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https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5812
Amicom of Spreadpoint has been interviewed by Com and Orlando of Brainstorm at the Escpape and Spreadpoint copy party on Oktober 7th. 

When did you join Spreadpoint ? 
-A month ago. 

Your task in Spreadpoint ? 
-Coder, but in Spreadpoint everybody can do what he wants to. 

For how long have you been programming on the Amiga ? 
-For 2 years. 
What computers did you work on before? 
-Spectrum, Sinclair QL. I did some graphic programming with BASIC. 

What did you program on the Amiga? 
-A 3D-Demo (Summer of 88 for TLB), various intros and copiers for cracked games, Powerutility (sold it), a level editor for a shoot'em up, AMICOM-Kickstart (Antivirus, Copier etc.) 

What are you doing at the time ? 
-I'm working on Demo, called ATOM-demo. 
What's this about ? 
-Colored, shaded, permeating(!) 3D-Objects. 

Your future projects ? 
-3D vectorgrafics, 3D editor (ev. sell it), copier with multitasking capility, various utilities. 

What hardware do you have ? 
-An Amiga 1000  (1.5Mb, Harddisk 20 Mega SCSI), And an Amiga 2000 (A2620 Unix card, 68020 processor, 68881 math. coprocessor, 68851 Memory Management Unit, harddisk 80 MB SCSI, Modem 2400 Baud) 
Tell us something about your Master Seka. 
-It's based on the Seka V3.0 by Kefrens/Promax. It has been reassembled  and revised by my collegue Buddha. 
The main advantages are: 
Better editor commands, a finally working optimize function, auto runback, the workspace can be changed without exitting the Seka. 

Is there anything you want to advise to Amiga coders ? 
-Unfortunetly, there are more and more good programs, recently, which run only on one special Amiga. So I advise to try out the programs on different Amigas and to avoid unproper coding (absolute addresses, selfmodifing code, DBF-waiting-loops running to fast on the 68020.) 
And I hate programs, which you only can exit by a reset! 

Thank you for your answers. 

     Translated by The Acc{sed/BRS
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5934
Hah, I might not be the best to explain Amiga history, but I’ll do my best :) Fish disks were the main way to distribute public domain, open source, shareware etc. before the internet was wide-spread. People would send Fred Fish software, and he’d compile them into individual disks that people would copy. Magazines would have lots of companies that would allow you to order copies of these disks etc. He ended up creating over a 1000 disks this way. When cd-roms became a thing, you could order the whole collection on those. Those were strange times :)
Aminet was the most famous ftp-archive for amiga software. It was run by the same guy that made Brainfuck, Urban Müller. Rather than chronologically like fish disks, it was organized by topic, with readme’s for every file. You could upload to a staging area, and he’d put them in place. Much like fish disks, companies would print cd-roms with the latest from aminet for those not hooked up to the internets (or on 56k modems, which was most people).
Giger H.R. (Swiss)
2023-03-28 11:38:31
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=905
Giger was an educated as an industrial designer. Afterwards he made art and after working with jodorowski on dune, he joined the aliens-team. He created the slick fast monster in ALIEN. he influenced with his style (developped before in paintings and sculptures) the whole scifi. And so he became also one of the most influencing artist for games like r-type and and and and and …
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5721
Till today. What is the right amount of buttons?
It started with 3 Buttons and than 1 for the macintosh, 2 For Amiga, 2 for MS-DOS (ContextMenu).
Often behind the discussion: "Profesionality" vs too simple.
Interesting questions: Were the 16-bit-Homecomputergames differeent on Atari ST/Amiga and on Mac? An how? 
(First Impression: No second button used in 16-Bit-Games.)
 
Tracker
2023-05-07 09:21:37
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1856
Tracker were software - used especially on the Amiga. The most of the music was created in this type of music software. And the people behind the swiss games of the 80ies/90ies even created a tracker and the possibility to use the same framework also in games. 
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=7867
Hardware
- C64 consolen basis, erinnert mehr an eine Console als an einen Computer (Sprite, Hardwarescrolling, Music).
- SID wirklich witzig
VisualDisplay
Unmöglich viele Modis: High res. Multicolor > Programmierung schwierig. Positiv: Kombinierbar
- Beschränkte 16 Farben > Schwierig etwa eigenes zu machen. 
- Strahlende Farben fehlen.
Music
- Music Coding
- SID wirklich interessante Stücke. 

Tools
- Damals Paintingprogramme? > Öfter bessere Computer genutzt wie Amiga/PC (Compiling)

Coding
- Schwierig reinzukommen, sogar schwieriger als Atari2600
- Entwicklung über Jahre
- Basic embedded .-(
- Woher kam das Wissen? Die Software? (Magazine?)
- Öfter bessere Computer genutzt wie Amiga/PC (Compiling)
Gamecoding
- Ohne Tricks (Sprite Multplexer 8 Sprites viele Spiele nicht denkbar) ähnlich wie beim Atari 2600. Tricks
Beschränkung
- Beschränkung bei Shootemups am Schwierigsten bei allen anderen Genres eher möglich mit 8 Sprite durchzukommen.

