The Amiga was an innovative home computer, originally built and designed 1983 by a group of talented people at Amiga Corporation. This company was acquired by Commodore in 1984, who themselves had been instrumental in the spread of home computers with the original Commodore PET, the VIC-20 and later the very successful “Volkscomputer” Commodore-64.

One of the people responsible for the success of the Amiga was Dr. Tim King. He brought to the Amiga an operating system that he had been working on at Cambridge University called Tripos. This was a fully pre-emptive multi-tasking system written almost entirely in the programming language BCPL (a precursor to C). Tim worked with the team at Amiga who had already produced a kernel, and moved Tripos on top of this. Others in the team produced device drivers and the award-winning graphics and user interface.

After having very much success with the original Amiga 1000 and the Amiga 500, the Commodore marketing failed to keep the momentum going and bringing interesting and affordable successor machines. Instead, they wasted their resources by producing PC compatible designs. Eventually, Commodore went bust, and passed the remains on to Escom who also went bust. Despite the trademark rights still wandering around and an apparant lack of force behind companies trying to bring back the Amiga operating system, what remains is a hugely vibrant Amiga User’s community.

Demo Scene

Demos have been around as long as personal computers have been popular, but they didn’t become a regular occurance until about 1983. Demos started as a small program that, sadly, was used to identify who had cracked the game you were currently (illegally) playing. They were a good test of the programmer’s abilities, because they had to fit in a pretty small space — usually 256 to 1024 bytes. Obviously, they were all coded in either assembler or machine language. Around this time, they mainly started showing up on the Commodore 64, and the Apple ][ computers, being the most popular home computers at the time. Around this time, a gradual shift occured, from people cracking games to writing graphic/sound demonstrations that showed off the computer they had just learned to program. Sure, cracking games was still popular, but some people decided that learning about the machine and using it as a tool for creativity was “cooler” than cracking one dime-store game after another. Around this time, in 1984-1985, the first demos were born, as people willing to show off their computer and programming skills learned new ways to wrestle more power and speed out of the computer. Early demos showed up on the C64, the Apple ][, and the Atari 400/800/XL computers. And then came the Amiga.

When the Amiga computer from Commodore hit the home-computer market in 1985, it was not very well received initially in the USA — but it took off like wildfire in Europe. It was manufactured and sold primarily in Europe, and made its way into many households. The Amiga was different — it was the first low-cost, home computer built for multimedia — which, back then, was a term almost unheard of. It had incredible sound and graphics capabilities, and shipped with a multitasking operating system.

Clearly, the Amiga was the machine to program anything graphical on, like games and presentations, offering the best well-rounded graphics and sound and speed. It was the clear upgrade path for many people wanting more from a computer than the aging C64 could give them. The so called “demo scene” flourished on the Amiga, mainly due to the fact that the computer was fast and a with the custom chips a lof of cool hardware tricks, e.g. multiple video pages, multiple resolutions, four-channel digital stereo sound (for the first time, computer music actually sounded like music), and nearly complete control over the graphics hardware - down to the point of offering multiple resolutions on the same screen.

The Amiga demo scene truly created revolutionary products from 1986-1990. For a while, there was a surge of products from the Amiga and the Atari ST (which had its own successful demo scene) because the two sides were competing, and constantly trying to out-do the other.

My Participation

I bought one of the first batches of Amiga 1000s which appeared 1986 in Germany. This was my second computer (the first one was the Commodore 64) and I started to program it in 68000 assembler. Eventually, I got hold of the legendary SoundTracker program, written by Karsten Obarski for his Arkanoid style game and started to create music in .mod format. During 1987-1990, I was part of several more or less famous groups in the Amiga scene. My nickname was “Lord Performer Artworx” (LPA) and in chronological order I was part of:

• Magic Software Team
• TGM-Crew
• Thrust
• Traitors
• Threat
• Supreme

Note that I never was directly involved in cracking games or distributing illegal stuff — I “just” programmed intros and made music. With these pages, I want to remind me and you of these great days which formed the best part of my youth:

• Visit the Modules Page to hear and read about most of the songs I composed during my Amiga time.
• Read an interview with me made by the great Amiga Music Preservation site.
• pouet.net contains some of my demo creations.
• ExoticA contains some of my demo creations as well.

Eventually I will also publish my demo creations as far as I can get hold of that ancient stuff…