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Saxonia Issue 03 Part 020
1 Scening via emulation0
by drHirudo/Void
l
This year there weren't that many Amiga scene productions, so what to do
if you want to watch the newest demos or intros, but you the latest Amiga
releases are already ran on your computer several times?
One possible solution is to code something by yourself and watch with joy
at the final result. There are two problems with this. The first is you have
to be a coder, and the second is that coding is a huge time consuming task.
Another solution is to wander on the other computer scenes and see their
newest releases, especially the 8 bits, which the Amigas emulate quite well.
These both solutions worked for me, but I will focus on the second, since
it's the easier for everyone.
The Amiga is known as the chameleon computer, or the platform with multiple
personalities since it's introduction. This name came because of the available
emulators, first hardware and later software. This totally new computer had no
compatibility with any other platform, but back in 1985 the available software
titles for the others were many. At the begining it wasn't even able to read
diskettes of another hardware platform. If an Amiga owning person, wanted to
take his computer related job done on Mac or PC, from office to home, he had
to save it on disk and read it on his computer. This desire caused the
appearance of software titles which were able to read MS-Dos, Atari ST and Mac
disks like MSDos from Frank Wubbeling, PCFormat and PCCopy, both found on
Workbench 1.2 and 1.3 Extras disks, and later the well known CrossDOS, from
Consultron, which was integrated in AmigaDOS releases 2.1 and up. Such utility
called "MessyDOS file System Handler" (MSH) by Olaf Seibert won a programming
contest held by the well known German "Amiga Magazin" - a paper magazine which
is still published. Another examples are CrossMac, from Consultron, which works
with Mac disks without the need of special hardware, and Disk-2-Disk from
Central Coast Software, which reads and writes Commodore 1541/1571 diskettes,
and had some BASIC translation capabilities. At the current stage the Amiga is
capable of using any common non obscure disk format, assumed you have the
hardware for this - i.e. you can't read 1.44MB disks with DD disk drive. This
is true not only diskettes, but also hard drives, CD-ROMs, PCMCIA cards,
Memory Cards etc.
Reading and writing alien format disks wasn't enough. Some software titles
were hardware specific, which means that there weren't versions for another
platforms, than the primary targeted. So the average worker wasn't able to
finish his spreadsheet/database entries, originally typed on the PC or MAC,
at home, simply because his home spreadsheet/database didn't use the same
format as this chosen by his employer. Then the emulators entered the scene.
First they were hardware based, like the Commodores Bridgeboard which was
available with processors from 8088 to 80386SX and even 80486 hacks and gave
pretty good compatibility, and it even multitask which means that you can use
the clipboard between the Amiga and the PC simultaneously - a real plus. The
Bridgeboard is one of the best emulator solutions, even giving the opportunity
to use PC expansion cards. It was intended for the serious computer user and
available only for the big box Amigas - 2000, 3000, and 4000 series. Another
hardware emulators boards were released by the German company Vortex - ATonce
and ATonce Plus - 80286 based cards for the A500 and A2000, and Golden Gate
80386SX and 80486SLC ones, similar to the Bridgeboard. The less usable PC
emulator card is the KCS Power PC Board, which had the NEC-V processor, was
slow and didn't multitask.
The fact that the Apple Macintosh and the Atari ST computers used the same
processors serie as the Amiga - the famous 68000 range, made emulation
solutions for the Mac and the ST a little less expensive. A-Max and A-Max II
Plus by ReadySoft were capable of running Black and White Mac software, but
they didn't multitask. Emplant by Utilities unlimited brought the color Mac
emulation to the Amiga with multitasking. For the ST the choises were the
Medusa and Chameleon, which were usable mostly on 68000 powered
machines, since the early ST ROMS were incompatible with the 68010+
processors.
Hardware emulation despite fast and compatible, had one big problem and
that was it's expense. Sometimes a cheaper option was to buy a spare second
hand computer, than an emulator card. Also not much people were interested
in buying hardware emulator for 8 bit machine, which they can find in the
garbage bin or buy for next to nothing. They rather spend these money for
an Amiga upgrade like RAM or accelerator. Also the Amiga central processor
was fast enough to emulate most of the computer parts at decent speed, for
example the 6502, 6809, 8088 and the Z80 CPUs, especially if it was
upgraded. One of the first software only emulators released was the SimCPM,
which emulates 8080 powered CPM machine. Later software only emulators
included options for C64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, BBC micro and other
platforms. People realized that the Amiga is capable of emulating these
without expensive hardware add-ons, and with the faster accelerator boards,
they started looking of the possibility to emulate more powerful machines or
the 8 bits, but with better compatibility. Software emulators for the
Macintosh, PC and Sinclair QL appeared. Trivial is that in fact the first
software only emulator for the Apple Macintosh was a hacked version of the
A-MAX II, which reads the ROM from disk and didn't need the hardware at all.