Community
- Identitätsstiftend aber warum? Einfach übers gemeinsame Spielen?
- Bis heute ungebrochen. Aber mehrheitlich Spieler? Demoszener? 

Heute
Gesamte Entwicklung auf einmal da, keine allmähliche Steigerung/Entwicklung über 10 Jahre
Selbst heute, einige Tutorials aber kein Gametemplate. Viel bis heute unterschiedliche Nutzung: Vorallem game und demoscene. 
> Anwendersoftware fast nicht dokumentiert. 
> Neue Games, demos > Anwendersoftware?
.
2022-05-12 09:21:42
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=2576
 
Amiga games database with information about every Amiga game ever released!
 
 
The Mega-Mighty Swiss Cracking Association is the leading Swiss C=64 and Amiga group. SCA was founded in 1983.
 
 
 
 
[11:44]
Viele Blogs und Magazine haben zudem angefangen die alten Spiele wieder zu besprechen und hervorzuholen. Damit wurde natürlich auch ein Teil ihrer Kundschaft (die Spielercommunity ist ja mitälter geworden) zu bedienen. Als eines der letzten Phänomene kamen auch die Let’s plays alter Spiele hinzu. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoxPW1_7ZVc “The jumps are almost pixelperfect”. Grosskonzerne wie Nintendo haben auch angefangen ihre damaligen Spiele nicht nur als neue Hardware aufzulegen sondern sie zu aktualisieren und so kommen nun neu Versionen von Zelda heraus, die sich an die damaligen Ideen anlehnen. In der letzten Welle findet nun eine zunehmende Wiedereingliederung der damaligen Entwickler, sowie der Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Aufarbeitung statt. Immer mehr werden die Spiele auch aufgenommen in die Spielgeschichte verschiedener Universitäten und sind teilweise Prüfungsstoff geworden (ZHAW .-) Je länger die Zeit der Homecomputerspiele zurückliegt, umso mehr muss heute auch erklärt werden. Als Beispiel das Interview mit Roman Werner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2ZPb1lQHes 2019
 
 
Bild
 
 
 
Bild
 
 
 
 
 
