I know this is an Amiga site, but with my newly acquired Atari ST I thought I would explore the ST demoscene a bit and see what it has to offer. After all, most ST demos are unique to the platform, and unlike games do not share any code or have direct comparision to releases on the Amiga, so it is a good way to see what the ST coders, artists and musicians could get out of the system.

After being a big fan of Amiga demo productions for years, there are a couple of noticeable differences when watching ST demos.

The first is the amount of screen real estate. On the Amiga you have the overscan modes, allowing coders to utilise the whole of the screen for their productions. On the ST it is a little more limited and still has one of the limitations from the older 8-bit days. That of borders. As standard ST screens still have quite a thick border just like games on the C64, Spectrum, CPC etc had. This can be set to a unique colour. Overscan could be utilised to extend certain things like background graphics, but in demos where things are bouncing around the screen you instantly spot this limitation as the objects are bouncing around in a virtual box, rather than going right to the edge of the screen.

The second is parallex scrolling, copper and blitter effects. The ST was nowhere near as capable of doing these, and some of these were not hardware supported out of the box. After watching so many Amiga demos you instantly notice the more limited palette of colours being used in most screens.

Lastly is sound. Until the STE that ST only had 3 channel mono sound, and it's sound chip was very similar to that found in older 8-bit systems like the Spectrum and BBC. For this reason it was never as good as replaying samples, compared to the Amiga that could be playing a 4 channel stereo sample based track. This does however mean the ST had some great chip tune musicians. The tunes might be higher pitched, with a very 8-bit days style to them, but the ST's chip tune capabilities were good and it allows some great chip tunes in demo productions.