intimate little events. Soon it became obvious that such small gatherings actually have a reason for existence besides of the constantly commercializing megaparties. Suddenly the race for the number of visitors and overall prize value went out of fashion. Megaparties still attracted the masses since they offered bigger prizes and more groups still saved their best demos for Assembly, The Party, The Gathering, or even Symposium. A good half of 1996’s demos were released at the smaller parties and there were plenty of memorable ones among them, like The Tribe by Three Little Elks, Glow and Darkside demos and Tractorbeam and Mind the Carrot ,.intros by The Black Lotus, and Kolor and Kolor Remix demos by C-Lous. TBL was present at most Scandinavian parties, and always ended up among the top three. Their popularity was increasing and some already mentioned them as the group of the year, comparing them to Anarchy, the legend that had fallen years ago.

The other great newcomer of the year was the Hungarian Impulse. The group, founded a few years earlier, had come out with two fantastic demos in 1996. They released Voyage in Storm, an excellent 3 D demo outside of any party. It was originally made for The Party ’95, but not finished on time. In the endscroller they blamed the organizers for taking the rules so rigorously that they hadn’t accepted their demo just minutes after the deadline. Voyage in Storm could have easily gotten among the three best, and although it probably couldn’t have beaten Faktory, it could have edged Oxygene’s demos out from the second place. Their intro titled Three won at Convention ’96 party in Potsdam, Germany, organized by TRSI and Remedy in March. Their next demo, Muscles brought home the top prize from Intel Outside 3 in August. This was the first serious Hungarian victory at a foreign party. They entered the same demo at the Hungarian AntIQ ’96 party, held on the same weekend with Intel Outside, and took the first prize again, however, without opponents. This demo was originally designed for Symphony, but wasn’t finished, then tried to complete it for Assembly, but again missed the deadline by a few hours. Impulse could probably run for the title of the group missing the most deadlines with quality releases. They wanted to make another demo for The Party ’96, titled 2001, but yet again, didn’t make the deadline. EFT spent half of the party at the Amiga’s keys, but all in vain. The organizers, despite the makers’ appeal, released the half finished demo with the compo materials, and it took a lot of work for Lord to get it remove from all BBSes. This demo was never released, although they tried to finish it for Assembly ’97, titled 2002.

In face of the all their bad luck, their serious demos brought fame and respect to Impulse. They were practically the only Hungarian group standing ground on the international scene, climbing into the front ranks. This was achieved mainly by four members, EFT, the excellent 3 D coder, working in a similar style as Azure, Rendall, the hyperactive graphic artist, Pixel, the musician and Lord, the swapper, running Number of the Beast BBS and maintaining an extensive network of international contacts. Soon they recruited a bunch of further members. Two members of a group named Waveriders, Soldier and Mezon,3 D modellers participated in the making of Muscles. In exchange, EFT helped them making their demo titled Corridor, which was actually a 60 megabyte animation. This demo was shown to the audience of the FLaG ’96 Party in Budapest, but only outside of the compo since it was the single Amiga entry, and on the other hand, it arrived to the organizers too late. Beast, the graphic artist, formerly a member of Majic 12, was also an Impulse member, drawing his mindblasting pictures while silently lying snug in the background, sometimes pushing celebrated stars from the top of the charts. Thomas, the other pixeller was similarly talented, and was also a member of Amnesty, just like EFT.

The Assembly of August 1996 was much more successful for the Amigans’ eye than the prior year. Surprisingly the Amiga spirit returned to the Finnish megaparty, and the Amiga demo competition raised an unexpectedly strong field. The beautiful cavalcade of the winning demos even faded the memory of The Party ’94. It proved that 1995 was just a temporary downturn, the apathy was gone and the scene was not yet willing to die.

Who else could have won at the Assembly Amiga compo but Virtual Dreams – FairLight, led by Alien? Still it was a big surprise to see the VD logo on the big screen, as everybody heard that Alien gave up democoding after his Amiga was stolen, along with all his source codes on the hard disk. Apparently it was just a temporary loss, as proven by Sumea, the new demo, based on a rewritten 3 D engine and raytraced animations, as dictated by VD traditions, dubbed with giddy goa music.

If it weren’t obvious already, Assembly proved that demo design trends had changed again. The change was observable already a year ago, but now it was completed to the fingernails. Assembly’s demos did not even resembling what they used to be two or even three years ago. Amiga style elements were mingled with PC ideas, and it would be hard to tell which platform dominated in 1996. Most demos were built on 3 D engines, rotating high polygon objects combined with different shadings. Flat shading and wireframe were gone. The competition of coders was much like a competition of 3 D engines. Each coder created his mandatory 3 D engine and developed it all the time. Every demo contained Phong shading, environment mapping, bump effects and 3 D morph, realtime vector object distortion. The most common form of morphing was a face emerging and retracting from the side of a flat box. Plenty of demos featured such a routine. Typical demo objects like the torus or the spikeball or virus appeared. Lately the lightsources were also visualized as flares, floating little star-like lightspots. Often the projection of light or the glimmer on the virtual camera lens was also simulated, calling it lens flare. Some coders experimented with physically correct motion, swinging pendulums, rippling water surfaces or bouncing balls.

2D routines still did not disappear. Tunnels were sill popular and made their appearance in almost all demos, along with bitmap distortions, ripples, whirlpool effects, and so on. Reflecting a bitmap graphics on the surface of a rotating object with environment mapping was also commonplace. Different breeds of voxel landscape also often appeared. The cylinder or bumproll was an interesting derivation of them, it was a voxel landscape that was projected on a cylinder instead of a flat surface.

Another novelty of the time was demo lyrics. Demos often displayed poems or poetic texts, which was an easy way to affect the general mood of the demo. Such lyrics soon became a popular style element. A characteristic color scheme, an atmospheric piece of music and some well fitting demo lyrics gave a strong emotional content to the production. Although it was more common on the PC scene, Amiga demomakers also often exploited its possibilities.

From Assembly to The Party, just like in the first half of the year, there were countless small parties. With a few exceptions, most of them were primarily PC scene meetings, with Amiga compos of just marginal importance, if there were any. Those exceptions included Intel Outside, Sea, Soft, Sun Party in Denmark (or 3S Party for short), Saturne IV in Autumn, and another Danish event, Scene Meeting ’96. Despite of the rich demo harvest of 1996, it was another sign of the PC scene soon taking over the Amiga.

The sixth incarnation of the annual Danish megaparty succeeded much better than the prior year. The partymood was good, sceners from two dozen countries celebrated the end of the year in cheer, amusing themselves with tasting different kinds of exotic alcoholic beverages. As usual, no party had as many visitors as The Party. The fair hall in Aars, the original location of the 1991 Crystal-Silents-Anarchy Party, was full almost beyond its capacity. So many people assembled in the three hangar-like halls that the organizers had to set up extra tables even in the sleeping areas. A total of 3,500 tickets were sold which was unmatched in the history of the scene at the time. Around a third of them were Amigans, the rest were all C64 and PC sceners. As a matter of fact, the organizers were not prepared for such a huge crowd and barely followed the growing demands. They put aside their arrogance which poisoned the atmosphere in 1995 but they still served the visitors quite frably. Most of them couldn’t speak a word in English and they didn’t care much about the people’s requests anyway. Fortunately they still had the sober senses to quickly rent a nearby school building to replace the occupied sleeping hall where the guests could sleep and take a shower, because there were only six showers in the original building for the tremendous crowd. The toilets were practically destroyed on the first day. The pointless rigidity of the organizers is well represented by the competition rule that enabled only those who are personally present at the party to enter anything for the compos. They however haven’t thought it over how they could check if the person is really who he claims to be. That’s how a lot of previously unknown sceners suddenly became excellent graphists, musicians and coders in person, while being a member of a dozen different groups. This also resulted in a totally screwed up results file. Moreover, the organizers simply lost a lot of competition entries.

There’s nothing against what remained whatsoever. When the lights went off, and the first spots of light hit the big screen three thousand people were sitting in the darkness, waiting to experience the newest wonders of digital art. Nevertheless there were still enough of new scene members even with the old Amiga legends already gone or transferred to the PC scene. The new and also last generation of the Amiga scene were those formerly playing second fiddle, but now climbing to the top ranks. The winner of the Amiga demo compo was Bomb! from France, with Shaft 7, sharply repeating the success of Nexus 7 two years ago, even in respect of scoring. (Nexus 7 got 1,443 points and won with 733 points of advantage, while Shaft 7 got 1,424 points and was 721 points over the runner-up.) The French demo was a nice newschool production, well loaded with the typical Phong shading routines of the era. Surprisingly enough, it was not coded by Bomb!’s well known and made coders, but a formerly unknown member, Ben. He was so unknown that even Bomb! members only learned about him at the party and never met him in person. The graphics of Shaft 7 were made by Titan and Made, 3 D models by Axel, and music was arranged by Yolk and Legend. This was Bomb!’s last Amiga demo. They later also migrated to PC scene.

Although Shaft 7 was a great demo the same can not be said for the rest of the competition. Moreover, one can even pick at Bomb!’s demo, as it contained nothing innovative, just the usual PC-like 3 D effects. Many asked how could such a simple vectordemo could win with such a serious advantage? Some suspected that there were too many lamers at The Party, and PC nerds only interested in gaming and collecting porn movies – a third of the audience were allegedly of this kind – and they voted helter-skelter, skewing the results, and that’s how Shaft 7 won. Three sceners, Eye of Chrome Concepts, MFD of Extents and D-Lux of Creed came up with an interesting theory on the pages of R.O.M. According their own experience and general public opinion after the party they claimed that Bomb! had cheated. They said that the French guys talked to the lamers, who knew nothing about the demoscene, and were preoccupied in network games, and pretending they are organizers, they asked for their voting codes. As they calculated, if they acquired just 80 codes from the 3,000 visitors, they possibly gained 400 extra points already, as each visitor could vote for the three best entries in each category, giving 5, 3 and 1 points each.

We’ll probably never know if it actually happened this way or not, but it’s a fact that Shaft 7 won, and also that it’s a nice demo, although nothing groundbreaking, and its competition was not much better. It was one of the era’s fashionable vectordemos, nothing more. The Party ’96 brought nothing new. It seemed that the Amiga scene finally took over the bad habit of the PC scene, making demos that were all alike. Many still claim that the scene became boring on both the Amiga and PC after 1996 and the whole demo scene practically died. Well, that maybe a bit of an overstatement, it surely didn’t die since it still exists nowadays, but those complaining about the poor quality of demos in this period were right. Fortunately the forthcoming years still brought plenty of coup de théátre.