[11:44]
// ich habe diesen text nur geschrieben, um ein bisschen rauszuarbeiten, was alles für themen da drin liegen
[11:45]
das letzte ist natürlich unsere studie .-)
Amiga-Display
2023-03-13 16:15:22
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=7343
Define colors.
Out of x color system!
Bitmaps …. Layers of colors
Weber, A. Christian
2023-02-14 09:24:41
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1489
vs. Muscian Weber, Christian
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5100
'I had created maybe around 30 demos and I wanted to create a game on the Amiga because I always like shoot'e 'up. It was a new challenge for me: I gathered a team of a few people, some of them ended up not staying very long: Marc Albinet, the graphic designer, who would work on other games later on, such as Agony, Frédéric Hahn (musician with Ackerlight), Pierre Adane (who worked on the copy-protection system and the endgame animation), and myself Olivier Régis (Metalwar), doing the cosing in terms of programming, there was nothing fancy. I just had to create some specific tools to piece up graphics piece-by-piece and to manage the dynamics of enemy motion. We then called Ubisoft to show them our Ilyad project. Marc Albinet and myself met one of the Guillermot briothers in Paris - they are the founders of Ubisoft. At that time, the firm was very small compared to what it is now, and the licensic fees we received, were really symbolic. They barely covered our travel expenses, but we did not do it for the money."
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5850
Brainstorm is a Swiss-based demo group, that has existed in two distinct periods; their formation as an Amiga demo group in the period between 1989 and 1993, and their reformation as a mainly pc demo group in 2006 until present day. They were originally formed a short while before may 1989 by graphician Chester and coder Majestic, and their first release was Lazer Roll. During the summer they recruited more members (like Orlando), and at the end of the summer vacation they were joined by the entire group Axxis (Bird, ...). This group had both a Swiss and German section, but the German section was found to be substandard and was forced to leave after a while. Another member, swapper Joker, left the scene soon after. They had by now started planning what would become the diskmagazine Zine. It was originally conceptuated as a cooperation between Brainstorm and another Swiss group at the time, Setrox, but the latter eventually decided against being part of the project. Due to this, Setrox coder The Accused left to join Brainstorm. Zine 1 was released in october. They were now a totally Swiss group again, except for two German members - Shadow and Yankee.
Advert in Cracker Journal 18 (january 1990), looking for members. Cracker Journal 19 (march 1990) reported, "Angel Dust joined Brainstorm and his name is now Six Pack." Sometime between Zine 3 (february 1990) and Zine 4 (april 1990) they decided to kick their German writer Yankee because he wasn't productive enough. He was a freelance writer for D.I.S.C. for a while before finally joining Addonic. Zine 5 was released at the Alcatraz Pentcost Party 1990 at the beginning of june. It was to be Orlando's last issue as editor, as The Accused had returned from his army service.
Metamorphosis (august 1991) mentioned their bbs Cheese-Line as 'new', and listed Accused, Axel, Bird, Chesney, Chester, Droid, ESA, Fly, Grubi, Luke, Macho, Majestic, Odie, Oli, Orlando, Patsy, Peace, Scattergold and Truxton as active members. Danish megaswapper The Pride joined the group in late september, and was sent a new packmenu for creating a new series of packs (see Superpack 1) - which would become the Obsession packseries, starting in october. All this was also reported in R.A.W 1 (november 1991).
R.A.W 2 (february 1992) reported that The Pride moved on from the group to join Sanity, and that a Finnish section had been opened by Phazer, Extabulator, Hoover, Mac, Top Azz and Voyager.
January 1993 saw the release of Axel's musicdisk Musicland, featuring among other songs his 8th-placed Technology from The Party 1992 the month before.
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5946
Aminet was the most famous ftp-archive for amiga software. It was run by the same guy that made Brainfuck, Urban Müller. Rather than chronologically like fish disks, it was organized by topic, with readme’s for every file. You could upload to a staging area, and he’d put them in place. Much like fish disks, companies would print cd-roms with the latest from aminet for those not hooked up to the internets (or on 56k modems, which was most people).
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=7387
one day in the computerclub. they could decide it! 
atari st played against amiga the same chess prg .-)
Swiss Game Design
2022-06-25 19:17:32
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=85
The swiss gamedesign was influenced and even founded by the cracker scene coming from the C64 to Amiga and the other tree was the Atari ST. Around 25 own Games and Ports were created and published from 1985-1997. There was even an own publisher Linel. 
Motorola 68000
2023-03-17 10:37:06
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=503
Base for a lot of computers (GUI, Mac, Atari, Amiga, Next  etc) arcades and Arcades! Expensive but with a fantastic assembler-language. 
Amiga - Multitasking
2022-07-10 01:29:25
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=3723
'Sound FX war ausserdem modular aufgebaut. Die eigentlich Musik-Abspielroutine befand sich in einer externen library (soundfx.library) und konnte dadurch von beliebig anderen Programmen genutzt werden. Natürlich gab es auch eine Library für Christian Webers GameExec welches in vielen Games als 'Betriebssystem' zum Einsatz kam.'
.
2022-11-28 14:03:03
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5762
Spreadpoint is an Amiga demo group, formed in 1986 by Marvin and (D-)Mike.
Amicom and Depeche joined the group in 1989. Swapper advert in Cracker Journal 16 (october 1989), listing an address in Bad Aibling, Germany.
They were coarrangers of the CeBit 1990 demoparty in march. Depeche left the group sometime this year.
With the march 1991 release Innovation Part Two, Psy announced he was rejoining Spreadpoint from Axxis. Grmblwrz (december 1991) mentioned, "We also welcome our new American members - Paninaro and Micro".
The october 1992 cracktro for Pinball Fantasies welcomed Ice Tea and The French Dewd to the group.
Upstream 1 (january 1993) reported that Cocaine joined Addonic from Spreadpoint & Amiga Industries along with his bbs Moria.
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5884

 

Facts

  • TTV1 was the first file-based Amiga virus
  • Its creation was a fun experiment. It was inspired by the boot block based SCA virus which had reached dubious fame due to its very successful spreading and the flaw of overwriting the boot block. Would it be possible to create a self spreading file, thus breaking out of the boot block dread?
  • Development took place between spring and fall 1988.
  • The early code name was HOUZ virus.
  • Thinking up the name we tried to find something that would sound mean and at the same time on the verge to ridiculous. The final name was inspired by a rap band called The Terrorists.
  • The virus does not harm the system. In fact, care was taken to avoid any even unintentional damage.
  • Identity of the authors was kept secret for 30 years. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2019 at the Demonights 008 event in Bern Switzerland
  • "The names have been changed to protect the innocent" shown in the message was inspired by the song Beat Dis by Bomb the Bass. They have sampled it from the Dragnet radio series.
  • The "BGS9" was in fact a clone. Its code is almost identical even including the resident name "TTV1". It got more reach and thus was regarded as the origin.

