Welcome to Show 060! This week's Topic: Zork - The Great Underground Empire!
Topics and links discussed in the podcast:
Wikipedia link list - Zork, Infocom, and Interactive Fiction.Check it out!
The American Radio Relay League - find out about hamfests (where you might find some cool retro computers), and the ham radio hobby in general...
An Apple I, for only $666.66?Not any more. But have a look at the vintage ad, it's great!
"Shall we play a game?" No scarier words were ever spoken by a sentient computer system - and you could hook up to it with an IMSAI. Check out the IMSAI page dedicated to the movie Wargames (in which an IMSAI system is used quite prominently...)
Be sure to download and enjoy the debut edition of the Classic Computing Podcast by David Greelish!
And while you are podcast surfing, do not miss the September edition of 1 MHz, the Apple II Podcast - Carrington Vanston covers Ballyhoo, an Infocom game. (And yes, it inspired me for this week's show...and to start playing Zork I once again! Thanks Carrington!)
Be sure to send any comments, questions or feedback to retrobits@gmail.com.
For online discussions on Retrobits Podcast topics, check out the Retrobits Podcast forum on the PETSCII Forums page!
Our Theme Song is "Sweet" from the "Re-Think" album by Galigan.
Thanks for listening!
- Earl
[Submitted by BitBot]
I do recommend to everybody visit WoS at: World of Spectrum.org. So what are you waiting for? Go there and experience something you never experienced before, birth of the most famous home computer.
[Submitted by BitBot]
Demo: Starstruck [H.264] (37.25 MB) [DivX] (38.35 MB)
Group: The Black Lotus
Released: August, 2006
I know it's not exactly old skool, but I just had to include this demo as soon as possible and some people had also requested a version other than MPEG-2 that is available, with bad audio.
This demo has only been out a short while but has a little history behind it. The previous demo party that The Black Lotus (TBL) attended they didn't exactly do well, and they were placed 3rd. Apparently, someone threw down the gauntlet for them to create a demo that could kick the ass out of the demos that would be on show at the next party (Assembly '06).
To cut a long story short, TBL came up with this little beauty and won first place, and absolutely slaughtered the other 14 demos (which were 13 PC and 1 Mac OS X) in terms of votes.
The music for this demo was composed by none other than Olof Gustafsson (of the legendary "Pinball Dreams/Fantasies/Illusions" fame and a once member of "The Silents", if I'm not mistaken.
The demo was made to run on an Amiga with a 68060, but I don't have that much power. They had to make their demo run on WinUAE because their A1260 (68060 CPU board) broke on the flight over to the party.
Anyway, enjoy this demo. As I said, this will actually run on the WinUAE emulator. It runs perfectly acceptably on 1.6GHz machine, so you can watch this one for yourself. Just need to get yourself Kickstart 3.1 ROMs and a Workbench 3.1 installation and you're good to go.
Demo Download: Starstruck (Zip File)
I’m migrating my account to a different cluster with my host Servage that supports Ruby on Rails.
Just letting you know so you don’t think I’ve gone offline permanently.
Demo: Jesus on Es [H.264] (162.68 MB) [DivX] (157.55 MB)
Group: LSD
Released: October, 1992
It's been a long time coming, but at last here it is.
Get out your white gloves, whistles and dummies and let the rave commence.
Seeing that this demo came out in 1992 makes me feel really old now
The length of this demo is absolutely huge, dare say my bandwidth limit is going to get tested with this one. Whilst the demo doesn't exactly do a hell of a lot technically, it certainly set a standard in its day. Kicking in at something around the 30 minute mark spread over two disks and REQUIRING an extra disk drive. Fortunately I AGA and ECS fixed it, so that I could run it from my hard disk (not having an extra floppy drive).
The disk images are the original unmodified ones, and the fixers/HD installer is included too to save the searching.
I'm going to try and get back in the habit of doing the demos on a weekly/bi-weekly basis now as it has really been hard going try to get myself back into.
Disk Images (.adz format): [Disk 1] [Disk 2] [HD Installer and AGA/ECS Fixers]. To convert to an ADF, use either WinZip or gzip.
Demo: Guardian Dragon [H.264] (44.09 MB) [DivX] (45.02 MB)
Group: Kefrens
Released: September, 1991
Sorry for the delays in getting this one out, there have been some connectivity issues recently and my WordPress install got hacked, just to compound things.
A nice old demo, that has visuals and music very reminiscent of the day. Most of the effects show off what type of vectors and 3-d models they could do.
Good demo in all. Brings back many memories of the 90's.
Ignore the "Vote for next demo", it's going to be Jesus on E's. Which I'm sure would win anyway if it was put to a vote.
The voting will return, following Jesus on E's!
Disk Images (.adz format): [Disk]. To convert to an ADF, use either WinZip or gzip.
Demo: Twisted [H.264] (32.56 MB) [DivX] (32.35 MB)
Group: Polka Brothers
Released: December, 1994
Lovely demo, nice visuals. Lots of spinning rotationg things. Small video clips and a thumping soundtrack.
Another demo I hadn't seen first time. This one comes on 4 whole disks, there is a hard disk installer (included in the downloads).
There are a few little glitches, most likely my dodgy (10 year old) disks again.
