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Home  About the Scene
About the Demoscene
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Written by PG
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Sunday, 19 November 2006 |
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The Art of Swapping - Exploring the Past
By PG
Introduction
The Internet. The World Wide Web. The Net. The Internet is something we take for granted today. Our societies have grown dependent on the constant flow and Exchange of information through this medium. It is safe to say that our communities and our economy would enter a crisis situation if something should happen to the Internet. It wouldn't just be a catastrophe for businesses, but also for ordinary people. Most men and women tend to use the World Wide Web for staying in touch with family and friends, shopping, online banking and a lot of other stuff as well.
The Amiga 500: Popular machine amongst swappers during the late 80's and the first years of the 90's
It is strange to sit here and think about how things were like 13-15 years ago. The Internet was not a widespread phenomenon, and most people didn't have a clue about what it was. Things were different back then. If you had a bill to pay, you went to the bank. If you wanted to buy a game, you called up a mailorder company, read catalogues, or you went to a nearby store. If you had an assignment at school, you couldn't just use Google to find all the necessary information. You had to go the library, find the relevant material, and then sort everything out without help from fancy computers or search engines. It took a lot of time, but it worked, and people learned from it. Of course, those things could be done faster and easier with the help of the Internet, and that is probably exactly why we use it today.
Aminet: Downloading made easy through the Internet
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Last Updated ( Monday, 20 November 2006 )
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Written by PG
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Sunday, 08 October 2006 |
Packs - A Glance at the Past
Today we have incredible fast Internet connections, harddrives with hundreds of gigabytes of storage space, CD's and DVD's and a lot of other fancy stuff. This hasn't always been the case. In the golden age of our beloved Amiga, things were quite different from what it is today. Nowadays, there isn't much hassle involved in getting all the productions that was released at a party. You just search around the web, and most probably, the releases will be available for download on multiple sites.
Imagine if you hadn't got Internet access and no one you knew had it either. Maybe you and your friends didn't even have modems. As you can imagine, you would be pretty stuck when it came to getting hot new stuff.
In the early days of the Amiga, people traded stuff via ordinary snail-mail. People established contact with likeminded people around the globe and disks with demos, intros and other stuff was exchanged. The productions was accompanied by letters written on paper or as a textfile on one of the disks. Friends were made and connections established between different demo crews or people who was independent.
It is in this context that packs come in as an important factor. Many swappers had their own pack, and they stuffed it with hot new productions. Some of you may wonder what a pack exactly is, so I will try to give you a brief description.
There were many different kinds of them, but I will deal with the most common ones here.
First, we have the programmed pack. Those consisted of a programmed launcher with a graphical interface. They could be a bit similar to diskmags, only that the main focus was on the productions. Through such a pack you could view articles, news, messages or perhaps other stuff, along with launching the productions that was included. Two good examples are Speed from Nah-Kolor and Frozenpack from Whelpz.
Some packs were simpler and could just contain a launcher with a scroller. Hitpack from Gods is a good one when thinking of those. The other kind of packs did not have a programmed launcher or article viewer. They were simply a disk you could boot and you would get up a menu in AmigaDOS. There were quite a lot of these around, containing everything from utilities to pictures and from games to demos. Those that has become most cherished among nostalgic fans are the advanced packs, mainly due to them having much, much more content.
Now, back to the topic. As you can read from the description, packs were extremely handy for swappers and other end-users alike. With them you could easily gather productions from a specific party without much trouble. Remember that harddrives wasn't a common piece of hardware on the Amiga in those days, so having an organized diskbox was an advantage. With packs you knew exactly were to find a certain intro, a special utilitity or maybe a game like Rick Dangerous.
As mentioned earlier, packs could contain articles as well as productions. Because of this, they became an important spreader and provider of news for the Demo Scene. You could read the latest gossip about many different groups or people or just keep yourself updated with the latest events. Beside this, messages from sceners was usually included. Many packs had a special section for this, where people could send in a textfile of messages to their contacts. Such stuff was always fun to read.
Last but not least, the all important advertisement section. Here you could find huge load of adverts where people searched for new contacts. If you were looking for more people to trade with, this section was the number one section to search. Many of the adverts had fancy ascii-logos, which made them look quite professional and inviting.
There is a lot more that could have been written about packs and all the history around them. We are planning more articles and insights into the Demo Scene here on www.classicamiga.com, so please check back with us later to see if more content has been added.
PG |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 08 October 2006 )
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Written by PG
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Saturday, 26 August 2006 |
The Amiga Demoscene was, and still is, a global phenomenon. Throughout its history there has been activity on all continents of the world. Despite this, the continent with most groups and Sceners has been Europe. In this article series, which is called Exploring the Amiga Demoscene, we will take a journey through the most important countries in the Scene. We will start our investigation in the early days of the Scene and then make our way through the years until we reach the present.
 There has been a lot of research tied to finding out what there is to know about the Amiga Demoscene in the various countries. The main sources of information has been textfiles, newsletters, diskmagazines, messages, packs, pages on the Internet, interviews and so on. All of the sources has been freely available for everyone to access.
We, the Classicamiga moderators and staff, hope that you will find these series intriguing, interesting and fun. If there are some errors, please don't hesitate to drop us a line, and we will try to fix whatever is the problem as speedily as possible.
Thank you for your interest and have a great day.
PG |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 08 October 2006 )
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Written by PG
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Friday, 18 August 2006 |
Introduction
The Internet can be a confusing place sometimes, especially if you are searching for a special site, an obscure topic or perhaps a rare file. The Amiga Demoscene on the Internet is not an exception. This is especially so if you don't have much knowledge about the Demoscene in general and if you don't know where to start your search for information. In this guide I will do my best to provide you with links to the most popular and interesting sites, along with some extra information here and there. I hope that this guide will be of some help to you. |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 08 October 2006 )
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Written by PG
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Tuesday, 25 July 2006 |
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Introduction
What kind of programs does Demosceners make, how do they make them, and for what purpose? These questions can be answered by looking at various kinds of productions that has been released and how the different parts, in form of code, graphics, music and design, are glued together. Regarding the purpose of the work, a plausible answer can probably be found by studying the demoscene audience.
What do demosceners produce?
Usually, when confronted with what demosceners and demogroups produce, one is likely to refer to the term demos. The term is short for demonstration, which means that the people behind it have done their best (in some cases the worst) to demonstrate their abilities to the audience. How do they achieve this? As mentioned in the introduction chapter of this article, one has to look at the different pieces which the demos consists of, to get a full understanding of this.
Demos consists of programming, graphics, and music. A coder does the programming, usually in the low-level language known as assembler, which is the backbone of the production. Effects in various forms and 3D engines are examples of the work a person with this job do.A graphician on the other hand paints the pictures, the cliparts, the fonts, and the textures, while the musician has responsibility for creating the earcandy. On the Amiga a program called Protracker has been the standard tool for Amigascene musicians, although applications like Digibooster have become more common during the last 7-8 years. When it comes to the graphics, it is worth noting that there are people who does raytracing as well. Tracers does for example make 3D objects for the demos.
When all the different parts are ready, they are glued together into a standalone production which is called a demo, and this job is done by the coder. It is a heavy-duty job, and one can often see exhausted coders collapsing in front their computers at demoparties, battling against the deadline for delivering their work to the competition.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 23 September 2006 )
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