About the life of the beast

  1. TTV1 installs itself as a reset proof resident module (KickTag/ROMTag) named "TTV1"
  2. On reset the resident module (virus) is called
  3. Execution gets delayed in order to gain disk write access. Therefore Intuition's OpenWindow function is redirected.
  4. As soon as the AmigaDOS tries to open the CLI window the OpenWindow gets called the virus looks for the startup-sequence on the booted disk
  5. The virus is looking for the first command (A) in the startup-sequence
  6. File request windows (e.g. "Disk is write protected") are being temporarily disabled
  7. Virus renames A to $a0202020a02020a020a0a0. This is a combination of none breaking spaces and spaces. The idea is that the user will oversee this "invisible" file.
  8. Virus writes itself as an executable command with the name of A to the disk
  9. Eventually A gets loaded and executed with all its parameters by the virus
The next time the user will boot the disk the virus gets loaded into RAM and step 1 takes place. On reset the horizonal beam position gets evaluated. If the beam position is smaller than a certain number the screen turns black and a message in white letters appears.
Computerclubs
2022-06-30 09:42:21
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=99
Computerclubs were a very important institution. 
0. Is a place and a community in the same and also a public in the same
1. Networking people in a non internet time.
2. Bringing KnowhHow to people (Courses)
3. Showing, Selling Hardware (Internally)
4. Own public magazines
5. Part of Creating Groups/interested people
6. Only available in bigger towns 
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=792
With modems1987  and zterm you could enter to a bbs and download software. You needed the number and of course a computer on the other side. So this bullet boards system where dial in systems. from time to time the mother of a guy took the phone .-) 
You only used this in the ‘phone cheap time’ - >21.00. A game for Amiga or Atari ST was 900kb - the modem was about 3600-12200 bauds. you waited very long from time to time.
homecomputer 16-bit
2022-07-07 15:44:34
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1543
this computers came with an operating system, gui-based and mouse. basic was a prg to use (not anymore line based). there were some new styles of basics coming up like gfa-basic, omikron-basic (atari st). 
and the most games were coded in assembler (68000 was a god processor for assembler). so you had to buy assembler, which was not included. 
Windows (OS)
2023-02-06 08:31:49
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5326
OS from Microsoft with Windows. Came first out in ASCII-Blocks. Well known for 3.1 and of course 95. Which was the first modern Windows (vs 85 Mac with Finder, 85/86 Ataris ST with GEM and Amiga)
Trainer
2023-02-14 11:43:15
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5442
Often implemented add on in a crack: service to have endless lives, start at some point of the game etc. 
.
2022-12-06 08:34:22
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5922
» How did you spread the word about the language (if you did), and how widely was it used?
Mostly by announcing it on usenet. That had a tight-knit community of Amiga programmers that was easy to reach. Then on Fish disks and Aminet as well. At some point, print magazines started to cover it with courses etc, and I got invited to speak at conferences about it.
It got fairly popular, to the point where at some point a popularity poll was held somewhere on the internets, and E came in second after C/C , but before Pascal and Basic. Probably a biased sample, but still :)
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5930
» FALSE influenced early esolangs like brainfuck and Befunge, which went on to inspire more, setting off the esolang movement. Did you have much interaction with esolangers (either during the Amiga era – not that they were called esolangers then – or more recently)?
Back then yes. Me and Chris Pressey would email a lot, with him showing me his latest creations (I mostly went back to “serious” language design after FALSE :). There was also quite a bit of community around FALSE, with people making implementations in other languages/systems, or make dialects etc. There was actually quite a few people that made “useful” programs in FALSE
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=6667
Le Salon de la Micro was an expo/computer show for Atari ST and Amiga computers.
Escape Copy-Party 1989
2023-02-14 11:44:43
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=6879
Escape Copy-Party 1989 was held in at the Schützen Haus in Villmergen, Switzerland for the Amiga scene. About 120 people attended, and 10 demos were released. Escape helped organize another Swiss party, this time together with Spreadpoint, in october. Among the groups that visited this party were Double Density Crew, The Supervisors, Piranhas, Amitech, Clan, Space Coloss, Silver Hawks, Slime Byte, and many more. During or immediately after this party, Atrix and Senses merged into the new group Setrox.
Mentioned briefly in the news section of Cracker Journal 12 (january 1989), "Escape Copy-Party was on 28 29 January 1989 in Switzerland.". A party report followed in Cracker Journal 13 (march 1989).
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=9101
Paraphrase: The decision is made - the same program on both computer. Atari ST vs Amiga with the same chess-programm.
 
Cracking
2023-02-11 14:57:25
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=768
Make games copyable. Some cracker groups where in the tradition of information freedom, others learned from cracking software creating software, others had fun, others were in a sport ‘who is first’ and of course also others gained money. 
Why switzerland? and not us? The rumor is: There was no law in switzerland against cracking. 
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=9245
Die beiden Deutschen Oliver Lindau und Mario Knezevic portierten die Original Amiga Version von Rolling Ronny für C64 (Für Starbyte und Virgin Games)
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=855
Games made for old hardware or emulators for hardware. Restrictions of yesterday.
Bootsector
2022-07-11 14:26:51
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1457
The bootsector allowed an automatic startup (vs tapes) of games like in consoles with cartridges (of course a lot of games came also out as cartridge for computers). Put it in and switch on computer and play. Of course the bootsectorviruses were a sideeffect of this innovation. 
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=3463
What is next? 16/32-Bit but which one?
(- Macintosh)
- Atari ST? (like C64)
- Amiga (Multimedimaschine) expensive - Amiga 500
- Sinclair 68000
- Archimedes?
(- NEXT very expensive!)
 
