You kids probably have no idea what an Amiga is or what a graphics demo is, so let me first give you a bit of history. The Commodore Amiga was one hot stinkin multi-media machine created in 1984. Since its inception programmers from all around the world would hold demo competitions…basically a super drinking party full of nerds to write some really cool demonstration programs that had little or no interactivity at all. Just something to show off the sound and graphics potential of the machine.
Amiga people used to shove this graphical and sound masterpieces into the face of the monochrome PC and MAC realms to really display how inferior their machines were.
The Amiga had 4096 colors, 4 channel stereo sound, digital sampling, speech synthesis, pre-emptive multitasking and a butt-load of other neat features. Well, the partying went on with little improvements to the machine or to Commodore and eventually things went belly-up.
So back to the retro 90’s Amiga demo. The one I’m talking about was created in 1992 by the demo group Spaceballs titled State of the Art. Watch the whole thing below and keep in mind that the machine that this ran on only had a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 7.5 MHz. No math co-processor, 320X200 resolution with only 4096 colors. The graphics and sound and complete demo run off of a 800k 3.5″ floppy. You’ll see the cool silhouetted looking characters dancing to some wild music. Very similar to iTunes commercials.
Related iTunes Links:
Wow, I remember having this demo given to me on a floppy disk by another kid at school.
It was great to see it again, and it still blows me away that programmers were able to do this kind of stuff on an Amiga. It really was a great machine.
You know there is NOTHING compared to the MAGIC of Amiga demos. This one rocks even today! Guess Apple is still learning how to be cool from Amiga 😀
Was it just last year an Amiga demo won the comp over PC and Macs? Check it out:
http://www.amigademopodcast.com/2006/08/16/demo-013-starstruck-the-black-lotus/