“The Amiga is a pretty and nice woman, very good in the bed, but unfortunately already in her fifties …”

– Charlie of Inquisition

7. The dusk of the Amiga

Where is the Amiga going? This topic heated endless discussions in early 1997. It was obvious for everybody that the platform could not exist forever without support. But many thought the same back in 1995, and there it is, the Amiga not just survived the year, but thrived. The PC’s superior performance had no impact, devoted Amigans did not abandoned their lovely old machine even though the PC outmatched it in every aspect. It didn’t mater that the PC scene sucked up the best Amiga groups as there were still newcomers to replace them. And while the production of Amigas has ceased, some companies still developed and manufactured accelerator boards, accessories, and peripherals all of which enabled Amiga 1200 and 4000 users to meet the demands of the time, although for a stiff price. The 50 MHz accelerator boards, equipped with Motorola 68030 chips were standard, and the even faster 68040 and 68060 accelerators were also becomming common. The brutal power of a 68060 could match even the fastest Pentium PCs, although the price was disproportioned with its performance, since a properly upgraded Amiga 1200 cost twice or three times as much as a similarly performing PC. Still there were plenty of Amiga users to keep the scene and the Amiga going. A ray of hope was shed on the dark future when Phase5 announced the forthcoming introduction of the new A-Box computer and word came about some up and coming accelerator cards built on PowerPC processors instead of Motorola 680x0 ones, and would have been several times faster than the 68060. The A-Box, however, was never completed.

Despite of the developments, the same fate awaited the Amiga as the Commodore 64. Regardless of its possibilities and superior architecture, it became obsolete living on as the hobby of a few enthuasistic obsessives. Just like on the C64, the last supporters were the sceners, the ones most holding on to the Amiga, and therefore the best in programming it. For this reason good demos were mushrooming in the last good years of the Amiga scene. Some explained it with another upswing however the number of productions dropped despite the high amount of quality releases, and finally just a handful of big labels remained alive. This process began in 1997, and became evident around 1999. The last generation of the Amiga scene grew up in this period, and are still active these days.

At the end of 1996, Generation asked their readers about their expectations regarding 1997 and what they thought woud happen on the Amiga scene in the new year. Skutt, the graphics artist and coder of Limited Edition answered the question with unmatched insight:

I think AmigaScene during 1997 will loose a lot of talent to the PC, but I also think this is the year a lot of new or less wellknown groups will show their skills, and throw the old ones of their thrown. The Amiga scene is shrinking, but the demos will improve. On all major parties the Amiga demos will be far better and more original than the PC.

Skutt was right, point for point. Let’s see how this situation evolved.

The Party 6 was followed by the usual silence and migrations between groups. The world of diskmags changed when R.A.W. ceased its release and became an online magazine. It was the first diskmag to move from the offline world to the World Wide Web, but it was too early. Few had Internet connection in 1996, and the story of R.A.W. Online ended after only a few issues. R.O.M. followed suit in 1998, but without more success. R.O.M. was still the most popular Amiga magazine early 1997, but Generation, a diskmag edited by the famous German columnist, RokDaZone was really closing on it, and Jurassic Pack by Gods was also coming up. It ceased in 1997 and the editors joined the revived D.I.S.C. team. The chartsmag field was undoubtedly dominated by Eurochart, edited by Depth, although design- wise was quite weak. Conventional, article-oriented diskmags came out seldomly during these days, and even leading magazines tardily got to the readers. R.O.M.’s next edition was delayed,Seenpoint editors were behind schedule and also smaller mags were habitually late. The Ripper, a Generation editor blamed constant evolution as the delay in their 24th issue. In his opinion, the quality of diskmags have reached their maximum by the end of 1996, and either further improvement or just the maintenance of the current level takes more resources and work hours than a few people can allocate for a freetime project. He saw two ways for the future. Either the development of magazines would halt at a certain point and stays there for years, maintaining existence, but never bringing anything new, and eventually become boring for the readers. Or the editors would further improve quality, sparing neither time nor money, beyond their possibilities, but this can’t be a long run solution, except if someone financially supports the editors’ living. But nobody was willing do that perhaps only if they turned the magazine into a commercial one but then it would not a diskmag any more. The Ripper’s arguments were solid and explains why no one ever towered above the classic Amiga diskmagazines. The future was for the ones choosing the first option, keeping a constant quality, and sometimes better quality mags appeared but all disappeared after a few issues since the editors could not meet their own expectations for very long. But this is already PC scene history, as there weren’t many new Amiga diskmags after 1997. Many famous columnists – like Mop and Macno, the editors of R. O. M., or Ghandy – now wrote for Imphobia, a PC diskmagazine.

TRSI resumed making demos in 1996. Their main coder was The Twins, supported by the big guns of Artwork, Virgill and Noogman. The result consisted of only one demo, Twin Peaks, which came in third at The Party. Uyanik, the leader of the group then announced that he is fed up with demos and also TRSI Recordz, so he quit the entire thing. So he did, and TRSI soon drifted out of the mainstream, although for just a short time.

A smaller war broke out between TRSI and Artwork for Twin Peaks. The Twins stated in the demo’s information file that Azure wanted to join TRSI at early 1996, so he sent him some of the bump mapping routines of Twin Peaks to take a look. Later Azure did not join TRSI, but made The Gate using the sources he received from The Twins. Azure first did not acknowledge the accusation, later he denied, claiming that he already coded bump mapping routines in December 1995 well before The Twins sent him their source code. As the irony of fate, later Azure was also outraged when Bartman of Abyss disassembled and reused the routines of his intro, Dawn. The Amiga scene was full of such quarrels, everybody pointed at others, claiming they stole one anothers routines. Another decade-long debate was about the reuse of code routines in several demos. The French Skarla was a good example of this. But in an age when most demos contained the same rotating objects, it’s no wonder that the audience often suspected seeing the same routine again and again.

Meanwhile Scoopex also had a quarrel with Surprise!Productions if they are a Scoopex subgroup or not. Finally they agreed that they were not. Amidst this dispute, the English S!P section was reformed for a short time in 1996, then it was disbanded again. The French Scoopex also died, but nothing could break the spirit of the group organized around Antibyte and Boogeyman, and Scoopex started its most successful period in 1997. The year began with a minor success when their new demo, The Sign only came in sixth at Mekka & Symposium ’97. However, a hyperactive Scoopex emerged among the most successful groups until the end of the year, constantly climbing the charts. Celebrated members streamed into the group, among them the Polish Lazur and the German Acryl, known graphic artists, Prophet – formerly known as Subject of Balance – and Splatterhead, Danish musicians, later also Calvin of Gfx-Twins returned to the scene to reinforce Scoopex. The headcount had grown so big in 1997 that Antibyte had to review memberships and remove inactive members.

In the first half of 1997 the Yugoslavian scene, which disappeared at the beginning of the civil war, showed signs of life. Corrosion had organized a new demoparty, Scene Strike One in Cinema Rex Belgrade, for both the Amiga and PC scene. About three quarters of the approximately 150 visitors arrived with Amigas and the world learned some Yugoslavian names again. Pasmaters and Corrosion made their return, some new names were Industry, Juice, and Depth Charge. Scene Strike was successful and repeated a year later. There was another party in Belgrade in 1998, called Yet Another Lame Party (YALP) which also had PC compos.

Meanwhile the Amiga scene practically perished in Britain. Only one group, Anathema remained more or less active. The quality of the English Amiga forums dropped, minor groups were fìghtning their pitiful wars in diskmags and no more demos were made on the islands. Italy was rowing in the same boat but they never had a strong scene except in Umbria to the North. Several noted groups originated from this region. Among them Zerodefects, Resolution 101, Divina, I.B.B., Nightfall, Chronos, and one of the oldest labels on the international scene, Ram Jam, never breaking out of relative mediocrity. Darkage was the newest, a demogroup just founded by Modem of Ram Jam, which later enrolled several foreign members from Sweden to Spain. They met their first success at The Italian Gathering, where their demo, Drug Vanilla Syndrome and intro Crash both won although there weren’t any dangerous opponents. They never managed to repeat this success at any international party.

Those who attended The Gathering ’97 in April saw some very good demos. Organizing was more or less decent and almost three thousand people bought tickets for the five day long event but only five of them were Amigans, and PC sceners were scarce. Two third of the attendees only came to play games and surf the Internet. The winner of the Amiga demo compo was The Black Lotus again, with Captured Dreams, a demo of similar quality and feeling as Tint. The runner-up was Artwork with Exit Planet Dust, and the third prize went to Limited Edition for the excellent Deus Ex Machina demo. PC and Amiga intro competitions were combined.

Captured Dreams, just like Tint, belongs to the best demos in history category. It resembled Tint a bit, but taking a better look it’s obvious that it’s not just a mere revision, Captured Dreams was a brand new demo. It featured similar true color effects as Tint, but not exclusively and the makers laid emphasis on not just the visuals but also technical solutions. This time they didn’t simply realized some old effects with bigger color depth, but came out with new routines. One of the best results was the beautiful underwater landscape, with sunshine casting through the water on the seabed. This naturally received heavy applause from the audience.

TBL’s newest success surfaced some interesting phenomenon. After the party many complained about that the organizers let them in for free, provided them a free room, and even served them with foods and drinks. When news spread about this, many were outraged, asking what did The Black Lotus think about themselves and why do they deserve special treatment. Many even debated the placing of Captured Dreams for this, and remembered that this was the single demo that had its makers’ name displayed on the information screen, others only had their titles. Actually everyone had the option to write his group’s name on the competition entry form, but allegedly nobody filled the necessary information. The special treatment and the separated room were for a simple reason. The organizers of The Gathering, just like any other party organizers of the world, greatly needed visitors of TBL’s caliber, to release demos that will attract even more people to the next event. On the other hand, they wished to rent the same place from the city of Hamar for the next year, and they had to prove that the event is an art festival. The city wouldn’t have sponsored The Gathering again if they only showed photos of some thousand gamer geeks fragging each other or leeching porn.

The united Mekka & Symposium party was held at the same time as The Gathering again. This time the location was the fair hall of Fallingbostel, a small city halfway between Hannover and Hamburg. The party stayed here till 2002, to gather the world’s sceners every Easter holiday. This little town forever carved its name in the scene’s history book and today it means the world’s best parties for thousands of sceners. The first Mekka & Symposium immediately deserved being the model of all true scene parties by its precise organizing and high spirit, an example for all party organizers in every country – an example copied by many.

Being a German party, the winner couldn’t have been anyone else but Artwork with their demo recalling old memories simply with its title, Megademo IV. This was the first successful experiment of making a multiplatform demo running on multiple computer platforms. The Amiga version was one of the many. The program was originally written in ANSI C language, later ported to MS-DOS, Windows 95, BeOS, x86 Linux and even PPC. The runner-up, with just 6 points of disadvantage was Arsenic with Fear Factory, and Essence came in third with Thug Life. The winners of the 40K intro category, in order, were Diskobox by Abyss, Kenguru 64 K by Impulse and Changing by Capsule.