Demos
2022-06-17 14:05:50
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=3902
Several demos are behind the mechanic of the ‘puzzler’
.
2022-07-07 14:57:06
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=4470
die motivationsmechanik ist ja auch interessant. man wählte zuerst aus. was könnte man gebrauchen. dann setzte man sich dran und musst zuerst einmal die sachen eintippen. die textsorte listing war ja oft, ein bisschen theorie, die erklärung des programmes/architektur. dann praxis
wie die textsorte rezept beim kochen. dann ging das aptippen los. bei den einen der versuch zu verstehen, bei den anderen nur aptippen. dann war man fertig. testete. 1. belohnung es läuft. 2. belohnung man hat vielleicht was gelernt 3. belohnung: es hilft oder macht spass.
4. man denkt, das könnte ich auch. und versucht selbst etwas. (die alte telekoleg idee .-) gingen die listings in den heften schon zurück über die jahre oder?
(ich meinte jedenfalls) wurden mehr so helpers. das ganze bediente ja auch einen noch nicht vollständig
entwickelten software markt. nicht zu vergessen, die keyboards wurden auch besser. gerade beim atari st und amiga.
Die ST-Tastatur kam mir (als gelerntem Maschinenschreiber) immer zu "schwammig" vor. So gut wie auf der Atari-8-Bit-Tastatur konnte ich darauf nicht schreiben/programmieren (was mich aber nicht davon abgehalten hat).
 
HIstory
2022-08-03 12:18:08
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5064

Alcatraz was formed in 1988 from the ashes of the more strangely named "Motley Crue Team", by Metalwar (Code, Music), Helix (Gfx) and PGCS (Gfx).

Metalwar was the mastermind behind most of the first productions of the group, until the time of Mega Demo 2, when new creative members like Hornet of Avengers joined Alcatraz.

After Mega Demo 3, Metalwar started to work on his dream Amiga game, codenamed "Ilyad". This shoot 'em up was eventually released in 1989 by UbiSoft. One year later, Metalwar and Helix decided to leave both the group and the scene, leaving PGCS heading the group.

Ilyad Credits
2022-08-03 12:48:31
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5078
Shoot'em'up game on Amiga. Coded by Metalwar, Music by Fred (fantastic C64 style !!!!), Graphics by Leto2 and Disk routines end demo by P. Adane. I especially love the music of Fred (Fredereic Hahn). 1st music is done by metalwar
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5268
ILYAD (1994)
7 August 1994
4th THE ASSEMBLY 1994
AMIGA DEMO COMPETITION
AGA - TRACKMO - 1 Disk
Asphyxia Design was founded by Shagan and Cookie in 1990
In 1994 they worked together with the ALCATRAZ guys
ILYAD v1.3 was released on 25 Sepetmber
Cookie remenbers
2022-08-17 09:24:29
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5272
"Later we started developing a game called Immanis, and we already had dedicated tools for making parallax masks etc. The project was started on the Amiga and then continued on PC before being abandoned - this doesn't fit in the context of demos, however it was inspired by them." The Demoscene: The Aga years (2020:119)
.
2022-11-28 14:16:48
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5788
Amicom
Coder.
Amicom joined SPREADPOINT in 1989 together with Depeche. He was active as coder of very different things from MMU tools to demos. What he liked best was to explore and develop new programming tricks that could be used in demos and other places.
Data
Born 1968, grown up and living in Switzerland.
Todays occupation: finishing studies (natural science), running an internet company togehter with other ex-amiga freaks.
Work
Demos: Lissa, Platin3D, Small.
Intros: Giana Sisters (trained by Depeche), Amegas (trained by Depeche).
Utilities: Blitter-Copy, List Manager, MMU expert, AFS File Scrambler, SPlay soundtracker player.
Other stuff: Atom Demo (unfinished), Platon's Polyhedra (unfinished), revival of HQC demos, GigaMem (a virtual memory extension to AmigaDOS), some work in TypeSmith (a outline font editor).
Music
Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, Simple Minds, Billy Idol, Pink Floyd, Pet Shop Boys, OMD, ...
.
2022-11-28 14:18:15
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5792
Depeche
Demo coder, known for cool demos and trainers.
Depeche jonied Spreadponit in 1989. He mysteriously left SP in 1990 and broke up alomst all contact. He then went over to DefJam but not very much later stopped his Amiga activity. Depeche was so fond of language games that he once bought a Langenscheid's dictionary of slang-English!
Data 
Born 1972, grown up and living in Switzerland
Todays occupation: finishing studies (comp. sci)
Work
Demos: Wooow, Scrapheap, Empire, Power!, HI5 and more
Trainers: a whole lot...
Sound: some crazy mixes
Tools: a disk copier in a bootblock, TLB-Utilitydisk, more
Hobbies
old days: being creative, being cool, speaking cool, cool places, cool clothes, cool people, arcade games, pinball machines
today: unknown.
Music
DM, Art of Noise, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Yello, LL cool J, Derek B, De la soul, ...
Decision - Future?
2023-03-16 09:56:57
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=7397
Thesis: the atari st guy were much more into business afterwards because of the software (calamus etc)
.
2023-03-25 11:51:38
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=7733
Während ich aus Spaß eini-
aus Versehen Kaffee in die
Amiga-Tastatur.
Die
Tasten
klemmen jetzt alle ein bißchen.
Die Sprites muß ich auf dem
C64 sowieso neu malen.
Antares Review (2015)
2023-04-11 13:15:22
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=8114

