pouët.net

I have an Amiga 600 with HDD drive, but this thread also applies to AGA demos.

I know we have WHDLoad (many "classic" demos were converted and that's great) ;
I know we have ADF disc-image files (with HxC/Gotek, it requires to boot the machine on the previously selected image);

But is there lots of demos that can be directly started from HDD ?

For example, "The Fall" from The Deadliners/Lemon (https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=75773) has a file version, and it's handy.

I tried to find a list or a filter here on Pouet, without any success.

ps. thanks to @ham that suggested me to look first at 40Kb intros, that was good advice

you can extract any executable from an adf but I guess you want to avoid that hassle.

here are 3
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=88713
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=89097
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=19259

3D Demo II by Anarchy can be installed on harddrive

Grats on the desire to run demos in 2023. Feeling lonely! :'(

Important: There's no "install demo" on Amiga, and you don't have to go "intro" or "onefile". Just copy the files and run the executable, easy - how it should be.

Of the 30000+ Amiga demos released (so far), each one runs in the environment they were released for. Me saying I've run most of them would obviously be a lie. Let's just say I've run 1000+ releases this way.

Environment. A600 is ECS, and until 1988 OCS+Kick 1.2/3 is expected and no fastmem. After that, OCS+1.3 fastmem is expected, and after that "or better" is mostly expected so that in recent years, you should have NP running a modern release on the media you prefer. (If you really have a HDD I recommend to back it up now and switch media before it dies!)

Suffice to say, I've run a lot of st*ff on my A600! Here are some helpers to change configuration without changing Amiga. ;)

For A500+/A600/A1200 I heartily recommend a little fastmem though. It will make your Amiga sing, whether for demos or any other use. <3

As for filtering out the demos on here, I say: "It's not needed!"

And w/r to the unspecified problem you're having norecess, I have to throw some salt at Pouet, not providing the general OCS 1MB platform established in democompos since 3 decades. But for the pre-A500+ demos you need to give it a little fastmem to run the older ones.

As for floppy releases, well hm, it's a packaging thing. It's handy, some use it to make a release "genuine", and e.g. TEK used it as a way to bring the send a physical floppy to a friend back. Which I did. <3

Blu Sky was a trackmo, so there it was needed. For Frazetta not, and there is a file version with more paintings. To run floppy images on non-floppy I recommend A1200/030 and to request a slave if your favorite demo is missing, otherwise even OCS releases are likely to perform unexpectedly.

For AGA demos I can also answer, but there is still the problem definition missing. So my answer is the same, no install required and media doesn't matter but if you have an HDD you should back it up before it fails. Just boot without startup-sequence, configure the CPU you have in your Amiga, navigate to the demo folder and run it. :)

Thanks @photon for your answer, this is really appreciated.

I don't have any specific problems, here it's more an observation. WHDLoad works perfectly well for me - which also solves the "environment" issue at some point. Unfortunately, from what I'm seeing, most "classical" demos are available through WHDLoad, but not the recent ones.

Yes, there is ADF playable through Gotek etc. Maybe I picked a wrong model on eBay, but it's so unconvenient to use: located in place of the floppy drive, the screen is ridiculously small + I can barely access the navigation buttons. Annnnd I have to rotate the keyboard every times I want to interact with the device.
Because of that I decided to switch back to the original A600 floppy drive. With the bonus of having the wonderful "drive tick" :)

My A600 has few small "cheap" (but mandatory) upgrades. 5.5Mb FAST Ram + 1Mb CHIP Ram. The HDD is not the original one, it's based on a Flash card.

I agree with you, I'm not looking for Installs that are expecting fixed file locations, instead I expect a simple "drag'n'drop" (Windows terminology, sorry) of a folder.

Finally, I noticed some productions are clearly made to be run from the Shell -- they cleanly exit. For others, it enters an infinite loop / resets the machine completely when ended (I guess this is the expected behavior, designed to run originally from a floppy drive).

I know we can "mount" ADF files. I'm not familiar with the process, will it work well with trackmos?