Impulse’s intro is perhaps worth a few lines of comments as it was 64 kilobytes, while it was a 40K intro competition. Some were upset about it after the party, although those who were there already knew that there was no violation of rules. The entire fuzz started on a misunderstanding. EFT only had the idea of coding something two days before the party. So he sat down at his Amiga and started keying while Lord and some others left to Germany to attend the party. Kenguru was completed by Saturday, but a little snag happened. Every information flyer at the party incorrectly announced a 64 K intro, so Impulse’s intro was made in 64 kilobytes, but when the competition was started, it was called a 40K compo which was correct since it was announced as 40K in the invitation textfile. There was no time to rearrange Kenguru, but an idea saved the day. The intro would have been 40K without the music, so Lord asked the organizers to show it without sound. They did so and Kenguru placed second. This story well exemplifies the helpfulness of Mekka & Symposium organizers, since Impulse would simply have been disqualified at The Party or The Gathering. A few weeks later Kenguru 64 K was re-released at SCEneST ’97 in Budapest and won the Amiga 64 K compo.

This was the last production of Impulse before their breakup. EFT, Beast, Lord and Soldier started a new group named Kangooroo. Soon Mr. Pixel also joined and later Chip (coder) and Teo (musician). Kangooroo carried on with the heritage of Impulse. For a while they could not decide whether their name should be written as Kenguru or Kangooroo. EFT favoured the latter, but Kenguru was easier to spell and they had an array of ASCII logos ready with the name written in this form. Finally they settled at Kangooroo. According to Lord, both forms are correct.

A third demoparty was running paralell with the two big ones in Germany, called SILIConvention ’97, in the city of Bremen. Only a few Amigans and PC users attended, hence it was primarily an Acorn and Atari party. There was only one Amiga demo, Scenergy by Sector 7. This group later joined Haujobb.

The scene went silent until June. The usual rhythm seemed to continue, dividing the year between The Gathering, or now Mekka & Symposium, Assembly and The Party. Some noise occasionally broke the silence. There was a smaller roughhouse between TRSI and Scoopex about the title of the joint wild demo of TRSI and FairLight. The demo, placed only 16th at The Gathering, and was titled World of Wodka, however Scoopex announced the sequel to Mental Hangover with this title several months ago. It was quite a storm, although Slayer already disappeared from the scene forever with everyone knowing he would never code demos again. It was even more ridiculous considering Sanity never complained about the Finnish group Zenon choosing the title Broken Promises for their demo which won the first prize at Abduction ’97 in June. This was one of the first demos written for a 68060 processor and one of the best in 1997.

Plenty of small or medium sized parties occurred until the end of summer when the year’s biggest party, Assembly, was held. Most of them were mixed PC-Amiga parties, usually organized by PC groups, with some help by Amiga teams. Such parties were SCEneST ’97 in Hungary, Abduction in Finland, Remedy and Icing in Sweden, Kindergarten in Denmark, Wired in Belgium or Intel Outside in Poland. The Spanish Amiga scene had seemingly awaken, at least according to the results of the Euskal ’97 party which listed several Amiga demos and intros. These small parties still had around 300–900 visitors, a third of them Amiga sceners and the rest PC sceners. Amiga productions were still turning out in force and there was nothing to complain about their quality. The Amiga scene still competed against the already superior PC scene. That’s how Showbase Shape by C-Lous was born for the Icing party and Paranoid by the again reformed Rebels which also was the winner of Remedy ‘97. This demo was coded by Alta, who also made the Blue House demo by Silents a long time ago. Ghost in the Machine by Venus Art or Papadeo by Floppy also augmented the long list of great successes at small parties.

The winner of the Amiga demo competition at Assembly ’97, for the greatest surprise of all, was an English group already believed to be dead, Nerve Axis, with a demo titled Pulse. Their victory was even more surprising considering that Pulse did not really fit the trends of 1997. It barely contained any 3 D routines. It consisted of Phong objects fitted with a set of different effects, and it was rather built on wobblers, tunnels, water surface simulations, and other 2D stuff. Maybe this bedazzled the audience so much that they voted twice as many points for Nerve Axis then for the runner-up, Zoo by Puzzle. The English demo was primarily codework, without particularly coherent design, at least with an 1997 eye, but it was still the best Amiga demo at the Assembly and deservedly won. A 060 accelerator board was recommended for viewing but it executed perfectly on even a 030/50.

The 64 K intro compo was a race of newcomers. The first prize was taken by Limbo for 911, followed by Zero-G III by Scoopex and Fat by Mystic. Fourth place, dropping behind with a mere 4 points, came Haujobb, and the fifth was Nah Kolor from Poland.

In the first half of 1997, TRSI again tried to form a demo section. This time they did not assign the task to a well experienced, talented demogroup, but a less known, however productive Finnish team, Mellow Chips, the brightest new shooting star of the scene, scoring huge success in 1996 with their first demo, Dim. An expert could recognize the future legend in Mellow Chips. The new section achieved its first victory at the Demolition ’97 party, and took second prize with Dose.They made it as an independent group but already released it under the TRSI label. Dose was not yet a particularly nice demo, it was just another shoddy 3 D object shows but the engine was great and ran smoothly even with a 030 accelerator, although a 040 was recommended.

Demolition ’97 was the first demoparty where Amiga and PC demo compos were combined. It was an expected step but naturally the Amigans weren’t happy when it came about. “Are you for real? If so, why not get rid of all competitions and just have a single wild compo.” – as commented by Storm. – “And then, for the next olympics, we’ll get rid of all the events and just give each athlete 10 minutes to do whatever he likes to impress a panel of judges.” Such commentaries could not impede further parties from bracketing the two different machines. Meanwhile the PC scene was advancing rapidly and it reached the innovation level of the Amiga scene by the end of 1997 soon even superseding it. After that it wasn’t Amiga trends seeping into the PC scene but rather PC trends and routines making thie debut on the Amiga. Many elements of Amiga demos were made with PCs. For example, all raytraced images, since there were much more versatile 3 D graphics utilities available for the PC, but also a lot of 2D images, as PC graphics tools were more powerful. Pictures obviously made with Photoshop became quite commonplace in Amiga demos from 1997 onwards and also texts written with basic Windows fonts, Arial or Verdana.

The usual boring silence from the Assembly to The Party was pleasantly broken by a Polish demo, Everything Dies by Venus Art. In this demo they announced their liquidation but also added: “Never trust anyone.”Those who didn’t trust them were right as they didn’t disband and actually climbed a lot on the social ladder.

Poland was not some isolated frontier anymore but one of the strongest demoscene countries. Polish groups and sceners appeared on international charts en masse: Amnesty, Mystic, Anadune, Nah Kolor or Floppy, one of the most active groups in 1997. Polish Amiga sceners were very faithful to their computer, so much so that a smaller scandal broke out when Anadune, the main organizer of Gravity ’96, invited a PC manufacturer as a sponsor. But even Poland came to terms with the PC scene and multiplatform parties after a while and the already childish and ridiculous anti-PC mentality slowly faded. Thanks to the strong standing on the old machine, the Polish Amiga scene did not weaken. Even in 1997–1998, few sceners changed to PC, and while the Amiga lost positions in other countries, it held its own in Poland. The leading demogroups, however, weren’t the same anymore. New names rose into view, like the quickly growing Mawi, later name Madwizards, which released at least half a dozen demos and intros in 1998 and the experienced could already presume their forthcoming appearance on the international charts. The founder of Mawi, Azzaro, formerly a known ASCII artist, has repeated the career of Musashi and became the best known Amiga demoprogrammer within a few years. However, unlike his predecessor, Azzaro was not only a coder, but also a very successful demo designer.

Polish demos were still different from Western ones in 1998. They very slowly adapted to trends, if at all. The country was still a relatively isolated in 1998, and in spite of the spread of the Internet, the Poles still rather seeked contacts among each other than with foreign groups. The style of Polish demos was barely influenced by worldwide trends, slowly stiffening rock hard, and demomakers did not try to meet international expectations, but rather worked according their own taste and the Polish traditions. Their demos were lighter, lacked any strain, there was not a spot of forced seriousness, and they never pursued making a professional multimedia presentation. Of course, for the same reason, Polish demos usually did not stand a chance on the international scene, critics treated them as mediocre or simply bad productions. But the essence of demomaking is not necessarily saving the world, but to enjoy what you are doing and this was what West European demogroups slowly tended to forget. The Polish scene was always a little bit different and will probably always be.

The Party 1997 was probably the world’s most unfortunate party course there is at least one of these every year. The subtitle of the event, held again in the fair centre of Aars was Batteries not included. Heaven knows how they came up with this slogan, but it was fitting, as the city transformator station burnt out on the second day and entire city of Aars was cut off electric power. Screens turned black and the sound system went silent for the five thousand visitors. To relieve the sudden darkness, the organizers quickly opened the large gates of the pavillons and shed some light inside with some cars’ headlights but it did not help much, and the sharp December wind freely whizzed through the building. The compos were held with the help of petrol fueled generators but the power outtage lasted for the entire party and electricity wasn’t resumed until the last day. In the way of demoparties it wasn’t so bad, as at least 4,500 of the 5,000 visitors were PC gamelamers who only came to play network games and did not care about demos.

Fortunately the compos were still held so the power generators did not have to buzz behind the building in vain. Not a drop of petrol was wasted in displaying the joint demo of Scoopex and Haujobb, My Kingdom. The production, today considered a classic, won 3,009 points, twice as much as the runner-up Killer, CNCD’s comeback demo, which pushed Electroboy by Smoke to the third place. The 40K intro prize also went to Scoopex for the Superautodrome intro, Cruisin by Abyss came in second, and Suicide by Oxyron was third. Scoopex undoubtedly reached the peak of its career with My Kingdom and Superautodrome, after climbing towards the top of charts during all the year with excellent productions: the 5977 slideshow with Lazur’s graphics, Alien demo, Zero Gravity intro series or the Performance intro. The series of productions continued during the next year.

My Kingdom was not just the pinnacle of Scoopex career, but also the opening of Haujobb’s triumph. The German group was meeting success not only on Amiga, but also on PC, for example with the Neon demo, winning first prize at Demolition ’97, or the Discloned 64 K intro. They were just about to emerge as the leading group on both platforms. The career of this former fun group is particularly noteworthy as they carried on and renewed the design revolution started by CNCD. One of its early examples was My Kingdom. Their success, just like The Black Lotus’, was based on a bunch of quickly acquired talented members. The group had more than fifty members by 2000. This headcount never decreased, and even grew, since, to the opinion of XXX, their worldwide leader, they were a friendly company and not some corporation who would fire those who were not working hard enough. One of their slogans well exemplifies this mentality: “We are family!” But even if he started kicking the inactive members out, he wouldn’t have too much to do, as Haujobb always did something, divided to smaller or bigger quasi-sections. Almost everyone was active and there was barely any demo party in the world during the forthcoming years where Haujobb wasn’t represented with at least a few productions, either on Amiga or PC. Many criticized them for this, calling them a “demo factory,” holding the similarity of their demos against them. This is somewhat true, but only if we look at their PC demos after 2000 which will be discussed in the second volume of this book.

