I just bought the 1996 game Winter Gold for the SNES. And when I turned on my Nintendo... What a flashback!!! Fade to... the week beetween Christmas and New Year 1992. I was in Aars in Denmark for "The Party 1992" - an Amiga demo scene happening. The Norwegian group Spaceballs took everybody by surprise with their demo "State of the Art". A very cool demo for the Amiga 500. It won the demo competition. Now "State of the Art" changed a lot of things. This was a demo that actually could be shown at a discotheque, and proved to many (including myself) that they as Amiga freaks really were cool guys rather than boring geeks Looking at the intro on Winter Gold is like looking at "State of the Art". I noticed Winter Gold was made by Funcom - a Norwegian company. I have a feeling they hired the Spaceballs guys for this game, or at least got their approval, if not it's just not fair. Cheers! CF
ah. more people then me enjoying demos I was going to atend this year at dreamhack with a snes demo I'm working on.. but now I don't feel like going there.. it's more 13yrs old CS-players screaming there this days and the other reason was that I don't know if I will have it finished until dreamhack starts.. never heard of spaceballs got any links to something they've done?
Screenshots from "State of the Art": http://ada.planet-d.net/showdemo.php?demoid=141 Screenshots from "9 fingers": http://ada.planet-d.net/showdemo.php?demoid=227 Scene parties in 1992: http://exotica.fix.no/info/scenery/online/1992.html You're working on a SNES demo? That rocks! CF
yeah. if I ever get it finished.. working on the sound engine right now. looks nice from the pics on the site, just a shame I don't have a amiga to watch them on
count me in when it comes to the demoscene. =) by the way, funcom didnt only hire demosceners, the company was founded by and employed demosceners almost exclusively. iirc, funcom was founded by colorbird/razor1911 (Johan Andersson). you are right about state of the art. Paul Endresen (lone starr/spaceballs) was amongst the programming team of winter gold, he also worked on state of the art. winter gold really is a masterpiece in the technical sense. just compare its fluid 3d graphics to starfox or the rest of the super fx games that hardly reached more than 15 frames per second. the drawback is that all animations are precaculated (a guy who worked on the games graphics said so), but it looks damn fine, anyway. can you give any details on what exactly youre working, babu? im currently busy finishing a pro-tracker music player on the spc (based on existing stuff), already did a brr-audiostreamer last year. we could team up if you like.
A totally agree. And I don't care if it's precalculated or not. It looks good. Just like State of the Art. FX games like Vortex or Stunt Race FX are so slow that they are simply not fun to play in my opinion. Pretty ironic that a founder of a software company has a background from Razor 1911. No wonder they started to develop for consoles... Cheers! CF
Hey, you're totally right, inspired by State of the Art I loved my Amiga and watching those demos back in the day. I went to a couple of Amiga-meets to play games and have fun, but Western Canada was totally the wrong region for demoparties... (Wish I coulda gone to Europe back in the day.) Well, to see a few demos/intros that I did, you can go here: http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=3767 Sorry, no Amiga stuff. If my page were up, you could see the PC-Engine & Supergrafx demos too. :-( Anyway, a quick look at what's in the ROM shows this: They use a custom(?) IFF file-format for graphics, or maybe animations. Probably they use the ANIM format modified for vectors or the SNES format, anyway. Some text in the ROM: 9/1-1996 18:49 olav DEVELOPED BY FUNCOM OSLO FOR NINTENDO OF AMERICA INC EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS ANTHONY HARMAN ERIK GL_ERSEN PRODUCER BRIAN ULLRICH DIRECTOR HENNING ROKLING ADDITIONAL DESIGN KEN LOBB JOSEPH BAYNE MAIN PROGRAMMER OLAV M_RKRID MAIN MODELLER RUNE SPAANS MODELLERS DENNIS HANSEN DANIEL STAVER POLYGON PROGRAMMERS PAUL ENDRE ENDRESEN STEINAR MIDTSKOGEN GAME PROGRAMMERS JOAKIM J^NSSON FRANK STEVENSON TOOLS ANDRE JOHANSEN STEIN PEDERSEN MUSIC AND SOUND JEROEN TEL OF MANIACS OF NOISE CLEANUP ARTISTS TOM T GJERDE ODD RUNE HANSEN CLEANUP ARTISTS JACK KRISTOFFERSEN DAGFINN M_RKRID DANCING JANNICKE S OLSEN SPECIAL THANKS MIKE FUKUDA MIKE KELBAUGH RICH RICHARDSON CHRIS NEEDHAM SPECIAL THANKS ERICH WAAS STACEY PETERSON SCOTT STINSON JEFF BAFUS SPECIAL THANKS GREG RICHARDSON ISAAC MARSHALL HENRY STERCHI SPECIAL THANKS HENNING SOLBERG ALF YNGVE MARIA M_RKRID _YSTEIN ANDERSEN THANK YOU FOR PLAYING WINTER GOLD ......NULL Pointer Pointer to Anim was NULL Pointer to TextSprites was NULL No VRAM for SpriteChars Anim pointer was NULL for SpriteChars Frame pointer was NULL for SpriteChars Pointer to PropList was NULL Pointer to TextSprites was NULL Cannot use packed chunk for TextSprites Cannot use packed chunk for TextSprites FlexiFrame tried to free NULL_VRAM Cannot apply packed chunk to FlexiFrame No VRAM for FlexiFrame Unable to allocate memory for IFF at %08x
back in the days, lots of game companies emerged from the scene. factor 5 and shinen (mostly members of abyss, their most recent game was nanostray for the ds, iirc) are amongst the ones that are still active. i'm sure there are others, but cant remember any more off-hand.
I believe I have found some of your productions over at Zeograd's: 256-Colour slideshow http://www.zeograd.com/dl.php?arg=281 Axelay demo (SGX) http://www.zeograd.com/dl.php?arg=282 512-Colour http://www.zeograd.com/dl.php?arg=284 Greyscale http://www.zeograd.com/dl.php?arg=293 High-resolution slideshow http://www.zeograd.com/dl.php?arg=283 Wavy raster effects http://www.zeograd.com/dl.php?arg=280 I'll check out your demos and graphic tests on my RGB modded DUO-R. Got a flash card for it. Very cool of you to include the source code!! Respect! CF
