Step5: Amiga – How I discovered demos

Let's go deep into the serious stuff now: The Amiga. When I saw the game Hybris in end 1988, I asked my parent to buy an Amiga. Music and arts were so impressive. In fact I first bought an Atari ST but the one I got was bugged and always crashing. So my father brought it back to the store, and we exchanged it for an Amiga. Graphics and musics were so nice on Amiga. (See previous article)

I’ve also been really impressed by Sword of Sodan. The size of the characters and the audio were unbelievable for that time. The stage in the cemetery is my favorite (5’00 on the video).

Demos

And here are my first Amiga demos. These are precomputed demos but already impressive.

The juggler © 1986 by Eric Graham

The Juggler demo is an animation, contain on one full disk. The animation have been rendered using a raytracing software. The images are displayed using the “HAM” special mode (“Hold and Modify” each pixel color is relative to the previous one, that allow to display up to 4096 colors).

Walker demo (1988) Animation

Crack intros

The other category of demos are the crack intros. At that time demos were quite small and often used to sign the crack of a game. I think this is the point in history were the intros became so nice that people wanted to see full demos without any associated games.

Unit A – Crack Intro

Some of the first intro using a tracker to play music from audio samples. The first tracker have been created in 1987 (Ultimate SoundTracker). More info in Article 13.

DOC – Demons are forever (D.O.C = Doctor Mabuse Orgasmic Crackings)

Ackerlight – “1, 2, 3, 4!”

If you want more demos, here is a long compilation of Amiga demo of 1988 (not my video)

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