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Antares: Wrap-Up and Final Rating

Antares
Nightmare Productions (developer); Bomico (publisher)
Released 1991 for Amiga
 
Date Started: 7 July 2015
Date Ended: 19 September 2015
Total Hours: 23
Reload Count: 24
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 30
Ranking at Time of Posting: 106/199 (53%)
STOS ...
2023-12-01 11:44:30
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=8931
Basic for creating games. 
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=9255
OLIVER It all started for me at a Christmas party at Starbyte Software. It was a remarkable event. I never met so many talented people at one place before. The developers showed the games they were developing including the Amiga version of Rolling Ronny. We got the offer for converting the game and if I remember correctly, we agreed almost instantly. Previous projects of Bones Park were economic simulations, which was… how to describe… rather static stuff. I usually call those games Excel-pushers. A jump-and-run is way more interesting and it is action we wanted to create.
MARIO Back then, in the C64 era, most games took only a few weeks or a couple of months to develop. So we had to keep a constant flow of new contacts and projects. One project we did in late 1991, Trans World, for German publisher Starbyte, went pretty smooth and even became our first #1 in German sales charts, so we were invited and offered to work on other titles. One concrete offering was the C64 conversion of Rolling Ronny. Even though most of the first games I programmed were simulations, I still had spent a lot of time on developing action and real-time oriented games. So it was a perfect moment to put all the learnings into a concrete game – and that would have been Rolling Ronny.
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=9257
OLIVER Being a pixel guy – the tools were remarkable. We did not have devkit like the Katakis tools or something specified for creating game graphics. I used the editor that came with the Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit for sprites, which turned out extremely practical. The Ronny-sprite was created with an C64 editor called Mob-Profi, which provided overlayed hires and multicolour-sprites. The pictures in the intro and end sequence were pixeled in Koala Painter with a joystick, but everything else was more like hacking. I edited the charset with a font editor. The level backgrounds were tile-based maps, so a friend of mine coded one tool for combining 2×2 chars to tiles including the colour – and a second tool for assembling the levelmap like a puzzle game. As setup I had a C128 and Amiga 500 side by side. By the way – there was a TV and a monitor connected to the C128 at the same time, because of the the different video quality and I wanted to be sure that the graphics  looked right on both display types. With our modern mouse or stylus driven tools and those workflow-trimmed programs it is hard to believe that we got things done at all back in the day when we were even lacking fundamentals such as UNDO functionality. However, I have to say that you had full control over the technical specs of the graphics and as a graphic designer you started to think like a coder.
Otherwise, I hardly remember details of the project. At least for the first month, Mario and I were working alongside each other. The intro and the end sequence were finished first. Then it was very intense and determined by crunchtime, the process was sort of first-in-first-out. The progress in code was tied to incoming graphics. Markus composed the new tunes at home far away and we had some issues with the delivery. Nevertheless the whole soundtrack reached us in time and its implementation went smoothly. Still there was no free time at all. In the final weeks weeks it became a kind of competition – like, who needs the least sleep! I also remember that the editing of the levels was pretty chaotic. Three of us worked in shifts and it took much longer than planned.
Oh I almost forgot about the  communication with Virgin. That was the horror for me because I hardly spoke any English back then. David Bishop and I talked English and German mixed, which worked surprisingly well.
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=501
The after mainframe-area (based on c and co) was driven by coding near the hardware to get more speed. espacially in games. So Assembler was important. 
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=507

Apples erste Mac-Generation nutzte ihn. Der Amiga wurde von ihm inspiriert und um ihn entwickelt, wie auch der Atari ST. Der MC68000-Prozessor von Motorola wurde der Standard für die Homecomputer-Nachfolge der legendären 8-Bitterund zeitweise eine ernstzunehmender Alternative zu IBM-PCs.

"Motorola's Advanced Computer System on Silicon" war der sperrige Name, unter dem 1976 die Entwicklung des MC68000 und damit der Ursprung der 68k-Generation begann. Motorola orientierte sich beim Architekturdesign an den legendären IBM360-Mainframes, allerdings mit linearen Adressbereich; die Entwickler scherten sich auch sonst nicht um alte Zöpfe der frühen CPU-Entwicklung, sondern schnitten sie einfach ab.

