The Amiga games and demo scene collection | Hacker News Reader

The Amiga games and demo scene collection

amiga.vision

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My Demoscene links

https://rumca-js.github.io/search?search=tag%3Ddemoscene

Amiga links

https://rumca-js.github.io/search?search=tag%3Damiga

Commodore links

https://rumca-js.github.io/search?search=tag%3Dcommodore

The worst Amiga demo blew the doors of anything Mac or PC. Anything. Crystal Hammer, Dungeon Master, Firepower. Battle Chess.

LONG LIVE THE DEMOSCENE

I rarely give up, but this. Holy shit. Every step is a master class on user hostility...

I just deleted all this shit in frustration. If anyone manages to get this running with an emulator in windows and could show a basic howto/walkthrough I'd give it another go...

See below for the pain:

Nostalgia + Amiga.Vision. Lets do this > Download > We don't have downloads, but here's a download link > Archive search link, not direct link > eventually find big file > download...

Search which emulator is the best > WinUAE/FS-UAE > Pick FS-UAE > No installer > Download 4 rando zips > two need to be extracted in a nested location that doesn't exist until you run FS-UAE-Launcher.exe first

Extract Amiga.vision > readme says "Double-click the `AmigaVision.fs-uae`" > Filetype not associated > open with FS-UAE-Launcher.exe > rom not found > manually run launcher > config appears randomly > find rom > update rom location > save > launch > Amiga screen that shows no disk..

Search FS-UAE/WinUAE AmigaVision > videos > none

> If anyone manages to get this running with an emulator in windows and could show a basic howto/walkthrough I'd give it another go…

Maintainer of the project here. Let me see if I can help you get it running.

> Download > We don't have downloads, but here's a download link > Archive search link, not direct link > eventually find big file > download…

We do not distribute the files because old games are still under copyright, so we can only link you to a search for builds other people may have done. I’m sure you saw the message about that when clicking the link :)

> Search which emulator is the best > WinUAE/FS-UAE > Pick FS-UAE > No installer > Download 4 rando zips > two need to be extracted in a nested location that doesn't exist until you run FS-UAE-Launcher.exe first

Yes, Amiga emulators are legendarily unusable and hard to work with, unfortunately. FS-UAE is your best option unless you are willing to learn how WinUAE works. I plan to create a WinUAE setup to include in AmigaVision, so I bought my first Windows computer in 20+ years because I care about things being as easy as possible — although I can’t fix the emulator user experience more than to try to give you a default setup that just works.

> Extract Amiga.vision > readme says "Double-click the `AmigaVision.fs-uae`” > Filetype not associated > open with FS-UAE-Launcher.exe

The launcher is not necessary. You should open that file with the main FS-UAE app. This is probably why the rest of the steps did not work. Could you try that?

> Search FS-UAE/WinUAE AmigaVision > videos > none

There are plenty of videos on AmigaVision, but since the project originally was built and optimized for the MiSTer FPGA project, most of the videos cover that instead. There are a few videos in German/Portuguese/French if I remember correctly that use emulators.

As mentioned, emulator support is still newer, and since I just got my Windows computer, it has only been tested properly on Mac until now. So either you found a bug I am not aware of, or it’s just a matter of opening up the file with FS-UAE using the right click menu in Windows.

Let me know how it goes, and happy to help you get it running — I want to know if there are bugs too, of course! :)

Opening AmigaVision.fs-uae with fs-uae.exe not fs-uae-launcher.exe was the ticket! Thanks.

Bug: The demoscene demo '3D Demo II' bricks after the white text section where the 3d ball should appear. The demo goes blank. Pressing Del stops the music and hard locks the emulator.

Great! I will add that to the emulator documentation on the site, I wasn’t aware that it didn’t auto-associate .fs-uae files to FS-UAE on Windows, it does that without any user interaction on Mac.

Can’t do much about emulator bugs, those need to be filed in the respective issue trackers — could be a WHDLoad problem too. As far as I remember it runs fine on the MiSTer FPGA, but I should double check.

Documentation updated:

https://amiga.vision/docs#setup-for-emulators

Amiga forever! Curation first. Two follow ups:

1) An amiga museum with all the games, artwork, coding technology, music technology etc. Perhaps an AI can be tasked to produce all of this soon. Youtube videos might be an engaging delivery mechanism. A physical museum too can be considered, perhaps as part of Computer History Museum and similar.

