you think that dreamcast was ahead of his time? Check THIS!

What if we never thought the Dreamcast was ahead of its time?

HAHAHAHAHA... oh man, that's a good one.

 

No. PCs in 1989 (when the 500 was released) were rather expensive and not very capable. I think VGA had just been released the previous year but many computers were still using EGA (16 colours, yo) if they were lucky - a few were were using CGA (4 colours on screen at any time).

As for sound, the Sound Blaster Pro (with stereo 8-bit sound) wasn't around until 1991. The Sound Blaster 16 wasn't until 1992. As you can imagine, when they first came out they were expensive.

Hell, even true multitasking on a PC wasn't available at a popular aspect until Windows 95. Amigas could do that in 1985.

...what, and the Xbox, PS2 and GameCube were just 'behind'?

 

Hiho,
hehe, glad to see some people still remember the great Amiga Demoscene days.
But I have to correct you in one thing:
State Of The Art runs from ONE floppy.
Nine Fingers, its successor, runs from two.

Btw, I highly recommend some other demos:
Arte from Sanity (1 disk standard A500 with 1MB memory upgrade)

Motion (Origin2), from Bomb from 1994 (runs on a standard A1200 with memory upgraded to 6MB, that´s still just an 68EC020 with 14mhz. And the endpart is "playable", runs from 2 disks)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXQ4dvEw1sE


But great things happen on the PC scene nowadays, and shouldn´t be missed.
If size doesn´t matter, try some productions from ASD (Andromeda Software Development), I highly recommend Iconoclast, Planet Risk and Lifeforce.

And don´t forget Farbrausch if size matters. Visit farb-rausch.com and download FR-041 Debris now. 177kb. Try to remind your brain while watching this demo of this number.

And everybody from Germany with a slight sense of humor should get the "Winnerdemo" from Metalvotze, but be warned, you might be offended. Or you might not get that damn chorus out of your head anymore. But don´t blame me...

As for the multitasking aspect: In 1989, using my 2.5MB memory upgrade, i could use a word processor, listen to a modfile and render a 3d scene on my Amiga 500 all at the same time, the OS was very effective in assigning every task the amount on processing power it needed.
Ofcourse, the onscreen resolution was 640x200 in 4 colours, so you didn´t actually get a rendering preview p.ex, just a status bar

 

Just on the topic of file size and how much can fit on a floppy disk etc. I think http://212.202.219.162/kkrieger is a true testament to what is capable. At just 96kb you can have a really decent looking 3D FPS with an intro, sounds, different weapons and enemies etc.

Take a look:

 

yup, kkrieger was also made by the farbrausch guys. iirc they´re from Hamburg, at least some of them.

Most 64k intros nowadays run on windows librarys, so technically they´re not completely 64k only (p.ex. using some standard windows files as a base for calculations etc.)

But check this out:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=482
1997, DOS, 4KB. With midi sound.

Or this, DOS again, 64k from 1995
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1525
(you need a Gravis Ultrasound for music though)

The thing is though, don´t mistake this stuff for things possible in games. A lot of it is only possible through huge trickery and faking effects. There is a great demoscene DVD out there called Mindcandy which has commentary tracks, partly from the coders that made the demos. They explain how the things they did were really working (p.ex. moving a set of dark lines across a texture to give the impression that the overlapping 3d object would cast a shadow).

Inside from CNCD
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=74
has a part (with the chrome spaceships zooming over a planet) which was about to be made into a game. The demo version ran in high color SVGA mode on a P90 without a problem. It should´ve been some planet-bound ELITE clone. Unfortunately, it was shelved.

Into The Shadows from Triton
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2588
was probably the most famous never released demoscene-born game.
The realtime demo ran great even on a 486-100 and was just a total killer at that time. Just when you accepted the blocky reality of the first tomb raider might be a possibility then came this. Realtime shadows (several at a time, and freaking accurate), fluid motion, it was a dream.
Sadly, the management of Scavenger never really had the right grip on the development team, which in return never had a complete vision. They had a cool engine, but no plan what to do with it.
When Quake came out and was a hit, the whole thing got finally shelved.

 

There is a reason why I love the Amiga, the demoscene, and the mod culture so much.

http://www.pouet.net/

http://intros.c64.org/

http://www.scene.org/

http://www.cracktros.org/

http://www.docsnyderspage.de/

 

well spotted.
winter gold is a game by funcom, which is a company that consisted almost entirely of former demosceners.
in other words: winter gold was made by the same people that made this demo.
i've talked to a couple of them, some interesting stories there.
there are a couple of other scene references in the game.

if you haven't heard about the scene before, i'd suggest looking it up on wikipedia or something.
it's has been an european thing for the most part.
the roots are on old homecomputers like the c64, but you can find impressive demos for almost any platform.
attending a huge demoparty is a unique experience, really.

also, check out this demo on the nes, i find it to be one of the most impressive on that system(there aren't too many around, though):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ-OcS2Gwvk

 

Man, demosceners in the 90's must've done a lot of ecstasy.

By the way, I think the first demo in this thread was using vector graphics to render the women.

 

That's very impressive when you concider what it's running on. The audio is also very good :thumbsup:

Yakumo

 

i strongly doubt that an unexpanded amiga 500 could handle such good vectors grafics. i'm pretty sure they are sprites.

and yes, i guess they did use a lot of LSD after all they passed through psichedelic rock years, right?

 

oh, they were vectors, the transformations were calculated in realtime afaik.
2D vectors though, an unexpanded Amiga had serious problems in the 3rd dimension.
There´s also a lot of trickery going on behind the scenes that you don´t notice, colormodes being emulated through clever palette changing, lowering precision or resolution, using the sound files and the diskdrive for timing etc... (the latter being the reason why quite a few demos won´t run correctly on emulators when the floppy acceleration is on).
Back in the Amiga days, there was always some clever hacking going on somewhere. I remember MicroProse flightsims allowing the use of PC analogue sticks by wiring them to the parallel port with a selfmade interface :lol:

 

I was referring to ecstasy, which is a completely different drug. People associate ecstasy with techno-music, lasers, glow-in-the-dark stuff, etc. It didn't come into wide use until the 80's.

 

i meant lsd, because i think that is more lsd than exstasy-like and at pink floyd's time wasn't available

 

Amiga..Amiga..
How about Acorn Archimedes? Was it power in 1987?

 

you just made me want to try LSD :lol:

 

Realy cool!
This is what vector based Flash animations does today.
This remembers me of Red Zone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwZErWZXRh0

 

We had 2 of them in out school when I was 15 or so (now 32). back then I thought they were amazing! Far better than anything I'd seen before. i remember playing a racing game called E-Driver or something on it.

Yakumo

 

The Archemedes was powerful in 1987, but mostly popular in schools - I didn't know anyone who had one as a home machine. The Atari and Amiga had really dominated the market, and the Amiga was the more powerful in the graphics and sound department.

 

x

 

Yes.... you can tell that by the description and comments - however, the thing is it's been shrunk down to 64k. The game originally came on a CD.