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Let's explore the birth of the demoscene, the Amiga platform's revolutionary beginnings, its emotional resonance within a dedicated community, and its broader influence on the field of computer graphics and sound.
I've taken "Show HN" out of the title now.
It's from a time where if you wanted games and you were a kid, you most likely pirated them. Wanna learn to code? Start messing with your game's files and hex editors. The demoscene was where the cool kids came up with ways to push the limits, beyond commercial software. Beyond that oh so lame Microsoft PC.
It's remembered fondly because it's a way to congregate the people who were there. I never had an Amiga as a kid, my parents had a PC. But I still care about that community. It feels like my people, when I started computers.
Much like music has genres and some might be nostalgic, so does the demoscene. It just doesn't get as many releases as on Spotify.
Respect to all the groups still making content for it. I'll share my favorite recent one, by TheBlackLotus https://youtu.be/W5_NMxW5UfE
I don't know if I'd call it an ancestor. When I first saw the Amiga 1000 introduction articles in the computer magazines in 1985, the Mac vs PC wars were already well entrenched and I had both a Mac and a PC. It didn't stop me from getting an Amiga 2000 in 87 when I'd saved up enough money though.
That's an odd turn of phrase considering that both the Mac and the PC predate the Amiga.
If anything surely the Mac's Ridley Scott directed launch Super Bowl ad was the start of "Mac vs PC".
People loved the Amiga because it had a lot of modern features for the time and was reasonably priced. You're definitely right, it's the little computer that could.
The demo scene loved the Amiga because a lot of hardware features were left undocumented ready for you to discover and wow your friends with.
I remember these commercials, because they were on a VHS recording I had of Back to the Future, along with a brief news clip of the only Soviet Shuttle flight.
Amiga 500 commercial (1988)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2KiNpqATUY
Atari 1040ST Computer Commercial 1988 With 1 Megabyte Of Memory!
Technically true. The PC definitely predates both, but the first Mac launched in 1984 and the first Amiga in 1985. They were very much contemporaries.
sweeps config.sys under the rug
IMO besides being extremely easy to program, they didn't required extensive tooling to make interesting programs specially when you compare with alternatives at the time.
Another interesting aspect was the "statelessness" of the system. You had one disk with your programs, other with data and so on, a crash wound't affect or make you lose everything since you're a reset away from coming back to where you where
Even the simplest programming solution today is way more complicated than what existed back them. I wish we had more boot to work systems to hand to kids without much interruption.
My kids are getting into the age of programming and understanding how hardware and a computer works is way more easy when you don't have tons of abstractions on top of it. That's the reason I've been following the David Murray's commanderX16 initiative anxiously :)
It's virtual, but PICO-8 seems pretty cool, and it works nicely on a phone via Safari.
Moving from an Amiga 1200 to a 486SX with Windows 3.1 after it was clear the Amiga platform was dying was disappointing.
What a mistake...
It took years before PCs were able to match the graphics of the Amiga.
[0] It could take 15 minutes to render pretty pedestrian paper on that machine, but many highschool projects were created on that machine, and printed out on his work's LaserWriter.
Amiga and C64 included capable multimedia hardware so demo coders could target a known quantity and ship something that Just Worked for the masses.
Sure, the PC had superior graphics and sound by the 486 era, but it was not a pleasant user experience.
70 Hz 320x200 mode 13 was a different matter. Had to use CPU to update it.
I'm not sure where your 120 pixels are coming from, looks like an error. Color mode was half the resolution of the hires mode (2 hires pixels were taken together to represent 4 values that a color pixel could represent; there were 40x25 blocks (corresponding to characters in text mode) where the colors used for each of the 2 or 4 states could be set (with some additional complication as it was using a separate RAM chip for part of that, the details of which escape my memory without looking it up). There were also 8 sprites of 24 (hires) or 12 (color) pixels horizontally, those don't add up to 120 pixels either.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170104014040/http://c64pixels....
The images really look like that on C64 screen, with absolutely no flickering etc.
In the last couple pages, there was the source code. So kids like me always went on to modify the source code, implementing better weapons, modifying health bars, gravity values and stuff like that to have more fun with the games.
When I bought my first computer, I also heard about the "Savegame Editor Construction Kit" which was basically a tool that allowed to intelligently search for symbols, functions and addresses and their values in live-memory. So you could build trainers, hacks, even cracks and serial generators very easily with it.
Through this I naturally learned about SoftICE debugger even before I actually learned how to use "real" programming languages. Around 8 years later I saw a colleague debugging his C program, and I realized that I can understand assembler very easily.
My theory is that there's a very high chance that if you owned an Amiga or C64 as a kid, you'd excel in pentesting and malware analysis.
What I see nowadays even in my role as a tutor in University is that a lot of kids these days never made these "low level" experiences. They never had to debug a mainboard to replace a burnt out transistor. They most of the time don't even know what a filesystem is, because they only owned smartphones and never had a laptop.
All this knowledge is important to our trade, and I wish there were more efforts to preserve these kind of things.
And it’s shockingly performant (on par with Linux, sometimes even better), given the tiny development team.
Messaging passing, etc are core Amiga ideas that exist today only in Dfly.
That's pretty much what I was going for.