Haujobb was not yet a “mammoth group” in 1997 but they weren’t small on numbers either. The success of My Kingdom was undoubtedly established by the music of Muffler and Jazz, with the graphics of Bay Tremore and Kidlove. For the Scoopex side, the merit is given to Boogeyman, the main coder. The others participating were Fastjack, Speedo and Kenny, coders, Visualize and Leunam, graphists, Nomad, 3 D artist, and Owl, general designer. If some of their names sound familiar, it’s not a wonder, since most of them became famous in the forthcoming years. With a few examples they were all Haujobb members in 1997, or became members later.

Without exaggeration we can state that Haujobb was one of the first representatives of modern demo style, one of the creators of this style. Although the group originated from Germany, they abandoned the dry, technocratic style hallmarked by the names of Sanity, Artwork, Oxyron or Scoopex, and followed the footsteps of Melon Dezign, CNCD and The Black Lotus. The same slightly grotesque motives can be discovered in Haujobb demos as in CNCD’s ones, but their style successfully mingles with the bright, colorful world of The Black Lotus, and meanwhile keeps its unique taste and technical excellence. Muffler’s music was a dominant element of early Haujobb demos, who, as already mentioned in the previous chapter, was following in the footsteps of Yolk, Legend and Dune, and besides he was Heatbeat’s brother. Muffler composed music for several demos and many groups since he was a “freelancer”, just like Yolk and Legend. On the graphical line, the “crowded” design by the Finnish Visualize is often breathtaking, and it still is today, using full screen graphics which were not depicting anything figuratively, but often conveying emotions, abstract impressions by ambiguous color spots, blurred figures and text fragments. Two of these graphics can be seen on the screenshots above. In later demos they usually coupled these graphics with demo effects, thus giving a meaning to even the simplest routine. This is of course nothing but the invention of hot water, since this is the essence of design, but Haujobb integrated these graphics tighter than anyone previously. The style received the name layerdemo, as the graphical elements and animated visuals were placed on each other like layers.

Haujobb’s style did not become mainstream on the Amiga, and actually it didn’t even crystallized there, but rather on PC, where they changed demomaking trends instantly. It ended the flood of boring coderdemos, pointlessly rotating, amorphous Phong objects, which was an even more ponderous problem on the PC than on the Amiga. Where CNCD and The Black Lotus could not succeed, Haujobb managed: bringing life to the dull world of demos. The less innovative PC scene was starving for a new design school and the new style brought to them by Haujobb also influenced the Amiga scene around 1999–2000. This was the point where the PC scene surmounted to the Amiga, and outpaced it on the design field. Actually we have to add that it was not solely the result of Haujobb’s work. They just provided the final push for an already preparing style change. Without them, however, today’s PC demos would have a much different look and the Amiga scene would probably have followed a different path.

Scoopex and Haujobb kept their lead for the next year and drove The Black Lotus from the top of the charts, after which they transferred to the PC scene. Scoopex was undoubtedly the king of intros. Boogeyman and Antibyte effused their 64 K and 40K productions. They developed a fantastically fast and tiny 3 D engine, which served as the core of all of their intros. This is how Torque, Superautodrome 2, System Crime, Haupex, and 1000% were born in 1998. They used the same pastel colors in each of them and also generally the same objects and effects. If someone watched all Scoopex intros in succession they might have the feeling of watching the same thing again and again but with a different music.

Haujobb won the demo compo at Mekka & Symposium ’98 with Aphrodysiae. This was less advanced than My Kingdom, but that’s no wonder, since it was made before My Kingdom. It was originally intended for Assembly ’97 and after its display was screwed up by the organizers at The Party ’97, it was entered at Mekka & Symposium. The silver medal was taken by Extra Life from Abyss, also being second in the PC demo compo, and the bronze went to Mankind for Scraps of Beings. Scoopex swaggeringly won the intro compo with Superautodrome 2, pushing Shibuya by Haujobb to second place. It was the other way around at Assembly ’98: there Haujobb won with Edit 0.5, and Scoopex was second with System Crime, with a similarly big difference in scoring. Haujobb, meanwhile, kept collecting new members. They announced the association of Virgill, the former TRSI musician in the endscroller of Aphrodysiae, and later the winner of the Mekka & Symposium ’98 graphics compo, Cyclone of Abyss also became a Haujobb member.

The Gathering, commonly held at the same time as Mekka & Symposium, was a moderate success. PC gamers flooded the hall, just like at The Party, and the once high standard demoparty went on to became a plain LAN party. Additionally they did not give away the promised prizes. Despite all of this, The Gathering wasn’t without decent Amiga demos in the last good year of the Amiga scene. One of the year’s best Amiga demos was also introduced there, by the new mascot of TRSI, Mellow Chips. Their demo, Rise was more than just a competition winner. It was the first example of a new demo style that is typical on the Amiga scene and a style that has never appeared on the PC, and probably never will simply because of the different approach of the two scenes and the difference between the two computers.

The makers of Rise quit the tradition of displaying abstract shapes and technically interesting, but generally boring effects. They did not follow CNCD or Haujobb, they did not improve their demo with graphical elements, but assembled closely realistic cinematic sequences and realtime animations. In demos similar to Rise, demoroutines are introduced as tools of applied graphics. For example, an amorphous shape rotating in nothing would be quite boring, but if the same object floats over the hands of a mage-like character, then it can be immediately inserted into a fantasy storyline. Fire effect or glowing particle storms were also banal effects, already seen a thousand times, but if the fire effect is placed in the middle of a fireplace, then it’s already a lifelike set for a scene, and not a pointless coder stunt.

Because of the limited performance of the Amiga, the final scenes usually used small, 2 × 2 or 4 × 4 resolution, often undocumented HAM modes, and strong blur was applied to smoothen jaggy edges. This blur cut a different path on the Amiga than on PC. Small resolution and strong blur resulted in a cinematic effect in Amiga HAM modes, while it would have looked like a cheap effect on the PC. But such tricks were already out of fashion in 1998 on the PC, as 3 D accelerator cards were already advanced enough to display a 3 D animation in high resolution. That’s why demos similar to Rise never appeared on the PC.

To mark the birth of this new cinedemo style with Rise I will present a totally subjective opinion. Actually we could start a long debate if this style had already appeared earlier, for example, with FairLight-Virtual Dreams demos, or did it only emerged later? Regardless, it’s a fact that it spread and gained strength with the release of Rise and the Assembly winner Relic by Nerve Axis, half a year later.

The roots of cinedemo are very old. Perhaps we can say it’s the resurrection of the old idea by Alcatraz, the storydemo, hallmarked by Odyssey, or we can even think of them as the descendants of old virtual world demos, but the heritage of Virtual Dreams and The Black Lotus can also squarely be discovered within them, along with some influence from the PC scene. Cinedemos usually covered a sci-fi or fantasy theme but rarely a complete story. Usually the aim is just to create a cinematic milieu, demonstrating the possibility of building a realistic environment out of demoeffects. A movie director or a professional computer animator would probably scream in horror when seeing the ungainly storyline of Rise or Relic, but these pieces of art should be watched with a different mindset. Although the visuals are molded into a more down-to-earth form than in earlier demos the main emphasis is still on codework and programming stunts and the storyline is just a marginal feature. When watching Relic by Nerve Axis, no scener asked where they got the banal sci-fi story, but “Oh my god, is it really realtime?”. Surely enough, the English guys had bedazzled the audience with such a visual quality as if they were watching a trailer of an expensive Hollywood movie. The simple, low polygon 3 D objects were made realistic with fantastic light and fog effects. Since they used few polygons, there were still plenty of resources for movie-like effects, which they exploited to the last byte.

If we dig really deep in the two new styles from 1997–1998, the cinedemo and the layerdemo, we can discover the old duality, the opposition of coderdemos and design-demos. Layerdemos were built of simple but spectacular elements, while cinedemos were difficult and demanding in another way. It is still a subject of debates in Amiga circles whether this or that is the real demo style and whether fabulous realization is really necessary for a demo to receive accolade. But this is also not a novelty, as this debate traces back to the Melon Dezign days. Today, in 2005, both styles stand their grounds and probably will stay forever, or at least as long as Amiga demos are still made.

In earlier years, if new and innovative works like Relic came up, demos proliferated and everybody talked about the resurrection of the Amiga scene for a while. But yet, 1998 was different. From the Assembly to The Party and practically the rest of the year, not a single party had Amiga compos, except for Polish ones. The Amiga was not the same anymore, even in Poland, but a handful of Polish groups ardently guarded the remnants of the scene. The elite of the PC scene respected them for their endurance and achievements. As a matter of fact, there were already fewer Polish parties. While half a dozen events awaited the sceners in 1998 – Rush Hours, Intel Outside, Gravity, Quast, Satellite – most of them disappeared in 1999. Only Satellite stayed on its feet in 2000, and even that faded to oblivion in 2001.

A weird new Amiga scene developed in Hungary. Demos were still not made, only Kangooroo showed some activity. But the scene remained and there were still organized Amiga parties, or “PC free events”, as they called them. Amiga, C64, Atari and Macintosh users gathered 2–3 times a year in Budapest to meet each other for one or two days. The series was opened by Amiganica Hungarica Party, followed by Fuck-Ya Party (from the name of the club where it was held, Fáklya, meaning torch in Hungarian), and later Fyanica Party by merging these two, repeated a dozen times. The location was usually the Csokonai Cultural Center, where the Hungarian C64 cracker scene used to assemble every week many years ago. There were compos at these parties, but quality productions were rarely appeared. Hardly any demos or intros and it was rather a friendly users club and boozing event than a demoparty. The highlight of the evening was always the PC smashing show organized by Crimson Jihad. The computers brought by the visitors always died a painful death by high voltage, sledgehammers, petrol cans, or similar devices, depending on passing fancy.

The Party in 1998 has not brought any surprises. No new names emerged, and nothing groundbreaking was released. The makers of Rise and Relic had no followers yet, but it’s no wonder considering the plunging quality of The Party. The once glorious megaparty now supported the scene only half-heartedly. Rather it saught the pleasure of the thousands of gamers who now occupied all three huge halls. The disappointed demomakers wrote off the Danish event. Fortunately there was still something to watch on the big screen in 1998, although the quality did not even approached that of earlier years, except for the winners.

