6 ms·

Using an Amiga in 2021: Making an intro

180 points by bane 4y ago

KingOfCoders 4y 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.
aphroz 4y ago
Demoscene is such an interesting form of art. If you are interested, watch this documentary: https://youtu.be/iRkZcTg1JWU https://youtu.be/iRkZcTg1JWU The 4k (not the resolution) are very impressive.
exogeny 4y ago
The demoscene is just the purest, coolest shit ever. Makes me wish I had grown up in Finland!
- ghusto 4y ago
  I wasn't really part of it, but it felt pretty happening in England too :)
- pavlov 4y 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_inflator 4y 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. ;)
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      I always took that as harmless posturing, given that the 'XYZ' was invariably a pseudonym. Modern FLOSS development needs codes of conflict that forbid this behavior because we fully involve our personal and professional identities in it.
      - _the_inflator 4y ago
        Not at all. During the 80th and early 90th I encountered many personal attacks, and few of them escalated into physical encounters. I was involved quite heavily into the C64 and Amiga scene, attended quite a few copy parties. Most conflicts I knew of, started on a personal level. 98% of the persons that attacked each other knew each other in real life. The scene met at copy parties, or did phone conferences. There were also some funny encounters, when groups who were at war with each other met at copy parties. In Venlo for example, I remember the bouncer quite well, because he was some huge 2.10m dude. I can tell you of dozens of other encounters. Some works, that caused trouble, are even sanctioned by officials. And this is good.
- pwrrr 4y 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 4y ago
    The Party in Aars… oh the memories…
- pcardoso 4y 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 4y ago
  We were also a part of it in Portugal, that is how I got to play with Amigas, without having one at home.
doener 4y ago
I submitted this 11 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33195162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33195162
- NKosmatos 4y 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 4y 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.
unwind 4y 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/ https://datagubbe.se/colophon/
- mhd 4y 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_inflator 4y 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 https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug
anothernewdude 4y ago
Every time I have attempted to emulate an Amiga I've found it such a painful experience. Do others find the same?
- porbelm 4y ago
  Nah, I found WinUAE to be excellent and problem-free.
- seba_dos1 4y 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 4y ago
  Yes, I have completely given up actually.
mvidal01 4y ago
https://youtu.be/8Xq0fgfXgq8 https://youtu.be/8Xq0fgfXgq8
_dan 4y ago
Nostalgia hit me hard reading/watching that.
NKosmatos 4y 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_(demoparty)
royjacobs 4y 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 https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug [1] https://mos.datatra.sh https://mos.datatra.sh
- erwincoumans 4y ago
  6502 assembler, good times with some SID tunes (or armsid) in the background :)
taubek 4y ago
I loved making intros and demos on my C64. I never had Amiga :(
butz 4y ago
Very useful, I might try building a remake of "Cow Postman" during the weekend.

180 points by bane 4y 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.

aphroz 4y ago

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

exogeny 4y ago

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

ghusto 4y ago
I wasn't really part of it, but it felt pretty happening in England too :)
pavlov 4y 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_inflator 4y 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. ;)
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    I always took that as harmless posturing, given that the 'XYZ' was invariably a pseudonym. Modern FLOSS development needs codes of conflict that forbid this behavior because we fully involve our personal and professional identities in it.
    - _the_inflator 4y ago
      Not at all. During the 80th and early 90th I encountered many personal attacks, and few of them escalated into physical encounters. I was involved quite heavily into the C64 and Amiga scene, attended quite a few copy parties. Most conflicts I knew of, started on a personal level. 98% of the persons that attacked each other knew each other in real life. The scene met at copy parties, or did phone conferences. There were also some funny encounters, when groups who were at war with each other met at copy parties. In Venlo for example, I remember the bouncer quite well, because he was some huge 2.10m dude. I can tell you of dozens of other encounters. Some works, that caused trouble, are even sanctioned by officials. And this is good.
pwrrr 4y 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 4y ago
  The Party in Aars… oh the memories…
pcardoso 4y 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 4y ago
We were also a part of it in Portugal, that is how I got to play with Amigas, without having one at home.

doener 4y ago

I submitted this 11 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33195162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33195162

NKosmatos 4y 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 4y 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.

unwind 4y 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/ https://datagubbe.se/colophon/

mhd 4y 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_inflator 4y 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 https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug

anothernewdude 4y ago

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

porbelm 4y ago
Nah, I found WinUAE to be excellent and problem-free.
seba_dos1 4y 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 4y ago
Yes, I have completely given up actually.

mvidal01 4y ago

https://youtu.be/8Xq0fgfXgq8 https://youtu.be/8Xq0fgfXgq8

_dan 4y ago

Nostalgia hit me hard reading/watching that.

NKosmatos 4y 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_(demoparty)

royjacobs 4y 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 https://github.com/BartmanAbyss/vscode-amiga-debug [1] https://mos.datatra.sh https://mos.datatra.sh

erwincoumans 4y ago
6502 assembler, good times with some SID tunes (or armsid) in the background :)

taubek 4y ago

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

butz 4y ago

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