An on-going conversion of Scoopex's Amiga Hardware coding tutorials into C

Scoopex' Vectrex [1] was one of the first intros I saw on the Amiga, and I still have the music to it in my music library. It's not advanced by Amiga standards (I don't mean that to insult them; when it was released most demo groups were still learning the Amiga; it stood up fine alongside other releases at the time, but by a couple of years later it was a totally different ballgame) - I mostly remember it because it was a huge step up from the C64 I was used to, but it did impress me at the time.

As for being legendary, I think for many of these groups part of it is simply surviving. Very few had many enough members and/or members with close enough friendships to have longevity past people moving apart after school etc..

Of course part of that certainly is down to having grown to a certain status quickly enough to be attractive to be members of, so I'm not suggesting that longevity alone is enough.

But the sheer number of well received early releases gave them a reputation that made longevity much easier, and longevity makes maintaining that reputation a lot easier.

[as a total digression, only related in that it's about scene fame/status, this reminds me when I dug up the phone number for Strider of Fairlight from some release he made before he was well known and called him at his home in Sweden (recently he turned up as a Republican politician in California...) to try to convice him to swap with me; he was "famous" by then and I was an annoying little kid disturbing him at dinner; I wonder how often he got calls like that from total strangers in other countries - some of these people had a weird level of niche fame that most people have no idea about]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZobqjVim-6c

Absolutely, great effort. Interesting to compare the two mind you.

You can always use C for scaffolding and then gradually optimize things in assembly. Great way for a busy ex-scener. :-)

Truly being one with the machine and, it's an interesting machine too. I guess similar to old SmallTalk and Lisp machines, only much much cooler and faster.

And those noooooo screams when your speedcode generator writes all over memory crashing the system and you did not save for an hour...

Luckily memory contents (including source code) was often still in RAM after reboot.

RAM disks were pretty common that time. Especially if you had lots of fast RAM, but no hard disk. It also usually survived reboot.

Other common demo writing tools included CygnusEd (text editor), Directory Opus (file management), Deluxe Paint, various crunchers and packers, graphics conversion utilities, Noise/Pro/whatever trackers and of course X-Copy.