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Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay) (marincomics.com)

89 points by marinbala ↗ HN
I love the Amiga platform and started to wonder why it still is one of the most significant platforms in the demoscene? So I wrote an essay about it.

Let's explore the birth of the demoscene, the Amiga platform's revolutionary beginnings, its emotional resonance within a dedicated community, and its broader influence on the field of computer graphics and sound.

50 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread
pixelpoet
Greetz to all who were at Revision this year :) I was always a PC guy but the Amiga scene is amazing.
leshokunin
The Amiga isn't remembered as a technology. It's the ancestor of "Mac vs PC". It's the little computer that could. Where indies would hack cool stuff. It had a well understood spec that didn't change so much, so you could push the metal to its limit.

It's from a time where if you wanted games and you were a kid, you most likely pirated them. Wanna learn to code? Start messing with your game's files and hex editors. The demoscene was where the cool kids came up with ways to push the limits, beyond commercial software. Beyond that oh so lame Microsoft PC.

It's remembered fondly because it's a way to congregate the people who were there. I never had an Amiga as a kid, my parents had a PC. But I still care about that community. It feels like my people, when I started computers.

Much like music has genres and some might be nostalgic, so does the demoscene. It just doesn't get as many releases as on Spotify.

Respect to all the groups still making content for it. I'll share my favorite recent one, by TheBlackLotus https://youtu.be/W5_NMxW5UfE

kstrauser
If you haven’t seen Black Lotus demos yet, stop what you’re doing and click that link. It left me speechless.
leshokunin
I remember when it came out and I was like oh neat demo. Is this a 64k or something? Then it clicked. Madness. It's not just beautiful code, it's stylish too.
HumblyTossed
The Amiga was a hotrod to eveyone else's sedan, basically.
falalalala
An all-Ford comparison: While IBM PC was an Econoline, Apple Macintosh was an Escort and Commodore 64 a Pinto, but Amiga was a flashy Mustang.
technothrasher
> It's the ancestor of "Mac vs PC".

I don't know if I'd call it an ancestor. When I first saw the Amiga 1000 introduction articles in the computer magazines in 1985, the Mac vs PC wars were already well entrenched and I had both a Mac and a PC. It didn't stop me from getting an Amiga 2000 in 87 when I'd saved up enough money though.

leshokunin
I hear you. I needed an analogy that most of the people here would be familiar with and it's the best I had. Agreed it's not the best :)
Lio
> It's the ancestor of "Mac vs PC".

That's an odd turn of phrase considering that both the Mac and the PC predate the Amiga.

If anything surely the Mac's Ridley Scott directed launch Super Bowl ad was the start of "Mac vs PC".

People loved the Amiga because it had a lot of modern features for the time and was reasonably priced. You're definitely right, it's the little computer that could.

The demo scene loved the Amiga because a lot of hardware features were left undocumented ready for you to discover and wow your friends with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA

leshokunin
I'm referring to the I'm a Mac ads, which came much later.
zozbot234
The Atari ST was even more reasonably priced, but of course it lacked the Amiga's custom hardware chipset so it was a lot more boring on the gaming and multimedia front.
pjmlp
And did not support properly colour on its first iterations.
kstrauser
> That's an odd turn of phrase considering that both the Mac and the PC predate the Amiga.

Technically true. The PC definitely predates both, but the first Mac launched in 1984 and the first Amiga in 1985. They were very much contemporaries.

pjmlp
We had Amiga vs Atari vs PC instead. :)
leshokunin
Exactly. Sure you guys has the better color palette, but we have cd rom.

sweeps config.sys under the rug

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pengaru
The PC has always been such a mess of incompatible peripherals, it made for a terrible demo platform in the DOS days when the OS didn't abstract any of the graphics and sound stuff in a normalized form.

Amiga and C64 included capable multimedia hardware so demo coders could target a known quantity and ship something that Just Worked for the masses.

epcoa
Early DOS days. By the early 90s the raw processing power of a 486 with VGA and a Soundblaster pretty easily trounced the Amiga in raw capability, inelegant as it may have been. A bunch of demos of the period document this conflict.
jcadam
I didn't have to fight with (or even know about) things like IRQ jumpers and Expanded memory management on the Amiga. That was kinda nice :/

Sure, the PC had superior graphics and sound by the 486 era, but it was not a pleasant user experience.

layer8
Smooth 60 Hz scrolling was still a challenge on VGA.
Narishma
That might be because VGA ran at 70Hz rather than 60 in its 256 color mode.
vardump
Smooth 60 Hz 320x240 256 color "mode-x" scrolling was for free on VGA. Just had to update the start address and panning registers. You could also have a hardware supported stationary portion.

70 Hz 320x200 mode 13 was a different matter. Had to use CPU to update it.

fmeyer
I haven't lived that era, but developed some interest later to both c64 and amiga.

IMO besides being extremely easy to program, they didn't required extensive tooling to make interesting programs specially when you compare with alternatives at the time.

Another interesting aspect was the "statelessness" of the system. You had one disk with your programs, other with data and so on, a crash wound't affect or make you lose everything since you're a reset away from coming back to where you where

Even the simplest programming solution today is way more complicated than what existed back them. I wish we had more boot to work systems to hand to kids without much interruption.

My kids are getting into the age of programming and understanding how hardware and a computer works is way more easy when you don't have tons of abstractions on top of it. That's the reason I've been following the David Murray's commanderX16 initiative anxiously :)

tenebrisalietum
> I wish we had more boot to work systems to hand to kids without much interruption.