Disk Images (.adz format): [Disk 1] [Disk 2] [Disk 3] [Disk 4] [HD Installer]. To convert to an ADF, use either WinZip or gzip.
Subscribe: Demo: Twisted [H.264] (32.56 MB) [DivX] (32.35 MB)
Group: Polka Brothers
Released: December, 1994
Lovely demo, nice visuals. Lots of spinning rotationg things. Small video clips and a thumping soundtrack.
Another demo I hadn't seen first time. This one comes on 4 whole disks, there is a hard disk installer (included in the downloads).
There are a few little glitches, most likely my dodgy (10 year old) disks again.
Disk Images (.adz format): [Disk 1] [Disk 2] [Disk 3] [Disk 4] [HD Installer]. To convert to an ADF, use either WinZip or gzip.
Subscribe: Demo: Full Moon [H.264] (40.43 MB) [DivX] (40.33 MB)
Group: Virtual Dreams & Fairlight
Released: December, 1993
This was the second demo to come of the Virtual Dreams and Fairlight collaboration.
Another AGA demo, an awesome soundtrack and some very nice effects.
Has a little bit of the "doom-style" demo going on at the start, but doesn't last for too long.
Demo File (.lha archive): [File]
Demo: RSI Megademo [H.264] (102.34 MB) [DivX] (100.83 MB)
Group: Red Sector Inc.
Released: September, 1989
This was the first megademo released and most of the effects and features subsequently formed the "Red Sector Demomaker".
The music was by Romeo Knight and provided a really nice backdrop to the whole demo. Excellent work.
Whilst the effects aren't as fancy as the demos so far, it was groundbreaking for it's time.
Disk Images (.adz format): [Disk 1] [Disk 2]. To convert to an ADF, use either WinZip or gzip.
I don't think I have enough to do with my time, so I've started up another podcast.
This one is dedicated to Amiga Game/Demo Music, back in the days when writing music was limited to generally 4-channels (7 if you include TFMX Pro).
Head on over to http://www.themodcast.com and check it out.
I'm determined to use my disk space/bandwidth, if it kills me!
Demo: Mental Hangover [H.264] (45.69 MB) [DivX] (45.29 MB)
Group: Scoopex
Released: April, 1990
This is one of the "proper old skool" Amiga demos, and I think the first ever Amiga demo that I saw.
I still had myself a Commodore 64 at the time, and this just blew me away. Thanks in part to my mate Gormy I pretty much managed to wangle myself an Amiga 500 shortly after off my parents.
Nice dark soundtrack, and some good vector work, considering the time.
Sadly, I've had to mark this one as explicit cos of a single rude 'F' word rather prominently displayed.
Good work Scoopex. And thanks again for the logos!
Disk Images (.adz format): [Disk] To convert to an ADF, use either WinZip or gzip.
Demo: Fruit Kitchen [H.264] [DivX]
Group: Silents
Released: August, 1995
This was the last demo that the Silents released on the Amiga. A very sad day. It was released at "The Assembly 1995" where it came 4th (source Amiga Demoscene Archive).
In my opinion it suffered from a problem that most Amiga demos had (after about 1992), and that was trying to do a "doom-style" first person fly through at really crappy resolutions.
As far as I'm concerned that was where the whole demoscene started to fall apart as there was too much concentration on getting "doom-style" sections and the type of innovations seen earlier in the 90s had just died by the wayside.
The demo "Blood Kitchen" advertised as 'coming soon', at the end of this demo, obviously never actually made it.
Demo Archive (.lha format): [LHA Archive] I'll try and stay away from these 'file-based' demos in the future, and keep it to the disk-based ones, as they are better anyway.
A lot of people have requested an Amiga Game Intro podcast. This has now been setup and, with any luck, shall be released every Wednesday to offset the wait for a new demo.
The first demo is Another World by Delphine Software.
You can subscribe to the following feeds:
Amiga Game Intro Podcast [H.264]
Amiga Game Intro Podcast
Give me some feedback in the comments to the post or in the forums.
Demo: Hardwired [H.264] [DivX]
Group: Crionics/Silents
Released: December, 1991
I remember when I first saw this demo and thought "Oooh! Video!".
Has some nice effects, and a very dark soundtrack.
Hope you enjoy this one was a right bugger to capture, had to whip out my A600 and actually run it off floppy disks because it was complaining a bit on the A1200 (didn't look pretty). It weighs it at a nice 61MB too!
Still at least it's free of glitches and errors.
Another classic made for the original Amiga 500 computer.
Disk Images (.adz format): [Disk 1] [Disk 2] To convert to an ADF, use either WinZip or gzip.
A lot of people wanted to see some of the other demos that didn't win the previous votes, so I thought I would put some of the more noticeable losers from the previous votes in to this weeks vote.
Also, I'm thinking of doing a vote where users can add their own demo to vote for, let me know what you'd think to that (via the comments to this post).
Sorry for the delay, had a couple of hectic days.
Demo: Origin [H.264] [DivX]This was I believe the first "proper demo" that was released for the A1200/4000 and the AGA chipset. It was definitely the first AGA demo I saw.
It won when released at "The Party 93", and whilst it didn't exactly contain anything special it did go to show what could be done with the new, more powerful, Amigas.
Disk Images (.adz format): [Disk 1] [Disk 2] To convert to an ADF, use either WinZip or gzip.