Scoopex had reached the peak of their career, winning both the Amiga demo and Amiga intro competitions with the Alien 2 demo and 1000% intro. Their usual partner and rival, Haujobb was not present. Their opponents were known names of the last era: Oxyron became second with Dreizehn, and Abyss was third with their last demo, Wildlife, outmatching Phenomenon by Dual Crew Shining by just a few points. Two new names appeared on the result list, Ephidrena, reaching the fifth place in the demo category with Substral, and Loonies, taking the second prize of the intro compo home – or they would, if they received it – for The Morning Trip. These two groups later surprised the shrinking audience of Amiga demos with plenty of great productions, but there weren’t many new names in 1998 besides them. They were the very last generation of the Amiga scene.

1999 was a weak year for the Amiga. Pessimists date the death of the Amiga scene as 1998. As a matter of fact, only decay can be observed from that timeframe. One can count the groups creating something enduring since 1999 on a single hand and unfortunately we don’t need more hands to count their audience. The Amiga had pretty much disappeared, it was not a factor in computer technology any more. But just like the Commodore 64, the Amiga was also not totally abandoned. Who were the last fanatics? Haujobb, The Black Lotus, Ephidrena, Potion, Madwizards, Spaceballs, Skarla, Loonies, many old names. Some are just a few years old, others go back well into the past. These groups were still present at parties and thanks to them, there were still Amiga compos after 1999 and the millenium. At the year’s first major scene event in 1999, Astrosyn ’99 in Poland there was even a separate Amiga 500 compo, with two entries, Rout by Potion and Best Before 2000 by ITB/Independent. The “real” Amiga demo compo was not a disappointment either. There were seven entries, of which Potion was triumphant with Vertus. Amiga productions also competed in the wild demo category, exactly a dozen in number.

The Gathering 1999 brought a big surprise, as Spaceballs had returned, and continued where they left off a few years earlier: they won both the Amiga demo and the 64 K intro categories. Their demo, Supermonster and intro, Fusion is no good for me were good examples of the growing influence the PC demos had on Amiga ones. Ephidrena stepped on the platform next to them, their demo, Flux received a few hundred points less but enough for second place. The third was the Finnish Da Jormas, stalwarts of the abstract Finnish demo style both on PC and Amiga, this time competing with a demo titled Ulsteri.

If you, dear Reader, feel a bit bored of the mere listing of groups, demo titles and their placings, I can assure you, the scene was also quite boring in 1999. Almost all demos were made of the same wood, tuned up vector objects were rotating, and seemingly the innovations of TBL, Haujobb, CNCD and Virtual Dreams has not carried much effect yet. Just a few were able to break out of the maze of stereotypes, and even fewer were able to break the monotony with colors and design elements. The bar was quivering even under the year’s perhaps best demo, the Mekka & Symposium winner Mnemonics, although not because of the colors but the monotonic house music. Loveboat drifted a bit closer to the ultimate aim with Beats, the Assembly winning demo. Even this was not interesting for new effects but smart graphical elements, the cartoonish intro, and the drum’n’bass music which was not yet very common in demos. Loveboat later also performed well at The Party. They came in second both in the demo and intro categories with Spellbound and Offbeat. They were defeted by Ephidrena with Concrete, while the third place was occupied by the unexpectedly returning The Black Lotus and their new Amiga demo, Rain.

The Amiga scene practically reached a seemingly dead state until the millenium. The great groups mainly died and since there was no replacements the Amiga,

Breakpoint 2004 is the last chance we can give to the Amiga scene.

– Scamp of Vacuum, main organizer of Breakpoint parties

8. After the millenium

The Amiga was still not really dead, as proven by the tremendous amount of Amiga demos released after the millenium. Only a few parties still had Amiga compos after 2000 but when they were held it was the best groups who showed up and brought out the best from the old lady. The most active during the first half decade of the 21st century were The Black Lotus, Loonies, Ephidrena, Madwizards, Nah Kolor, Darkage, Potion and Haujobb along with a few unknown or lesser known labels who did not fall very far behind the bigger groups. The word “Amiga demo” soon meant the same as “shocking visual experience” and if we look at the rate of such demos in a single year we have to admit that the Amiga scene really took flight after 2000. The uptick in productions was enough for even yet another step of evolution, completing the changes mentioned in the last chapter.

The first great demos of the millenium was made by the Danish Loonies. The winner demo of Mekka-Symposium 2000, Cybercinematastic was actually a response for Alien 2. by Scoopex. Scenes from some famous Hollywood movies, Independence Day, The Phantom Menace, Terminator II, Jurassic Park, Mars Attacks, The Abyss and The Matrix were elaborated as realtime animation sequences. Conventional demoeffects were given an interesting role, mocking the original movie visuals. Bump mapping was used to imitate the famous opening scene of Independence Day, human footprints disappearing on the Moon, textured vectormorph resusciated the T-1000 terminator as it emerged from the checkerboard floor in Terminator II.Two nicely textured and animated vectorgraphic figures, Darth Maul and Quin-gon Jinn, fought.

The 64 K intro compo also served up a huge surprise. The winner was Potion, a a Polish group not yet widely known abroad, with Gush 2: Gift.To understand what was so special on this intro, let’s jump a little bit forward to the second volume of this book, and see what was going on with the PC scene around this time.

On the PC, the genre of generated 64 K intros just came into fashion. The trend was set by Jizz from The Black Lotus in 1996, and its sequel, Stash a year later. These intros demonstrated the real possibilities of 64 mere kilobytes, if we abandon all stored data – sound samples, 3 D objects, graphics – and use algorythmitically generated objects instead. That means if we need an abstract 3 D object, we don’t model it with some 3 D program, but rather find a mathematical formula to describe it. For example, if we wish to display two interconnected, twisted torii, a routine generating them occupies much less storage space than a data file containing the premodelled object. Additionally, the iterative modification of the routine’s parameters enable us to animate the weird, abstract shapes and if we need a smoother object with more polygons we just have to set the necessary parameter value higher. Music can also be created by code. A simple software synthesizer and a script to operate it occupies much less space than a module music and a player routine. To summarize, generators can produce much more useful data – in some cases practically infinite amounts – with significantly less storage need. However, there is a trade off with load/run time in order for the demo to generate some of these 3 D worlds prior to running.

Gift was a generated intro, just like Jizz or Stash. There were not any such intros on Amiga at the time, and to be straight, neither existed on PC after TBL’s two masterpieces up until the appearance of Farbrausch – but this story belongs to the second volume. Gift started with an incredibly long preloader sequence which idled along unpacking data and precalculating for at least 15–20 minutes. There wasn’t much to impress the audience during this time – not even a moving progressbar – but those who had patience were presented with a fantastic experience, both technically and aesthetically.

The intro played with Skip’s excellent goa music and contained surprisingly few routines but these were enough for a very spectacular, almost ten minutes long show, when combined with realtime post-processing effects. At first sight it’s incredible what can be stuffed in 64 KB. Amiga fans had not had a share of such a surprise since Virtual Dreams’ intros. One has to watch it several times with a professional eye to notice the repetitions. For example, the ancient sinplot, a dancing animated Lissajous spline turns up very often, but the spline is sometimes plotted with light spots, sometimes with green glowing circles or white rectangles so it looks like a different effect every time. Square grids appear in the background as design elements but always in a different color. Metaballs are also returning objects, also in a different form each time. Sometimes numbers run in the background, looking quite “computerish”, while it’s very easily programmable and needs little storage space. The spice of the visuals are post-processing effects: transparency, distortions, blur, invertion, stroboscope. These effects are tightly synchronized to the music.

According to the calculations of Mavey, the coder, using the sound engine coded by Skip they saved 3 MB of space just by generating the sound samples instead of storing them. The entire song is built on a single sound generator and four stored drum samples! After optimization they still had enough free space to even squeeze a realtime raytracer into the rest of the 64 KB. Gift is not accidentally a cult intro, it’s a brave piece of art, which will proabably never be outdone on Amiga, at least not on the conventional 680x0 machines.

Mekka & Symposium emerged to be the number one party of the Amiga scene in 2000. The Party and The Gathering permanently sunk into the morass of commerciality, the Assembly party had been a PC event for years – seemingly also turning into a gameparty by this time – and many of the great old parties had perished. No wonder everybody released their best Amiga productions at the Fallingbostel world scene meeting. There were 13 demos and twelf 64 K intros in 2000 and we can find quite a few familiar names if we take a look at the results of the music or graphic competitions: Chromag and Virgill were the winners of the MP3 category, while we can find Lazur, DEF, Made and Cyclone among the best of the graphics competition.

There was no separate Amiga category at the Assembly party, the two platforms were joined. Metatag Lock K-231277 by Madwizards came out 13th out of 15 competitors. Two other Polish groups entered the 64 K competition. Appendix came in 8th place with Electricity and Whelpz 11th place with Rays. The Polish Amiga scene was still strong. Five Amiga demos competed at the Satellite 2000 party in Szczecin during November, while there were only three PC ones – all from the same group. The already world famous Potion amused the audience with their first PPC production, the Suicidal intro, bringing 55 points and a first prize. This intro was based on a lightning fast realtime raytracer, a nice achievement. Some other parties also had Amiga competitions during the year but those only attracted less interesting entries or none at all. Most organizers abolished Amiga categories and very few of them supported the last champions of the old machine in 2001. Even Commodore 64s were more frequent than Amigas at parties. Why, might you ask did the little 8-bit machine survived its supposed descendant. The explanation is simple, the Amiga was more expensive and rarer than the C64 and while it was easy to obtain parts for a C64, repairing an Amiga, especially a well equipped enhanced one, was a difficult and expensive task. Therefore those who still had a working Amiga cherished it more than carrying it around in a backpack. But why would one needed that since parties are not about sitting front of computers anyway.

Sceners gathered in Denmark between Christmas and New Year of 2000 for the last time. The glory of Crystal-Silents-Anarchy Party was gone. A few dozen Amigans, C64’ers and PC sceners grieved among six thousand imbecile game lamers. Only 300–400 people voted at the competitions, contrary to 2000–3000 of a few years ago. Old traditions, however, survived: heated debates broke out after the party if Megademo 2000 by Haujobb deservedly won against J by Ephidrena, even if it received twice the points. It’s a fact however that while Haujobb’s demo practically lacked any design and it was just a sequence of well coded routines, J was a true design-demo, technically matching Megademo 2000. According to Ephidrena, the explanation of the anomaly should be sought around the organizers, who displayed the demo with a 030 accelerator card instead of a 060 causing the demo run like a snug slideshow. Additionally they mistyped the name of the group. Actually the organizers broadcasted a message on the network before the competition, asking Ephidrena to bring a computer with a 060 card, but they never read the message simply because their Amigas were not connected to the network. Finally they reshowed the demo from one of Ephidrena’s A1200s with the correct speed but barely two dozen people watched it and it showed in the final results.