Listing Cultures
2023-02-10 08:58:30
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=801
The listing culture is a hybrid between gutenberg galaxis and software. Software was often distributed in the mainframe time as source code ( c ). each system had a different set of hardware, processor. c and co were the platform. You could compile it for your system. 

The listing culture brought source code to the magazines and could be published. first with basic and co for homecomputers, later with checksums, than basic with assembler inlines, than only shortcodes. 
of course by typing in you could learn how to code and solve problems.
/ ()
.
2022-04-14 14:10:31
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1463
1972: Demo Unix
> Science Fiction: When Harlie Was One  - "Computervirus" 

1975 Schockwellenreiter (Roman)
1979 AI im Netz (The Adolescence of P-1 Roman)
1980 Vergleich Bio - Computerprogramme
1983 AppleII Programm verbreitet sich > Elk Koner

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!
1984
1984 Theorie und Praxis > erster Demovirus
1986 erste Infektionen
1986 MS-DOS: Indien (free copy) >  Raubkopien > Virus dazu > Bindung an die eigene Software ... > effekt: umbenennung
1987 erster Mac Virus.,
1987 erste Amiga  Virus - SCA
.
2022-04-22 22:44:30
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1485
This may well have been in response to estimates that approximately 40% of all Amiga users had SCA in their disk collection somewhere, due to rampant piracy.
Tracker / Synthesizer
2022-05-21 14:03:36
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=1850
It is clear, the fantasy consoles embed trackers into their software to create music. They construct the fantasy of the tools of those time. There were no trackers direct embedded in 8bit computers. Trackers really became popular as standalone programs on Amiga. 
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=2572
Die Wellen der Wiederaneignung - von der Demoscene/Homebrew zu Retro und zu den Indiespielen Betrachtet man die weitere Entwicklung der Games und ihre Aktualisierung wird klar: Mit der Plattform Atari ST/Amiga starb auch die Unterstützung der Games. Denn nichts ist bekanntlich älter, als das Game von gestern und noch auf einer Hardware, die nicht mehr kaufbar ist. Die Vertriebskanäle wie BBSen kamen auch aus der Mode beziehungsweise wurden vom Internet verdrängt (FTP und WW) So wundert es auch nicht, dass die Spiele nicht in dieser Zeit dokumentiert wurden. Die meisten Spielkonzepte überlebten auch nicht die aufsteigenden 3D-Welten und wurden entsprechend auch nicht portiert. Erst später - mit mehr Rechenpower - entstanden die Emulatoren zu diesen Homecomputers und durch das WWW wurde Dokumentation auch möglich. [Recherche der ersten Emulatoren]
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2022-05-12 09:21:16
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=2574
Nach der ersten Welle der Verachtung dieser PixelGrafik-Homecomputer entstand mit dem Aufkommen der Indiespiele eine Renaissance der Homecomputerszene und zwar auf mehreren Ebenen: Die Demoscene entdeckte - nachdem auf PCs keine Grenzen mehr da waren - die kleinen restriktiven Homecomputer wieder und ist bis heute bestandteil der Demoscene [Recherche erste Amiga-Contests]. Es entstand eine Homebrew Szene für fast alle Consolen/Computer [Übergang, Wann entstanden?] und vermutlich der wichtigste Antrieb die Indiegamescene.
 
 
 
