How often do you have a look at some new demos?

[Harrison]

At least once a week I like to drop into Poeut and have a click around the content, not starting anywhere specific, but instead looking for a demo I either know or haven't seen before, and then seeing where links from that take me. I've managed to find some great productions I'd not seen before using this method. The number of releases is just too great to use any sort of logical order to look through them all. I mostly pick a production I find interesting and then see what else that group has released, and then the parties they were released at and so on.

Although I do like to pick the latest big release parties and look through some of the best from them. The one I most recently decided to explore was this year's Breakpoint releases, and there were some great and very interesting ones this year, especially some of the 4K and 16K PC releases.

Anyway, the question I was wondering. How often to you look at some new demos? The demos could actually be old but new to you personally.

[Buleste]

I've never bothered with Demo's. They just don't interest me.

[Harrison]

The thing is. How do you know until you watch a few? There are some amazing productions out there that are very creative and thought provoking. And equally show off the technical abilities of the coders, artists and musicians involved, whilst the best productions are also great showcases for the hardware.

The only thing I can't access is Amiga PPC based productions. These really show the top end power that can be squeezed out of the classic Amiga.

[Buleste]

I've seen a few and yes they are usually technically brilliant and they show what you can actually do with the hardware but they just don't interest me.

[premium]

Interesting, thats the only thing that holds me on the amiga at all, demos watching and making. This interests started back in the late 80´s with the first cracktros, after that the only target for me was making such stuff myself.

[Teho]

I said a couple of times each month. I have a huge backlog of demos I have downloaded and want to watch, and same as the games backlog, movies backlog and reading backlog it just gets bigger and bigger.

Someone think of a way to slow the Earth's rotation down, we need longer days!

[Loftus]

Demos - to me - are what used to come on the front of Amiga Power\Format!

Whats is this that im missing out on then!?

[Harrison]

@Loftus

Often with Amiga owners who were just gamers this is very common. Many instantly think of the term "demos" as meaning game demos, which were often found on the magazine cover disks of Amiga Power, Amiga Format, Amiga Action etc...

However there was, and still is, a whole other world out there. Did you ever play copied/pirated games on the Amiga? If so, do you remember the little cracker intros that played when you first started to boot the disk? And had to click the mouse button to load the game? These were the first type of demo scene productions called cracktros. These were designed by the game crackers to promote themselves and the fact they cracked a game.

But this soon evolved into something much bigger. Instead of just creating these little cracktros to stick on the front of cracked games as a calling card, the different cracking groups soon started to compete against each other to make the best graphics and music in these cracktros, and this soon expanded to full productions that were released on their own discs, with the cracking groups evolving into demo scene groups. These groups started to code whole demo productions to show off their coding, graphics and musical abilities and soon parties were formed so that the different groups could enter competitions to compete against each other to show off their abilities with their latest demo productions, and try to win the competitions.

Demos themselves are normally non-interactive. You boot up the disk and sit back and enjoy. Many common elements are found in most demos such as scrolling text effects, with the text containing welcome messages from the group to other groups, and explaining how they made the demo. The productions were used to first try and show their abilities, but also to try and push the Amiga to do things people thought wasn't possible.

It is definitely worth booting a few demos up just to see what it is all about. Have a look at our main classicamiga.com site, in the demo section, and take a look at some of the highest rated demos in there. We also have quite a few with videos so you can watch some of them from the site directly, although they never look or sound as good as they do when running in emulation or on a real Amiga.

Watch a few, have some fun, and let us know what you think.

[Cortona]

See also this web page at Demozone.nl http://www.demozone.nl/2008/about/demoscene.html

[Demon Cleaner]

Roughly once a month.