J was a truly modern demo, with all the marks of the 21th century but with a strong Amiga character. It consisted of simple but spectacular effects with a graphics rich environment, bravely employing the newest novelty, post-processing. The colorful images sometimes changed to monochromatic green for some seconds, with visible rasterlines, as if we were watching an old computer monitor. Loaderror’s routines, Cheetah’s graphics and the background photos of Loaderror and Pippin were already magnificent, but the demo was actually vivified through the mixed synth-acoustic music by Zixaq of Frequent. He was not the only guest star; the demo engine was programmed by a Serbian coder, Cyborg of Industry.

Apparently, even if the quantity of demos was behind the halcyon days there was nothing against quality. The same tendency continued in 2001 and 2002. The hard core of the scene has not surrendered.

Another new style appeared in 2001. Actually it was not started by Amiga groups, but the trends of the PC scene came over; namely the layerdemo style of Haujobb. Several groups adopted and developed it: “dirty,” noisy effects, resembling the damages of an old film strip came into fashion, along with abrupt words and characters carrying strange emotions, especially in Ephidrena and Madwizards demos. Dark, melancholic music took off and musicians often used speech samples distorted with different filters to mimick a decades old vinyl recording. The new demo style carried a gloomy, deranged feeling, something like a modern urban semidarkness mixing the visual elements of street art and postindustrialism with the underground experience of the demoscene culture.

Who could have expected The Gathering 2001 to still attract a any Amiga sceners? Powergod by Spaceballs and Showtimeintro by Ephidrena clashed for the first prize and Spaceballs won. But the real wonder was born in Fallingbostel, Germany on the same weekend, at Mekka & Symposium 2001. An impressive 22 Amiga demos were entered into the competition which was a record in those days and none of them were cheap fun productions. The winner was, not surprisingly, The Black Lotus with The Perfect Circle. It should be obvious why it is not surprising for anyone who watched this demo.

TBL continued their own traditions since Tint with The Perfect Circle, but also adopted a few elements of the layerdemo style. Their new musician, Trauma Child Genesis, who was actually two musicians, Cube of Armada and Teque of Aggression, both from Finland, arranged a fantastic synth-industrial and orchestral ambient soundtrack, well fitting to the characteristic colorful visual world and fabulous 3 D scenes. This was the premier of their new demo engine, NewAge, programmed by Scout (also known as Kalms). The effects were arranged by Rubberduck and Scout. The graphics and the 3 D models praised the handwork of Louie and Tudor. This demo had everything one could expect from The Black Lotus and more. One of the best parts featured a 3 D fractal tree seen on the illustrations above. The result of their first character animation experiment was a swimming whale brought to life by animated splines, but this was just a first step towards what they showed in their later demos.

The victory of The Perfect Circle was not at all easy. They had serious opponents, like Amsterdam Blessings by Madwizards and Adam Malysz vs. Wienerwurst by Ephidrena. Still, the second prize was not taken by these, but Hotstyle Takeover, a very special demo by Loonies. For the average viewer it may have seemed like a quite uninteresting, primitive demo, routines recalling the Amiga 500 era: simple vector cubes, robotic-looking animated characters. Why has this thing needed a 060 accelerator, and how was it able to beat more than fifty points on the far more spectacular Amsterdam Blessings? The fact is that Hotstyle Takeover was not primitive at all. Psycho and Blueberry, the two coders were playing with the speed of routines. As the message before the second demopart – the main part – proves, they wished to demonstrate that 68060-optimized chunky to planar routines can also run oneframe, if optimized properly. They coded a huge set of conventional effects which each met the expectations and the motto at the end of the demo: “A demo is meant to be oneframe!”The Loonies coders were great fans of optimization and speed, which is easily noticeable in some of their other productions like the 64 K intro Impossible from 1999.

As usually, a few months of silence followed after Mekka & Symposium. This silence was suddenly shattered by breaking news: An Amiga demo won the demo competition at the Assembly! It was the fantastic Lapsuus demo by the unknown Finnish group Maturefurk. This demo resembled the cinedemos of Mellow Chips and Nerve Axis. It was not merely a victory, but a victory at the world’s biggest PC party against superb PC demos that instantly became legends themselves. One of the runner-up demos was Gerbera by Moppi, which Lapsuus surmounted with a tremendous advantage of 6,257 points against 3,950. Actually this is not really that surprising if we unveil who was behind the unknown group of Maturefurk. The creators were the makers of the world famous 3 DMark audiovisual system benchmark software, the professionals of madonion.com, to specify: Petri, Mikko (also known as Aivo and Kalsu of ex-Mellow Chips, coders), Juha (Asa of ex-Mellow Chips, modeller), Eetu (Frank of Orange, modeller) and Saku (Owl of Haujobb, graphics and direction). Visualice also did some work on the project. The music was composed by Captain of Image, whose name first turned out in 1991, as the winner of The Gathering ’91 and Anarchy Easter Party music competitions.

The inspiration for Lapsuus came from the movie Dark City. The first part of the demo cites the gloom with dark colors, but the movie itself is not mimicked so this inspiration is not recognizable. But the brilliant 3 D engine was suitable for more than displaying lifelike static scenes. It also handled character animation and not with the usual robotic feeling as seen in other demos. A good example is the vampiric character turning around and looking into the camera. Light and shadows, volumetric light effects were also extremely realistic. The best example is the sunrays playing among the leaves of trees in the last part. The audience didn’t even know that they were watching an Amiga demo since all the different computer platforms were joined at the Assembly. This was only known when the message Lapsuus on Amiga was displayed after at the end. Amazed applause thundered the competition hall. There wasn’t such a beautiful demo even on high performance PCs! The Finnish word lapsuus meant childhood, referring to the makers’ teen years spent on the Amiga. For their hard work they were rewarded with an unexpected honour: they first prize of the Assembly 2001 demo competition was handed over to them by Robert J. Mical, the former designer of the Amiga, who was very proud of them. The audience later unanimously voted Lapsuus the best demo in Assembly’s history.

Lapsuus, just like every grand demo, also fired some debates. Some doubted the images were realtime. They assumed they were animations. As a matter of fact they indeed looked like animation, but this is the essence of this demo, and generally the cinedemo genre: small resolution, strong blur and the demo looks more like a film than a realtime demo. If we recoded Lapsuus on the PC and played it with a good 3 D accelerator in high resolution it would have lost its appeal and looked like just another clear and sharp PC demo.

The year’s last Amiga party was The Real Scene After Christmas (TRSAC) in Copenhagen, Denmark between 12th and 14th October. This atmospheric little party was already held two times in 2000, but with only 50–60 visitors, while this time they had around 300. The small headcount made it a true sceneparty: everybody that counted on the Amiga scene was there, and the yield of competitions outmatched even the biggest megaparties – among them the declined The Party, to which the name of this party referred.

The Party 2001 played no role in the life of the Amiga scene. The flagship of parties was reduced to a sleazy LAN party and although there still were some PC competition entries, the few sceners who still attended typically returned home with the memory of a disappointing weekend. There was still some debate in diskmags as to whether the scene should keep on supporting The Party but it was out of question after the tremendous flop.

But let’s look backwards in time for a bit. Back to a seemingly insignificant little Polish party, Symphony Demoscene Festival held September 2001 in the city of Trzcianka. Madwizards won this party, true to form, with Cruel Karma Forms, Amnesty came second with Dogstar Descends, and the third was Encore and Nah Kolor with a joint demo titled Plus. An excellent piece of designwork triumphed the 64 K category, SIL by Decree, with just a few points over Psychol by Appendix. The curiosity of this little party is that this was the first competition where PPC demos competed each other – these were demos not coded for classic Amigas. What exactly is a PPC? Let’s review the short story of this unconventional platform.

The story of classic Amiga computer ended sometime around 2000. This didn’t mean the death of the scene as the Amiga was always a demoscene computer and will always stay one. But the production of Amigas ended and hardly anyone manufactured peripherals or parts any more and the brand was practically just as dead as the Commodore 64. However, there still remained some hope, the PowerPC, or the Power Processing Computer.

When Motorola 68060-based accelerators were introduced rumours were already circulating about the next step of development, the fantastic PPC processors, designed for future expansion boards. Their time came around 2000. What is the PPC, as a platform, and is it an Amiga at all, is hard to explain. If we replace the original CPU in an Amiga 4000 with a PPC, and use an advanced graphics card instead of the AGA chipset we can hardly call our computer an Amiga any more, since we practically assembled a hybrid computer. New generation PPC machines, the Pegasos or the AmigaOne, can not be treated as an Amiga at all, since both are basically PCs, but with a Motorola PPC chip instead of an Intel x86 successor plus they are not compatible with old Amigas at all. Those Amiga users and fans who still didn’t want a PC after the millenium, all bought PPCs. Some purchased a PPC expansion board for his A1200, some added a PPC, and some added a modern 3 D accelerator to their A4000 while others simply ordered the new Pegasos. (The AmigaOne is not yet available at this books editing time but it can be preordered.) Naturally the number of PPC users is minimal since just a few percent of Amiga users switched to this platform and even less are making demos. Quantity is however compensated by quality, as we will soon see.

The first two PPC demos were presented April 1998, at Rush Hours ’98 in Poland and were made by Venus Arts. They remixed their two older demos, Everything Dies and Ghost in the Machine for the new platform and showed them outside the competitions since the competition machine did not have a PPC card and all the rest of the entries ran on conventional 680x0 Amigas. In the same year, at Intel Outside ’98, PPC demos were allowed to compete and Venus Arts won the second prize with a new PPC production, The Field Where I Die. Madwizards, closely associated with Venus Arts soon followed suit, and they presented a joint PPC demo titled Absolon at Gravity ’98 in August which palced third. Gravity was the first party where the organizers provided a PPC card for the compo machine, and this became a standard at Polish parties shortly thereafter. Incidently most PPC demos were made in Poland. Potion also changed to the new platform and amused the audiences with brilliant intros. In France Mankind made some PPC demos, and Kangooroo once released a PPC 64 K intro titled Flow. The hub of the PPC scene would have to be consider Poland, even today. To find out why, I spoke with Kiero and Azzaro, the coders from Madwizards, at the Symphony 2004 demoparty. Azzaro left to bring some beers at the beginning, so it was mainly Kiero who answered the questions.

The PPC is a bit special, as it’s generally connected to the Amiga scene, but it’s not really Amiga. But what I would like to know is why the PPC scene is generally associated with Poland? Why is the PPC is so popular in this country and not in other countries?

In general the Amiga is very popular in Poland. Poland was always Amiga-land, so to say. Polish people are still buying Amigas or if not Amigas, then something similar.

