Using an Amiga in 2021: Making an intro

https://datagubbe.se/mkdem/

by bane • 4 years ago

180 34 4 years ago

datagubbe.se

exogeny• 4 years ago

The demoscene is just the purest, coolest shit ever. Makes me wish I had grown up in Finland!

pavlov• 4 years ago

I grew up in Finland during the 1990s and was pretty active in the demoscene.

It was a really great creative hobby, but it doesn’t deserve to be viewed entirely through rose-tinted nostalgia. There were a lot of awesome people, but also toxic assholes and mean-spirited bullies. I suppose that’s par for the course for any community with so many teenagers.

_the_inflator4• 4 years ago

I agree. Mobbing and public shaming was definitely a thing, just have a look at all the "XYZ is a lamer", Federations against XYZ, anti demos, and stuff that was published using disk magazines, and sometimes declaration of war against other groups.

"Happy" times. ;)

ghusto• 4 years ago

I wasn't really part of it, but it felt pretty happening in England too :)

pwrrr• 4 years ago

Denmark was also a very nice place to grow up back then :) We had (have) a lot of legends of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.

hestefisk• 4 years ago

The Party in Aars… oh the memories…

pcardoso• 4 years ago

I wish too! Still, managed to find the local scene here in Portugal, some of it still active. We’re having a party in a couple of weeks.

pjmlp• 4 years ago

We were also a part of it in Portugal, that is how I got to play with Amigas, without having one at home.

aphroz• 4 years ago

Demoscene is such an interesting form of art. If you are interested, watch this documentary: https://youtu.be/iRkZcTg1JWU The 4k (not the resolution) are very impressive.

doener• 4 years ago

I submitted this 11 hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33195162

NKosmatos2• 4 years ago

Yeah, happens to all of us, don't feel bad :-)

Some submissions get unnoticed and some others with the exact same link gain traction and start having comments and being upvoted.

I'm sure if @Dang had spare time there would be a filter, during submission of a new link, to check whether the exact same link already exists.

dTal• 4 years ago

I'm sure if @Dang had spare time there would be a filter, during submission of a new link, to check whether the exact same link already exists.

There is. Duplicate submissions get redirected to the existing thread. Sometimes it doesn't kick in, for reasons obscure.

KingOfCoders• 4 years ago

Hoped for a star scroller and a starfield :-) I was very proud when I wrote them in my first Amiga intro. Because unknown demo groups are named, we went with Traveller (nearly joined RSI! ;-) after we went with The Yolk Rogues for some time.

unwind• 4 years ago

This was a fantastic walk-through of the making of intro, including great descriptions of some Amiga tech and features, plus: quite the cute little intro!

Reminded me a lot of some of the quick-shot productions me and my friends used to do back then! It was very satisfying to do these little single-screen things, sometimes in a single day/night, that were perhaps (eh) less about showing off massive technical chops (never my forte, especially not back as a teenager) and more about mood, sometimes humor, or simply just ... saying something. Then when the thing was done, you got to start spreading it by (of course) using your modem and uploading it to some choice bulletin board systems.

Amazing that Datagubbe (which by the way is translated by the author [1] as "old computer fogey" although I feel the Swedish word "gubbe" is really hard to translate well) wrote this in AMOS by the way, I used that a lot but mostly for tooling and general playing around, never for any released productions, they were always in assembly.

[1] https://datagubbe.se/colophon/

mhd• 4 years ago

Yeah, I remember a lot of AMOS-hostility from Amiga developers back then. Did someone actually write demos/intros in it back then or would the collective wrath of the assembly programmers be too much? ;)

(Along with AMOS, MUI was often a target. Quaint these days, given our current UI behemoths.)

_the_inflator4• 4 years ago

As the original author wrote, assembler is top level leet-ness. However, we aren't in our teenager years anymore and cannot spend holidays hacking our Amigas, so time constraint is a thing. To be honest, assembler coding was always tedious to say the least. Debugging, Gurus, just to name a few in inconveniences.

This opened a chance for Amos.

If you have a look at today's leet-ness, have a look a The Black Lotus. They do everything with a cross-development pipeline, they even forked Amiga UAE to streamline their process. TBL is really top notch Amiga coding, fantastic stuff.

Amos and cross-development compile to machine code in the end. Besides that it is about easing things.

For reference, here is Abyss' fantastic project: https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug

rob74• 4 years ago

Well, back in the day, when intros still fulfilled their original purpose of being added to cracked games, every byte that you could save counted. Most games already used the 880K available on an Amiga floppy pretty well, so the chances of finding an extra 64K for your intro were slim...

techcode• 4 years ago

Indeed it terms of view/emotions from "real programmers" towards AMOS - it was like Visual Basic <= v6.

And in practice I recall it was also slow for doing things like bigger scrolling things - like isometric RTS map, SimCity ...etc

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

Every time I have attempted to emulate an Amiga I've found it such a painful experience. Do others find the same?

porbelm• 4 years ago

Nah, I found WinUAE to be excellent and problem-free.

seba_dos1• 4 years ago

About 10 years ago I've been replaying bunch of Amiga titles from my childhood on a phone (Nokia N900) in UAE and it worked wonderfully well.

kal247• 4 years ago

Yes, I have completely given up actually.

mvidal01• 4 years ago

https://youtu.be/8Xq0fgfXgq8

_dan• 4 years ago

Nostalgia hit me hard reading/watching that.

NKosmatos2• 4 years ago

I still follow the Scene by watching winning demos from various parties/competitions. One minor comment if I may, I think the biggest demoparty and the best one IMHO, is Assembly ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_(demoparty)

royjacobs• 4 years ago

If you want to go a bit more hardcore (no AMOS-shaming btw), there's also an excellent Amiga VSCode extension written by Bartman/Abyss. [0] It has full debugging, profiling, etc. It's quite insane.

And it's probably a good time to also plug my 6502 assembler again, which has really decent VSCode support as well. [1]

[0] https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug

[1] https://mos.datatra.sh

erwincoumans• 4 years ago

6502 assembler, good times with some SID tunes (or armsid) in the background :)

taubek• 4 years ago

I loved making intros and demos on my C64. I never had Amiga :(

butz• 4 years ago

Very useful, I might try building a remake of "Cow Postman" during the weekend.

Using an Amiga in 2021: Making an intro

Related Stories