 
[11:44]
Die Indiegamescene um die 2000er Jahre fing nun an explizit sich an die Pixelgrafiken etwa der Konsolen zu orientieren. Sei dies aus Reflexion, Kindheitserinnerungen oder einfach, weil die Pixelgrafiken einfacher herzustellen waren. Dabei spielt natürlich auch eine Rolle, dass zunehmend über Plattformen wie Ebay nun nicht mehr lokal Consolen/Computer gekauft werden mussten. Parallel dazu entstanden auch immer mehr Retromessen bzw. Waren Verkaufsstände für Retro Teil von grossen Conventions und Game-/Spielemessen. Die Gesellschaft entdeckte die Geschichte der Gamekultur. Die Entwickler selber fingen auch zunehmend an ihre Arbeit zu dokumentieren und zu veröffentlichen (siehe sca, siehe roman werner, siehe christian haller). http://www.kingroman.com/ https://www.sca.ch/ https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/list.php?list_people=Christian Haller Durch die verschiedenen Game-Festivals kam auch vermehrt zur erneuten Auseinandersetzung mit dieser ersten Welle von Computergames. Ein Beispiel dafür wäre sicherlich das gameZfestival 2013. Und begannen teilweise auch ihre Spiele auf dem iPhone wieder herauszubringen (insanity wars). Einige sind weiterhin in Communities unterwegs, die die alten Praktiken wieder neu auflegen. [Roman Werner, Listings, C64 Spiele]
Gleb J. Albert
2023-02-03 08:35:17
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=2794
Wissenschaftliche Aufarbeitung
Intro Insanity Fight
2022-05-19 13:22:06
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=2878
Zitat:
Vor allem der Sternenhintergrund im Intro von Insanity Fight war für damalige Verhältnisse absolut cool. Christian Weber (er hat mir dieses Wunderwerk für das Intro zur Verfügung gestellt) hat hier ein wenig gezaubert und mit den 8 Sprites welche der Amiga darstellen konnte, alle diese Sterne dargestellt. Noch heute weiss ich nicht genau wie er dies getan hat :-).
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=3003
Who are the tracker-musicians in switzerland? 
.
2022-05-21 14:24:19
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=3040
Game description
Starbirds is a shoot'em up game in the style of old AMIGA shooters like R-Type, Apidya, Wings of Death and many others. The game play is simple: the player controls a space ship (called the Starbird) and tries to keep alive, which is best ensured by shooting as many enemies as possible.
Starbirds features four horizontally scrolling levels, each packed with a huge amount of enemies and guarded by an extra-large boss enemy with big shields and power. The levels are constructed in a way that there are a lot of turn-off's which allow the player to take another path each time.
A special feature of Starbirds is the weapon system, which was inspired by action games like Wings of Deathand Lethal Xcess. There are two categories of weapons, primary and secondary weapons. Each category consists of 8 different types of weapons, four of each category are selected by the player before entering the first level. The player can decide at every time if the approaching enemies should be attacked using the primary or secondary weapon. By repeated pressing of the fire button the primary weapon is fired, by holding down the button the secondary weapon is fired.
The currently active weapon can be changed by collecting weapon symbols, which are left behind from exploding enemies quite often. Blue symbols represent primary weapons, red symbols secondary weapons. Every weapon has five different powers. If a symbol is collected, which represents one of the currently active weapons, then its power increases by one. Therefore it is advantageous to collect the same symbol several times in order to get a weapon with high power. On the other hand, changing a weapon reduces the power by one, therefore too many changes without intermediate power-up quickly lead to a poorly armed space ship with little chance of survival.
The Starbird space ship does not survive hits with enemies, their shots or with the background. Fortunately the player has six space ships available and he can restart the game three times in the last visited level. The game supports four levels of difficulty, which can be selected in the main screen, before entering the first level. Finally the game can even be played by two players simultaneously.
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=3161
The difference between Homecomputer and Businessmaschines was clear for the homecomputer users. Homecomputers were cheap, colorful, had sound, modern (GUI) and you could play with them. So they were designed for ‘fun’. And they came all in one - as one consumer product. So it was ‘identity’. Clear that the Amiga was first designed as an Console. On the hardware side the homecomputers didn't use the ugly intels like almost no Arcade-Console-Maschine did. The question here why? Perhaps because the most of the Software had to be coded in Assembler? 
One of the big question was: Is the Macintosh a Homecomputer? One answer it was to expensive for beeing a homecomputer. Perhaps the homecomputers were the cheap versions of the macintoshs. 
.
2022-05-27 22:22:16
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=3477
“When the 16-Bit era arrived, the people in the C-64 computer club split up into an Atari ST and a Commodore Amiga community – Me going for the 4096”
(Werner 2005)
Simone Bernacchia
2022-06-06 11:29:15
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=3733
I did start tracking on soundFX in 1989 however the demogroup i was working on was unable to get the replayroutine so had to pass on noisetracker
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5110
some autostart games couldnt be used anymore afterwards. there was no exe to start the process. 
.
2022-12-06 08:35:46
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5926
» Do you remember your intentions when you set out to design FALSE?
Yes, initially my only goal was to try and make a “useful” language in as small an implementation as possible. I’ve always been obsessed with small/simple/fast (still am), and for me this was a fun diversion from the relative complexity of the E compiler.
I knew the language had to be based on Forth, as there’s no other language that has such simple parsing (it is mostly just a sequence of operations, little structure) and execution model (each operation simply takes from / adds to the stack).
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2022-12-06 08:36:27
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=5928
» Why did you pick the odd syntax?
To keep it simple to parse, I knew that each operation had to be a single character. Then it dawned on me just how unreadable this language would become, and it was at that point that I thought it would be fun to use more obscure symbols to make it crazy looking on purpose. The idea that you could have a collection of random-looking symbols, and that it would actually be useful, and implemented using such a small compiler got me excited :)
Most important
2022-12-11 14:49:21
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=6022
// directory list
dir
delete
MakeDir

FileNote!
Rename
LHA

// memory and oc
avail 
// coding
if 
elseif
endif
gt
lt
variable $
$a=10

endlci
 
// print etc
echo
 
processors
2023-03-17 10:19:05
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=7445
very important also for the developers of games. it was knowhow. the ground language. 
Showreel
2024-09-13 09:26:37
https://vintagecomputing.ch/?browseid=9493
Ausgeklügeltes Showreal, was man mit 3D so alles machen könnte.
Produktpräsentationen (ToniYoghurt), ArchitekturVisualisierung, Games etc