May 14, 2002

5:19 PM

Relive all your favorites from the demoscene.This project, headed up by nearly all of the team that maintained the old hornet.org demoscene archive, is committed to bringing those old classic demos ... to a DVD player near you. Now you no longer have to fret because you gave up your Gravis Ultrasound and DOS! Can I get a w00t from ya? I knew I could.
posted by WolfDaddy (11 comments total)

Now's a good time to remind everyone that some of the "favorites from the demoscene" won't appear on the DVD because they weren't on Hornet. A handful are here at ADA or here for those not blessed with an actual Amiga. And of course, if you'd like to delve down into the less-known demos, a more or less complete archive of the Amiga demo scene can be had.

No disrespect, WolfDaddy, but the Ami has to represent. (Especially since I spent the weekend building one)

Since I don't want to overly sidetrack discussion: I don't think I'd buy a demoscene DVD. A very large part of what made good demos cool was that they were doing such wonderful things on what was very little hardware. It was the code itself that was a large part of the art. Just looking and listening to the output is nowhere near as spiritual an experience. For not much more than the same handful of cash, I could probably cobble together enough of the missing parts to have a little 486 capable of running some of these DOS demos.
posted by majick at 5:39 PM on May 14, 2002

No disrespect, WolfDaddy, but the Ami has to represent.

And rightly so, majick, no offense taken whatsoever. And do keep in mind that Ami and C64 demos are planned for future discs.

I think it's cool that you'd cobble together a 486 just to run demos, but for me, a simple consumer/viewer of the things, there were some demos that I just couldn't view no matter how much I tweaked my config.sys file. Now I'll finally be able to see them, and that makes me a happy lad.
posted by WolfDaddy at 5:54 PM on May 14, 2002

All the rave kiddies will be after this one for sure.
posted by GrahamVM at 5:58 PM on May 14, 2002

Thank you *so much* for this link -- I've bunged my address on the reservation list. I used to love the PC demos and now I finally get to enjoy the Gravis-only ones. DVDs like this are the reason to get a DVD player.

Meanwhile, I've got an old Amiga 500 with 1Meg, is it possible to write Amiga disks from a PC drive? I'd love to try out those Amiga demos linked to by Majick...
posted by krisjohn at 6:46 PM on May 14, 2002

This is brilliant. Thank you.
posted by waxpancake at 6:59 PM on May 14, 2002

...still waiting for Triton to release Into The Shadows...

I actually got to play it at E3 (#2 I think). Then the publisher sat on it. Boo.
posted by NortonDC at 7:19 PM on May 14, 2002

is it possible to write Amiga disks from a PC drive?

Ask and ye shall receive!

Insert standard "if this fries your computer I don't have nuttin' to do with it, I done told you to make sure you had the widget in the wadget slot and you done went and messed it up and it's all your fault" disclaimer here
posted by WolfDaddy at 7:22 PM on May 14, 2002

Not only is there WolfDaddy's solution (which I'm hankering to try as soon as I scrounge up the requisite number of functioning floppy drives), but there are some other approaches as well:

Something called PC2Amiga I've used before to image floppies off my old 500.

magPLIP does SLIP networking over the parallel port. I'd use this except I just won an Amiga Ethernet card on eBay.

There's always Amiga Explorer from Cloanto, which has a $20 price tag but looks worthwhile. It only does serial and TCP/IP, so it could be combined with magPLIP above or an Ethernet card.

You can try the old school way, as well.
posted by majick at 7:40 PM on May 14, 2002

Yeah, I've only got a couple of portable PCs to play with, so no ISA card options. I'll have to get the Amiga really up and purring for all the other options -- and for that I need some physical room for it. Maybe I'll wait for the next DVD, but thanks anyway.
posted by krisjohn at 8:03 PM on May 14, 2002

krisjohn, I've never used an Amiga past replacing the power supply in one (which was more involved than any other power supply replacement I've ever done before... :-) but I think this link will come in handy.

There's various parallel port based PC-Amiga floppy disk adapters, one of which is so simple it only uses a single wire (but probably won't be useful for a laptop).

HTH!
posted by shepd at 9:45 PM on May 14, 2002

W00T!
posted by azazello at 12:19 AM on May 15, 2002