2) AI coding might unlock mass creation of new software, games, demos, music etc. What was once conceived impossible will be very possible and likely abundant soon -- think of brand new games, and mind blowing new old-style Amiga animations with music.

Of course, this will be only possible with the dedication and efforts of enthusiasts. Thank you!!

> An amiga museum with all the games, artwork, coding technology, music technology etc. Perhaps an AI can be tasked to produce all of this soon. Youtube videos might be an engaging delivery mechanism. A physical museum too can be considered, perhaps as part of Computer History Museum and similar.

Sounds like you haven't been in touch with the Amiga scene in quite a while, if you think the above is something new. Perhaps Amiga / retro museums haven't been set up in your location, but there are heaps of them in Europe, for example. Youtube videos are a dime a dozen, just search 'amiga' on youtube and you will find literally hundreds of channels dedicated to the Amiga and/or Commodore in general. I subscribe to many of them already, and they all provide excellent in depth content for the Amiga, from hardware, to software, to games, to demos.

> AI coding might unlock mass creation of new software, games, demos, music etc. What was once conceived impossible will be very possible and likely abundant soon

Why would game writing / music creation / demos / software be "once conceived impossible"? Kids were doing the very thing in their bedrooms in the 80s and 90s, without AI. What would AI bring to the table nowadays that couldn't be done in the 80s/90s when the Amiga was popular?

People developing for the Amiga were putting their heart and soul into their creations. AI can't replicate that, and it definitely can't improve it, in any sense of the word.

seriously, has Starchild3001 never looked at the modern indy game scene? Half of it is flooded with people choosing restrictions based on old machines. More consoles than computers, games trying to look like an NES or a PSX are a dime a dozen.

I mostly follow Amiga and C64 (a little bit). I don't follow the platforms you're talking about.

Most of these "new retro" games are coded with modern tools and engines, they often only approximate the look and feel of retro games (their code is very modern and much easier to deal with) and the restrictions are broken as soon as it is too inconvenient. They can be great games, look nice and be congruent with their inspirations of course, but the ones built with real restrictions, be it actually made to run on real retro hardware or some kind of fictional VM like in UFO 50 or attempting to recreate a similar graphics system like the NES PPU tiling and pixel restrictions in Shovel Knight are much rarer and take way more effort to make.

Re: Online content.

I'm well aware of what's available out there as online content (it's no farther than a Google or youtube search).

Do you think what's out there as online content is what's truly possible if we had a million more Amiga enthusiasts?

That's my vision of what's to come in, say, 10-20 yrs. Imagine every Amiga game played and recorded by many (AI) users from start to finish. Every tactic explored, and cool strategies figured out. I for one would watch this.

Imagine vibe coding becoming more and more possible with 68k assembly. And having 1000x Amiga (AI) developers producing cool demo, intro and game material. New material. Novel and cutting edge material. At massive scale.

I believe this is the future we're headed. I for one am very excited about it.

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Re: A physical museum.

No, an Amiga or Commodore focus cannot be found anywhere in Silicon Valley or in United States. Even Computer History Museum (CHM) in Silicon Valley has very little Commodore content.

I live <1 mile away from the original Amiga offices in Los Gatos. It's a bit of shame that there's so little Amiga or Commodore in CHM.

The joy of the demoscene is inextricable from the human and physical nature of it.

Yes, you can have AI tools vibe code up "new" 68k assembly for old machines, but you're never going to see it find genuinely new techniques for pushing the limits of the hardware until you give it access to actual hardware. The demoscene pushes the limits so hard that emulators have to be updated after demos are published. That makes it prohibitively expensive and difficult to employ AI to do this work in the manner you describe.

Don't mistake productivity for progress. There is joy in solving hard problems yourself, especially when you're the one who chose the limitations... And remember to sit back and enjoy yourself once in a while.

Speaking of, here's a demo you can sit back and enjoy: https://youtu.be/3aJzSySfCZM

Re: AI. I believe this will still be a human operation, as far as I can see.

Awesome demo! It's a little bit of middle age crisis :), but superbly done! Thank you.

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