It's virtual, but PICO-8 seems pretty cool, and it works nicely on a phone via Safari.

max-throat
I've always wondered something, are Dpaint's pixels supposed to be character sized? I know that pixels aren't always necessarily square, but Dpaint seems to exaggerate that a lot.
Cockbrand
The Amiga had a few graphics modes with rectangular pixels, some upright (e.g. 640x200) and some across (e.g. 320x400, both are NTSC modes). That would be 256 or 512 vertical pixels on PAL machines, respectively.
galangalalgol
Were they actually rectangular or was that an artifact of the hold and modify color mode? I mostly remember playing with dpaint and f18 interceptor in the a1000.
Cockbrand
The pixels were actually rectangular. Imagine that 640x400 has square pixels (which it pretty much does on a then-contemporary screen). When you have half the amount of vertical pixels at 640x200, you can either have square pixels at half the image height, or double the height of the pixels (making them rectangular) and fill the entire vertical space.
zozbot234
CRT TV screens and monitors come in a 4:3 aspect ratio, so you need 320x240 or 640x480 for a "true" square pixel grid. (Unless you manually adjusted the horizontal and vertical stretch on the monitor to letterbox the image, but very few people would've done that). None of the common screen resolutions on the Amiga matches that exactly, though the 320x256 and 640x512 (interlaced) PAL resolutions were reasonably close for casual purposes.
Cockbrand
> were reasonably close for casual purposes.

That's pretty much what I was going for.

tverbeure
I grew up with a Commodore 64 and 128. When I had finally saved enough allowance money for an Amiga, my father bribed me by paying for a 30MB hard drive but only if I'd buy a PC instead so that he could run LaTeX on it.[0]. It was a slow 8088 with a monochrome Hercules video card.

What a mistake...

It took years before PCs were able to match the graphics of the Amiga.

[0] It could take 15 minutes to render pretty pedestrian paper on that machine, but many highschool projects were created on that machine, and printed out on his work's LaserWriter.

Dutchie987
There was a port of TeX for the Amiga. It even ran from (a lot of) diskettes but a hard drive gave a much better experience, otherwise you kept swapping disks for all the fonts. There is a demo version of it on Fred Fish disk 083.
pflanze
> the C64 could display a total of 16 colors at a standard resolution of 120 x 200 pixels, though it also has a graphics mode with the higher resolution of 320 x 200 with more limited colors

I'm not sure where your 120 pixels are coming from, looks like an error. Color mode was half the resolution of the hires mode (2 hires pixels were taken together to represent 4 values that a color pixel could represent; there were 40x25 blocks (corresponding to characters in text mode) where the colors used for each of the 2 or 4 states could be set (with some additional complication as it was using a separate RAM chip for part of that, the details of which escape my memory without looking it up). There were also 8 sprites of 24 (hires) or 12 (color) pixels horizontally, those don't add up to 120 pixels either.

Cockbrand
Yeah, that should probably read 160x200. IIRC, most C64 games ran at that resolution. This was called “high resolution graphics” in the marketing material, mind you :)
vardump
C64 hi-res graphics was 320x200, two selectable colors for each 8x8 char sized block. So 16 colors on the screen, but...

See: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/High_Resolution

marinbala
Apologies and many thanks. It was an honest typo, should have been 160 x 200. I've corrected it now. Appreciate the headsup.
jcadam
As a kid, I remember upgrading from the Apple ][ to the Amiga 500. The Amiga was a superior machine in every way. I could do more with Amos than I ever could with Integer BASIC :)

Moving from an Amiga 1200 to a 486SX with Windows 3.1 after it was clear the Amiga platform was dying was disappointing.

icedchai
I followed a similar path. Apple II -> Amiga 500 -> Amiga 3000 -> 486. I still remember the day I got Shadow of the Beast on my A500 back in 1989. It was incredible. Sadly, by the the time the AGA machines (A1200/A4000) were released, it was clear the Amiga was on its way out. It was just too little, too late. Too bad Commodore let the platform stagnate for years.
cookiengineer
Back in the days there were a bunch of computer magazines that came out on a monthly basis. These magazines (in my case for the 6502) had always a game review in the front, detailing the mechanics and what you could do with it.

In the last couple pages, there was the source code. So kids like me always went on to modify the source code, implementing better weapons, modifying health bars, gravity values and stuff like that to have more fun with the games.

When I bought my first computer, I also heard about the "Savegame Editor Construction Kit" which was basically a tool that allowed to intelligently search for symbols, functions and addresses and their values in live-memory. So you could build trainers, hacks, even cracks and serial generators very easily with it.

Through this I naturally learned about SoftICE debugger even before I actually learned how to use "real" programming languages. Around 8 years later I saw a colleague debugging his C program, and I realized that I can understand assembler very easily.

My theory is that there's a very high chance that if you owned an Amiga or C64 as a kid, you'd excel in pentesting and malware analysis.

What I see nowadays even in my role as a tutor in University is that a lot of kids these days never made these "low level" experiences. They never had to debug a mainboard to replace a burnt out transistor. They most of the time don't even know what a filesystem is, because they only owned smartphones and never had a laptop.

All this knowledge is important to our trade, and I wish there were more efforts to preserve these kind of things.

alberth
Lots of Amiga concepts live on today with DragonflyBSD.

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/

And it’s shockingly performant (on par with Linux, sometimes even better), given the tiny development team.

Messaging passing, etc are core Amiga ideas that exist today only in Dfly.

KerrAvon
Message passing in some form dates from at least as far back as the 1970's, possibly the late 60's. Generally, BSDs were influenced by Mach to the extent that they've adopted some microkernel ideas. I'd be surprised to learn there's any genuine link between AmigaOS and Dragonfly.
ptek
oNLY aMiGa mAKES iT pOSSiBLe
snvzz
Amiga rules forever.