Amiga Demos

"I practically grew up with my Commodore Amiga 500 computer..."

The Amiga 500

The Commodore Amiga 500 is a brilliant computer, running at only 7 Mhz on a Motorola 68000 CPU, with 512 Kb of RAM and a few specially designed custom chips that provide very good graphics and sound capabilities. It appeared around 1987.

History

I used to have an Commodore VIC-20 and a Commodore 64 (C64) computer as a kid, but it was really only when I got an Amiga 500 computer and joined the Amiga demoscene, that I started to learn programming.

In those days, you needed to get yourself some classy alias (such as Midnight Maniac or Psycho). I called myself TAS (abbreviation that I will not explain). Then you needed to be good at doing something on the computer. Playing games was only something you did when you were utterly bored, so you needed to be able to program the computer, make funky computer music or pixelate computer images.
I learned programming on the Amiga by debugging other people's code (games and other demos). Back then I never really read a book about programming and the only language there was if you wanted to go anywhere on a 7.14 Mhz computer, was assembler code. So I spent some long nights trying to figure out how to program assembly using a primitive debugger. I was 14 at the time.
To be a cool dude on the Amiga you also needed to be member of a cool group. Members of the group would swap games, crack games, party and create demos. The groups also had to have a fancy name: D.I.E.D, The Popes, Trilogy (cracker group), Skid Row, Paradox (cool cracker group; still going strong), Palace and Parasite. I was member of all these groups, even though some only for a brief period.

The Files

The files you can download here are some of my productions from that time. Source-code and Amiga file is available at the bottom of this page. Watch the video above or click the screenshot images below.

	Click on the images to view in actual size. All images are from the demo2 demo available from the link below.

The Demo2 demo is probably the last thing I ever did on the Amiga. It was also one of my most successful demos. It was developed in cooperation with Gargoyle (Martin Amor) and other members of the Parasite demo group who also supplied music and graphics. We released it late November 1993.

The source code for the demo is also downloadable, but I must say that I find it unlikely that you will be able to recompile the entire demo from the sources.
And do remember, its all assembly code. No high-level crap, like C or C++. It's largely uncommented, full of hard-coded constants, obscene language and magically appearing numbers! Heck, it would be at least 4 more years before I even started to consider learning another programming language than assembly or open a book about structured programming!

How to view the files

To view the demo, you generally need an Amiga 500 computer. Of course it is quite hard to get one now a days, so I suggest that you find a good emulator. There are several great free-ware emulators around. One of the best is the Windows WinUAE, which runs all my old stuff (see link below). It also comes in a DOS, Mac, UNIX and LINUX version.
The files inside the ZIP download have ADF extensions. This is the file format used by the WinUAE emulator.
Please don't ask me to help you with setting up the emulator; you're on your own. Your configuration should however be something like this to match my old Amiga 500:

• Motorola 68000 CPU
• Kickstart 1.3 ROM
• 512 Kb chip RAM
• 512 Kb additional slow RAM
• No Hard Drive

Source Code Dependencies

Commodore Amiga 500

Useful Links

The WinUAE Amiga Emulator for the PC

Download Files

Demo2 disk image (390 Kb) The Source Code for Demo2 (209 Kb)