Probably this crack set the end of the hardware emulation era, but marked
the beginning of the software emulation era, which didn't end yet. Emulators
were released not just for various computer platforms, but also for
synthesizers (TB-303), or parts of computers like PlaySID, which emulates
only the 6581 and the 6510 chips of the C64 and replays SID tunes even on
slower Amigas. There are sound only emulators for Atari 800, Nintendo Super
Entertainment System (SNES), Atari ST, Amstard CPC, Sega Master System and
Sega Game Gear, MIDI and more. Almost everybody wants to have it all and
that made the emulators for whole systems much more popular than the
partial emulators. Currently the software only emulators available for
Amiga reached quite decent compatibility, which means that they will do the
job for the one who wants to see some foreign scenes productions. Of course
this have its own pluses and minuses against the hardware purism. The
pluses are that with emulation you have faster loading speed, multitasking
environment, more options and easier handling. The minuses are that not all
the productions work as expected to, if they work at all, but you shouldn't
mind that much. The computer scenes at which you can take a peek, right
from your Amiga are:
1
Sinclair ZX Spectrum
0
The speccy scene as they call it, is one of the most active 8 bit scenes,
especially in Russia, from where most of the latest productions came. There
are many speccy emulators for the Amiga, with almost perfect compatibility,
so you can see almost all of the scene productions. The current copyright
holder of the ROMs (Amstrad plc) released them free, so you wouldn't have
any problem installing an emulator. Recommended for watching are CBSpeccy,
ZXAM and ASp, but there are some other good ones, like ZX-Live, X-128 and
Speculator. This year the speccy releases didn't reach the quality of the
previous years, so you rather search for some older party releases. There
are many disk mags available, released often, with various topics, not only
the scene, but most of them are in russian, so they aren't of much interest
if you don't understand that language. The Spectrum emulation is also good
if you want to see pre-Amiga releases from some of the well known miggy
coders. I suggest to watch at the following productions:
"First Association" Mega Demo. This production is 1.6MB big, done by several
groups, featuring nice effects and good music. Released in 1998.
"Power Up" by Extreme. Released at Enlight 97, with many effects seen in
Amiga demos. The music is ok. Beautiful pictures.
"7th Reality" by Digital Reality and Prestige. Have good effects and
graphics, with well synchronised music. Released at Enlight 96.
There are many other worth seeing productions, just check the Sinclair
software archives on the net. Some of them are accessable at:2
http://www.zxdemo.org/
http://www.worldofspectrum.org
http://trd.speccy.cz/
1
Commodore Plus 4
0
Unlike others, the Plus 4 scene raised its activity this year. There are
two emulators available on the Amiga - CP4 and Flamingo. The CP4 is easy to
install have built in monitor, freeware ROM included in the archive, option
for realtime emulation on slower machines and also emulates the SID
expansion card. The compatibility is average. Flamingo is harder to
install, but utilizes the PPC processor, if present. This year +4 releases
had overall higher quality than the previous years. Recommended for giving
an eye productions are:
"HeartFixer95" by Luca/Fire and Bubis/Resource - released at Forever03,
it have pretty impressive colorful effects. Unfinished.
"Genetic Faulty" by Gentlemen Software. Rather old demo, but still good.
Released at Liquid 95, features many effects inspired by Amiga demos.
"Beggars aren't Choosers" by M and M, released at the LCP 2002. Shows
color plasma, twist and raster scrollers. Have decent non SID music.
New issues of diskmags were released recently, but you can read them
from cover to end for less than and hour. For scene productions check:2
http://plus4.emucamp.com/
ftp://c64.rulez.org/pub/plus4/
1
Commodore 64
0
The C64 scene seems less active these days. Nevertheless there are still
productions released. Sadly the emulators for this platform on the Amiga are
with poor compatibility. Only about twenty percent of the demos work. MagiC64
is fast and versatile, and the best option currently, but the unregistered
version timeouts after ten minutes. Frodo is freeware but slower. The fastest
is A64, and is good only for productivity software. But you still can watch
at some productions like:
"Bubbles V1.0" - hand drawn version of the famous Amiga juggler animation.
"Havin Fun" by Triad, with fake multiple BOBs effect in one of the parts.
"Blackice3" by Eclipse - Nice music and fast filled vectors with motionblur.
There are literally thousands of C64 scene releases on the net, which can
be leeched from:
2
ftp://c64.rulez.org/pub/
http://www.funet.fi/
0
Of course there are other computers which can be emulated on the Amiga, but
either their scene is dead or inactive, or their emulation support is poor.
The curious reader might check the Vic-20, Apple 2, MSX, Amstrad CPC,
Nintendo Entertainment System, Oric, TRS-80, Atari 800, Atari 2600, Nintendo
Gameboy, Sinclair QL, Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear and BBC emulators.
Since I am more interested in the Amiga scene, than any other, my review
of the platforms is somehow limited. I know that the Saxonia magazine is
read by various people, so I invite anyone who have something to add or
correct, to release a follow-up article, which will be greatly appreciated.
Overall the whole scene, not only the Amiga part seems to get less and less
active with every year passing. This have been discussed many times before,
but for me the main reason is the changing times. In the world dominated by
one main platform (the PC compatibles) there isn't much place for the
demoscene, or at least not demoscene as we know it. In the early nineties,
the demos had shown the capabilities of a platform and group. People got
impressed by master level of use of limited palette, slow processor and tiny
memory. Today you can't impress the average gamer, who spends most of his
day playing games on 1200*1024 32 bit screens, neither with FLI pictures, 500
BOBs on screen, or 4 channel SID tune, nor with 3D scenes. This wouldn't work.
I hardly believe they can be attracted with any demo effects. Some of the
players didn't watch the full intros of their games, just because they want
the action, let alone watching a whole demo, or trying to read a scroller.
This means that not many people are joining the scene today, if any. Without
new people the scene is aging and slowly dying.2
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