People say that it was Madwizards, especially you, Azzaro and Kiero, who started this entire PPC thing. Not like you made the first PPC demos, but you made the first “real”PPC demos.

Actually I only started making PPC demos because I had the hardware. If I had some better PC, I would’ve started making regular PC demos.

So you only started the PPC revolution because you didn’t have a decent PC? Interesting.

No, it’s not. My PC just sucks, I still have a Riva128. It sucks even compared to my Amiga. But I love making demos, I love the process, the people involved.

Is the PPC much different from the PC, technically speaking? Is it easier or harder to write demos for it?

Hmm, no.

Is it just the same machine with a different processor?

Hmm, yes. But you know, I never liked to make demos using some built-in script engine. I don’t like, for example, this Werkkzeug1 which Farbrausch is using. I think this just sucks. A demo is to be made by a coder, from scratch. He should code it, do it himself, working on it, not sleeping because of it, and that’s a demo.

People say that Madwizards demos all look alike.

Probably. Well, I started making our demoengine three years ago. Ever since then it’s been constantly evolving. And yes, we like the style of our demos. The colors, the schemes, the design, the way it looks. Why would we try to make something we don’t like?

How are Madwizards demos made? Do you or Azzaro do the design?

He first makes a draft, a screenplay, so to say. Then we’re improving it, changing it, blaming each other, and so on.

Are you making your demos while drunk?

No. Never. I’ll tell you, once we were making one of our demos – Cruel Karma Forms – in a garden. Everybody was drinking around us – and I was sober! Imagine that. Everybody is drinking, and I’m sitting at the computer with baggy eyes not sleeping or anything.

Well, that’s interesting.

No, its not!

I mean, imagining you sober.

Well, for me it was really hard. You know, I really like alcohol. And demos.

Which is your greater addiction?

Oh, my. Now, that’s a question. Well, I am not addicted but I really like beer.

Have you ever left a girl for a demo?

No, but once I left a girl for computers. You know, girls and such stuff doesn’t really work together.

(Azzaro has arrived at this point, carrying a few cans of beer and joined the conversation.)

Say, Azzaro, are you also a beer and demo addict?

Maybe a little.

And which addiction is stronger?

Computers are a hobby, demos are a hobby, but if you work ten hours a day on a computer, coding, working with Photoshop then you really don’t have time for doing anything else.

I see. How did you two get started making demos together?

Years ago, Kiero coded a graphics program which really looked like Photoshop on the Amiga. He was the only guy in Koszalin, the city where we live, who could code such things. One day I told him to drop this shit and make demos instead.

Which was your first demo together?

Metatag, for Assembly 2000.

I wasn’t in MaWi then – continues Kiero – I was in Appendix at the time. After Metatag, I made one more demo for Appendix, and that was the end. After that I left Appendix and joined Madwizards. It happened during some party. We were drunk for a week and went to some Internet cafe, and there I announced everyone that I was leaving Appendix. Madbart was mad about it.

Then we had two coders – explains Azzaro – but nothing else. We usually asked different people to make 3 D objects, music, and graphics. And I was just waiting and waiting and waiting for them, and since I got nothing I started to learn Photoshop myself and finally I became the main graphics artist of Madwizards.

Who is the greatest competitor of Madwizards?

It’s obvious I think. Try to guess.

Well, I could guess, but I want to hear your opinion.

Obviously TBL is.

Do you like TBL’s demos?

Yes.

No.

Well … I’ve met them many times. Maybe they’re not perfect but I really admire the way they work. The oldschool people they are. The way they get their demos together, how they work on it, and how hard they work on it. For example, at Breakpoint 2004 they only arrived at the party on the third day because they were in a hotel working to finish Silkcut.

Do you think the Amiga will die? Or will it survive as an oldschool platform, like the C64 has?

The Amiga will die. It’s obvious. But not because of the scene.

Madwizards was not just making demos. Several diskmags and packmags are associated with them, like Excess or Save da Vinyl, edited by Azzaro, or the Zosia pack series assembled by Mcr. Madwizards members were also the organizers of the Symphony demoparty.

The number of Amiga productions dropped in 2002 again. Most parties abandoned Amiga competitions. The main annual event of the Amiga scene was Mekka & Symposium, and the only other party considered a field of worthy competition was the Assembly. The Gathering 2002 only attracted local groups, among them Spaceballs, who again took first prize of the demo competition with Scrimm. Significant demos sometimes also showed up at small parties, like TRSAC FU in August, Symphony in June, or the French Slach also in August. Some examples are Third Eye Conqueror, Another Dream Away, and Till I Feel You by Madwizards, Chineasthetik by Scarab, Fisk Finger Lane by Spaceballs and Dark by Loonies. Generally the year 2002 was a great setback for the Amiga scene. Most demos were competing alone and real clashes were rare. The next such occassion was Mekka & Symposium 2003.

All Amiga groups gave their best efforts for the Fallingbostel party but also the organizers. At the most friendly party in the history of the scene – it would take a long list to mention all the ideas the organizers and the visitors came up with, from the buffet selling currywurst through the open air barbecue making to the live act of Welle:Erdball – The Black Lotus turned out to be the best again. Their winner demo, The Little Nell, was a worthy sequel to The Perfect Circle, with a lot of character animation and simulated volumetric lights. It was the play of precisely designed textures. Sometimes they managed almost photo realistic effects with shadows painted on the textures (shadow mapping). Volumetric lights, the simulation of light rays glittering in floating dust or vapor would be far too difficult for an Amiga but they solved it with semi-transparent spatial layers. Some great character animation, the obligatory part of The Black Lotus demos, crowned the new masterpiece.

The runner-up was Scarab with another AGA demo titled Tribute. Its most interesting highlight was a series of recoded parts from other groups’ demos, displayed as if we were switching channels on a television. These fragments ranged from The Desert Dream through J and Gift to The Perfect Circle, but even an old C64 Eagle Soft Incorporated cracktro appeared briefly. Actually Tribute was not squarely an AGA demo, it worked better on a Picasso graphics card and a PPC accelerator. It’s interesting because if we don’t treat it as an AGA demo then we can profess that there were only PPC demos at Mekka & Symposium 2002 with the exception of The Little Nell. But this could be the subject of endless debates.

There’s nothing to complain about Amiga intros either. Although there were only three entries they were all brilliant masterpieces! The winner was Potion again, this time outmatching even themselves and anyone else ever engaged in creating 64 K intros. Planet Potion won with 751 points, wallopping everything ever made in this category. It was another generated intro, with a few, but much better 3 D routines. The intro was based on simple, but masterfully combined animated two-dimensional figures, spiced with Skipp’s fantastic goa soundtrack and also supported with a speech sythesizer (!) which read the greetings in a rustling robotic voice. The contents of Planet Potion would have been enough for three demos. Never had such an outstanding intro been made either before or after for any computer platform. No wonder it immediately took three of the Scene.org Awards, the demoscene’s Academy Award next year, as the best 64 K intro, the best effects and the best soundtrack.

The runner-up intro, The Castle by Loonies also deserves getting into the hall of fame. It was a bit behind the design excellence of Planet Potion and the music was also no match for Skipp’s goa, but it unveiled a true technical wonder instead. In this film-like intro the camera wandered around in a castle. Fire was burning in the hearth, water was squirting from the fountain, sparkles of magic were fizzling in the throne room, and even a fire blowing dragon appeared. It was all achieved solely with generated textures and objects, running oneframe all the time with 50 frames per second!

Since 2002, the European Amiga scene was only active at the Scandinavian parties, mainly in Sweden – Underscore, The Gathering, Compusphere, Assembly – and the Breakpoint party in Bingen am Rhein every Easter holiday, which replaced the ceased Mekka & Symposium series. The single Amiga competitor at Assembly 2003, the Finnish Push Entertainment came in fifth place with their Mental AGA demo. Its placing is quite respectable, considering its strong PC opponents. Mental is a textbook example of how to make a conventional Amiga demo in the 21st century. It was a bunch of nice routines dubbed with eurotrance music, without any significant design or message but neither was necessary as the viewers were busy trying to figure whether they were seeing realtime effects or animations. These two were mixed in this demo. The main attraction was a set of different plasmas combined with simple 3 D effects and water surface animations. The group also competed in the 4K intro category. Exploder surprised the audience with Rebirth, an intro packed with colorful tunnel effects, almost worth a demo. The music was a cover version of Clokx – Overdrive by Ron van den Beuken. Unfortunately it was disqualified for this plagerism but according to the votes it would have been the winner. His other intro, Humus 4 came second. However, he received a lot of negative critics for reusing routines from older intros. It happened at The Gathering 2001 when the organizers asked him, why their new intro is so closely resembling an older one, except for the textures. Toaks, the coder went to the stage and talked about his brilliant coding abilities until the organizers got bored and showed the old intro on the big screen, next to the new one. It was quite an embarrassing moment.

So, even if some nice Amiga demos often turn up at the Assembly party the true gems were always seen at Breakpoint. After Little Nell, The Black Lotus triumphed again in 2003 and 2004 with Magia and Silkcut both following their own traditions, containing increasingly advanced character animation, physical simulations and painted textures. Their number one opponent was Madwizards, which became very similar to the disappeared Haujobb. Their demos were still always designed by Azzaro and Kiero. Their characteristic style is easily recognizable, just like Haujobb’s, and it’s even somewhat similar to it. As Flapjack, the organizer of the group – a former Appendix musician – noted: “We are the Haujobb of the 21st century.” As a matter of fact, that’s right: the mascot of the group, Erazorcat, a grinning cat’s head in a buzzsaw blade was just as well known as Haujobb’s Kopuli, and the group’s friendly, party-loving atmosphere was also similar to Haujobb’s. Madwizards kept shedding demos for several more years, that’s how Fate Fits Karma, the runner-up of Breakpoint 2003 was made, along with Own Love Balance, Till I Feel You, and Fluffy Digital Snowflakes in 2004, in cooperation with Suspend, or Glare, placed third at Breakpoint 2005.

After the Madwizards guys I had a talk with one of the best known members of The Black Lotus, Mikael Kalms from Sweden, about the future of the Amiga.

The possibilities of the Amiga has been unchanged for many years, but you in TBL are still able to show new things. How long can you continue upping the ante? Is there a point where’s you can’t go any further?

We currently have a large list of Amiga related things we would like to try out, but haven’t gotten around to yet. The list covers over a year’s worth of development time. Improving on previous years is getting increasingly laborious but I’m pretty certain there is at least 3 more years of progress in the Amiga 68k platform.

This year you won the Amiga demo compo at Breakpoint for the fifth time in a row. Can you repeat it next year?