Thanks

ADF files are just archives, so you can open them with the right tool*, extract the executable, copy it to your Amiga hard drive and often launch it from there without trouble.

* I use the AmigaDX plugin for Total Commander: https://www.ghisler.com/plugins.htm

I can understand someone who wants to run demos on Amiga HDD without WHDLoad, but does that omit LHA archives? Or do the demos need to be run on non-accelerated machines?

some demos runnable from A600's HD include
da jormas - major release
sanity - interference
ghostown & rave network overscan - boogietown

--

has anybody managed to run red sector megademo (1989) on A600 on any type of media?

two more popular titles that are directly distributed as files & seem to work on A600:
sanity - elysium
supergroup - superoriginal

I don’t remember if I ever tried running RSI Megademo, but when I had an Amiga 600 I used a program called ”relokick”. If I understand correctly, it would load Kickstart 1.3 to RAM and change registers etc. to what would be expected of an Amiga 500.

These seem to be newer versions of relokick: ReloKick v1.41 and ReloKick v1.4a. I think I used version 1.3, or maybe it was labeled 1.3 because of the Kickstart version.

I used to be able to run many demos which normally crashed on my 600, although not some of the contemporary ones like Wicked Sensation and State of the Art (didn’t try the one fixed by Skid Row).

Let's go Aussie today?

Cydonia

Satisfaction Gauranteed

Here is a small selection of good ones (one or two may have been mentioned before):

Spaceballs - Vold, Straff, Makt, Korreks
Dead Hackers Society - Copper-Kaah-Baah-Yaah
Uprough - 15 Years of Fame
The Electronic Knights - Dandelion
Nah Kolor - Abstractica
Melon - Fisherhawk Dr
Abyss - Drugstore
Five Finger Punch - Alt Cure
Jetset - Armageddon
Da Jormas - Major Release
Neural & Rebels - Retro Dentro
Pacific - Oh Five!, Monomateria
Sanity - Boggledop, Interference
Scoopex - Uncle Tom Sonix
Cocoon - MMXXII
Unique - Coco, Interparallactic, Multicolor
Booze Design - Baby Steps

Most of these should also run on A1200 without too much hassle.

There are of course many more. Of course, all intros can be run from hard drive and some of them rival demos in both quality and content. Check out the 40k and 64k releases from the last few years. Desire, Abyss and Planet Jazz are some groups that come to mind.

Thanks a lot for your recommendations ! I can't wait to test those.

99% of the Amiga demo between 1995-2000 are targeted for harddrives. 75% of the "adf" released today are actually just amiga dos formated "FFS" with files installed just like on a hardware, and you can just copy to drive. (Which hassle most real amiga users, but at least now OS3.2 can natively read inside adfs, thank you. )
then 25% of adfs around are "trackmoes", that was the early way on the 80's... it uses a bootblock and data is rawly put on disk without format. Here the only hope is WHDLoad. (thank you even more, what an hell of a work.)

And if it was'nt clear: RELEASE MORE LHA WTF !!!

Why mention FFS specifically when OCS machines like A500 can't read such floppies out of the box?

Perhaps because the thread starter said

I just assumed "75% of the "adf" released today" also includes OCS stuff. 🤷

Yeah, by around year 2010, we reached the point that basically all releases ever worked from a HDD. Then the retro wave came, people dug up their A500 from the basement they did not touch for 25 years, proclaimed everything that is beyond an 1MB A500 with an FDD is "uncool" (especially AGA and an '060), and trackloader entries started to pour in again.

It can't be helped, I suppose. Especially since we released the point, that even an ADF isn't cool enough, and we had releases only on a physical disk, that can't be made into an ADF... It's the demoscene. People will do what they want anyway. And yeah, it sucks, when you just want to watch demos, and not care for the BS.

Here's a quick and dirty listing of the demo directory from PiMIGA from a few years back, it's not exhaustive, there is a newer collection that I haven't finished working on yet, when I have I may make the demo collection available as a separate downloadable archive of hdd demos if anybody shows interest for it. Enjoy :-)

linky