Maybe we can, but the consensus among us TBLers right now is that we will not make a similar effort for BP06 as we did in previous years. Both Silkcut (released at BP04) and Ocean Machine (released at BP05) were in some ways geared for maximum visual and emotional impact in the demo competition and not only as a good view in people’s homes. That is not to say that we will not release any demo at BP06 – we still haven’t decided on that – but after having won 5 times in a row, the desire to snatch the gold has diminished somewhat. The best reason really is that someone has to give Ephidrena, Mawi, Iris and the other active groups a good run for the prize buckle!

Why do you think you haven’t won any Scene.org Awards, despite of being nominated for five categories?

First off, notice that only twice has any non-PC contribution won a Scene.org Award. (Planet Potion by Potion, Amiga PPC, Best Intro 2002; and Aura for Laura by Soopadoopa, PS2, Best Effects 2003) If modern Amiga and PC demos are compared against each other without attention to the underlying platform, then the Amiga demos are at a natural disadvantage due to their aging hardware platform.

Couple that with the fact that some people feel that post-2000 TBL demos are made up of a disjointed set of scenes which lack coherent direction, and there you have the answer to your question. The production values inherent in TBL demos are not the production values that the Scene.org Awards jury is looking for.

I’m glad that there is such a thing as the Scene.org Awards, but as neither Little Nell nor Silkcut won in any of their categories (eight in total), I consider any Scene.org Awards nominations of our demos mainly as a novelty thing.

How are TBL demos made? Are there special methods behind your special demos?

A TBL demo is usually created in a timespan of approximately four months. The first two months are spent planning and the last two are full production. During the planning stage we decide upon the demo’s audiovisual style, try to make out what kinds of parts we would like in the demo and build a very rough storyboard or script.

Most of the music, graphics, and code is developed during the production phase. The musicians get a copy of the rough storyboard and use that as a reference when making their music. When we get a draft of the music back from the musicians we nail the exact times and durations for the various parts. Then we adjust graphics and code to match that final timing.

Codewise a demo is split into two parts: demosystem and demo-specific code. The demosystem is kept between demos and improved upon all year round. The demo-specific code, on the other hand, is mostly written during the two-month “production“ phase. The large body of code contained within the demosystem helps us knock up custom effects quickly, import 3 D scenes, link parts together and make a release-ready package of the demo with little fuss.

If it weren’t for all the little niceties that the demosystem provides us with we would probably not have kept the “one demo a year” pace we’ve adhered to since 2001.

Will TBL always code for classic Amigas?

As long as there is competition we will stay on the 68k platform – that is where we battle with the other active Amiga groups. If the main body of groups would move to PPC-based Amigas we would probably quit or switch to a modern computing platform.

Why are you hanging on to this old platform so faithfully?

It is like an old friend to us and the spirit among the other Amiga demogroups is unmatched in the other scenes.

Which other groups’ demos do you prefer? Do you think there are others who’ll carry on for several years just as compulsively as you do?

I don’t watch many Amiga demos these days except when visiting scene parties. Course, the groups that usually surprise and impress upon me are Ephidrena, Up Rough, Loonies, Iris and MaWi.

What do you think, will the Amiga scene eventually perish or stay being an oldschool platform like the Commodore 64?

The Amiga scene seemed to be experiencing a major recession back in 1998. People were quitting, one by one. The remaining sceners gathered some momentum in 2000–2001, and as far as I have been able to see the scene hasn’t grown much weaker since then. Therefore I think that it’s going to stick around for quite a while.

This chapter can be concluded with exactly the same words as the history of the Commodore 64. The Amiga or the Survivor, as its fans sometimes call her, will probably endure as long as there is someone wanting to own one, turn it on and do things with it. Amiga is creativity and most importantly Amiga played a large role in demoscene over the years. The bloated PC is no match for these little computers when it comes to loveliness and flexibility. The Amiga changed the life of an entire generation and will never be forgotten. Wherever the future of the scene leads, whatever is used in ten, twenty, or more years to create demos creative people will always remember the first 16-bit home computer, the stalwart of this underground electronic art. Never again will there be such a great international youth community as the Amiga scene. This was only possible in the nineties, only with the little Amiga we loved. Memories will fade but the scene spirit and creativity during this Amiga demoscene period will last for a lifetime.

to be continued …

Extraleben

Gillies, Constantin

9783941287907

346 pages

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Eigentlich wollen Nick und Kee nur ihren Commodore 64 abstauben. Noch einmal in die Welt von Space Invaders, Pac-Man und Donkey Kong zurückreisen. Doch der Nostalgietrip endet mit einer Überraschung: In einem Spiel aus den Achtzigern entdecken die alternden Joystickhelden eine geheime Botschaft: Welcome to Datacorp. Plötzlich erwacht der alte Hackerinstinkt wieder. Die Freunde gehen im Dschungel der Bytes auf die Jagd - und entdecken eine weitere Spur: Sie führt nach Iowa, mitten in die amerikanische Provinz. Jetzt gibt es kein Zurück mehr. Von der digitalen Schnitzeljagd magisch angezogen, tritt das Duo die Reise in die USA an. Für die Hobby-Computerarchäologen beginnt eine Odyssee um die halbe Welt - und durch die Geschichte der Games. Doch am Ende wird das Spiel ernster, als die Freunde ahnen.

Die meisten, für die in den 1980ern C64, Atari & Co. der Mittelpunkt des Lebens waren, haben inzwischen den Weg in die Wirklichkeit gefunden, sich aber ein wenig Sehnsucht nach der aufregenden Computer-Pionierzeit bewahrt.
Genau davon handelt der Roman Extraleben: Zwei weitgehend normale Enddreißiger, gefangen zwischen Pubertät und Midlifecrisis, die der Eintönigkeit ihres Lebens entfliehen, nachdem sie einer Verschwörung auf die Spur kommen, die sie unvermittelt in ihre Hacker-Tage zurückversetzt. So unglaubwürdig das auch klingen mag, so glaubwürdig entwickelt das Buch ein Generationen-Portrait einerseits und einen Thriller-Plot andererseits.
Extraleben ist spannend wie ein Krimi - aber gleichzeitig als Kommentar zur Gegenwartskultur treffsicher. Haarklein recherchiert, reich an Seitenhieben auf das Establishment und garniert mit Spitzen gegen den Zeitgeist.

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Terrorismus A/D

Humer, Stephan G.

9783941287716

192 pages

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Cyberterrorismus ist kein neues Phänomen: nicht erst seit der Hochphase des islamistischen Terrors rund um 9/11 dürfte allgemein bekannt sein, dass alle Beteiligten - Staaten wie Terroristen - versuchen, digitale Entwicklungen wie das World Wide Web massiv für ihre Zwecke zu nutzen, beispielsweise auf der Propaganda- und der Rekrutierungsebene. Aufgrund dieser Entwicklungen ist auch der Begriff des Cyberkrieges nicht neu: "Cyber”-Phänomene dieser Art wurden in den letzten Jahren teilweise sehr intensiv ausgeleuchtet, Begrifflichkeiten geprägt - und Szenarien realisiert.
Was bislang fehlte, war eine gleichberechtigte Analyse der Wechselwirkungen zwischen analoger und digitaler Lebensrealität, sprich: ein Ausleuchten der Pfade zwischen neuen Cyber-Phänomenen und „alter Welt". Das Digitale potenziert sowohl die Chancen als auch die Risiken, es löst sie jedoch nicht automatisch ab. Es erschien deshalb zwingend notwendig, den Terminus der Wechselwirkung besonders zu betonen und hier genauer hinzuschauen. Es geht nicht um Einbahnstraßen von analog nach digital, auch nicht um Ablösungen, sondern um permanentes Pendeln zwischen den Polen: Wie prägt eigentlich Digitalisierung ein kulturelles/rechtliches/soziales Bild von Terrorismus und wie prägt diese (erneuerte) Sichtweise wiederum die digitale (Anti-)Terror-Arbeit? Wie stark sind diese Wechselwirkungen in den unterschiedlichen Bereichen, welche Akteure dominieren bzw. werden dominiert, welche Faktoren spielen hier eine besondere Rolle und wann haben sich welche Wechselwirkungen überhaupt herausgebildet, manifestiert oder auch wieder aufgelöst? Seitdem klar geworden ist, daß man mit digitalen Möglichkeiten nun auch nicht-digitale Phänomene sehr präzise und wirkungsvoll analysieren kann (und nicht nur umgekehrt), erscheint die Ausleuchtung der Wechselwirkungen zwischen analoger und digitaler Sphäre geradezu unausweichlich.

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Retroland

Gillies, Constantin

9783941287730

392 pages

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Pac-Man in der Spielhalle. Musik von Platte. Kein Rauchverbot. Kein Handyempfang - und nur Telefonzellen. Das ist die Welt von Retroland, einem Freizeitpark, in dem die Achtzigerjahre nachgebaut sind. Genau hier wollen Nick und Kee, zwei angegraute Nerds, einen letzten gemeinsamen Kumpelurlaub verbringen. Doch plötzliche passiert das Unfassbare: Ein Fremder schießt auf Kee, die Freunde müssen flüchten. Schnell wird klar: Es geht nicht um sie. Ihre Verfolger haben es auf eine Diskette abgesehen, die Kee bei sich trägt. Eine Hetzjagd durch die bizarren Kulissen von Retroland beginnt. Doch nicht nur Nick und Kee schweben in Lebensgefahr …

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Der Bug

Constantin Gillies

9783941287914

296 pages

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Es soll sein letzter großer Auftritt werden. Aber schon nach einem Satz bricht der legendäre Computerpionier Charles Irving tot zusammen. Zurück bleibt nur sein Laptop, Baujahr 1982. Die Datenretter Nick und Kee sollen das digitale Erbe sichern, doch der Routinejob entpuppt sich als Falle: Unbekannte verfolgen die Freunde, hören sie ab, brechen in Nicks Haus ein. Aus den Jägern der verlorenen Daten werden über Nacht selbst Gejagte. Eine atemlose Flucht durch die Zeitzonen beginnt - immer auf der Spur von Irvings letztem Geheimnis. Und das scheint mehr wert zu sein als ein Menschenleben.
Die lang erwartete Fortsetzung des Kultromans "Extraleben"

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Social Media Magazin #21

Sen, Dr. William

9783941287891

68 pages

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Das erste deutsche
Social-Media-Magazin…

…für Manager und Entscheider in
den Bereichen Marketing, Online-
Marketing, Social-Media-Marketing,
Marktforschung sowie PR.
Neben der Aufbereitung aktueller
Themen stehen das Aufspüren
neuer Trends und Chancen im
Fokus, doch auch mögliche
Gefahren im Umgang mit dem
Social-Web werden aufgezeigt.
Ebenso wichtig ist uns die kritische
Betrachtung von Wirtschaftlichkeit
und Nutzen im Umgang mit neuen
Themen, Trends und Technologien,
die den Bereich Social-Media
betreffen.

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