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That's why they have One File Demo category on C64.

Is it? One-filed C-64 demos that require a disk drive exist.

Oh, trust me, as someone who only had a Datassette back in the day, the fact that the floppy drive was definitely expansion to the C64 couldn't be more painfully obvious to me.


"Nobody" was really doing stock A1200 releases until now... And if we're talking "stock", lets talk stock-stock. (Also, what 4gentE said about One Filer entries.)

But of course any parties is free to come up with their own set of rules and limitations, it's just where I'm going to draw the lines, unless someone present me some very good argument they should be elsewhere.

My point being that we were talking about the OP, not compo rules.

A whole bunch were made in 1993-1994 before people generally moved on to accelerated Amigas, but indeed most of these were either trackmos or single-file demos that fit on a floppy. Psychedelic is a notable exception, but even though it does run on stock, it primarily targets fastmem and runs pretty badly without.

I do think there was a short period around that time where a HD was a much more common expansion that fastmem. Certainly if I had not been able to afford both a HD and fastmem when I bought my first A1200, I would have gone with the HD first.

Even then, there's definitely some sense to the "stock-stock" argument, and I'll buy that if I have to. :)

I lack precise historical knowledge but I especially remember the A1200 "magic pack" which came with HD and quite some of my friends had exactly that.
I do know that pack came rather later in the short life of the A1200 but that's what made me somehow assume "hard drive" at first.

Basically everybody I knew with an A1200 back then put in a 3.5" HD, which was much cheaper than the 2.5" form factor the machine was designed for. It made the case gape a little, but we didn't much care. :)

Did those 3.5" drives crash more often than the 2.5" ones? I seem to remember only buying a single 2.5" in my entire life and it is still in my A1200. My fellow groupmates had their 3.5" drives with wires hanging out of the case crashing all over the place.

Although much later (very end of the '90s), but this is what I also did to my first Amiga 1200 (3,5" HDD). And then maybe like 3 months later, I already had a '030 card for it, with Fast RAM. Turns out, it is a slippery slope indeed.

BTW, regarding the Magic Pack - it specifically had an A1200HD version. So see what I wrote before. :)

I suspect the 2.5" ones handled trips to parties better, since they were made for laptops and mobility. The 3.5" drives in my PC didn't appreciate that at least.

Vanilla A1200 stuff would be fun to see. I think they should run on accelerated machines too, at minimum on any 020/030.
And if they need to run from floppy they should work from HD/CF/CD or whatever too. As in, slightly longer loading times from floppy would be perfectly fine, definitely much better than only supporting floppy disks.
Although for me it would be easy to run stock A1200 + floppy stuff since Blizzards can be disabled with a key press. The 'impressive' OCS stuff I can't watch on real hardware since my A600 has a Furia 020 which I can't disable easily.
So yeah generally I would rather see stuff that supports a wide range of hardware than a few extra pixels in a rotozoomer.

I had 3.5" hard drives in my A1200 for a long time and took them to parties without trouble. For a while I even used it without the top lid on, because the 3.5" HDD and 040 card (with a fan and heatsink) wouldn't fit well otherwise. I just put it in a sports bag and transported it like that. Very durable machines!

My first A1200 from 1994 had a 260 MB 3.5" harddrive, way before Magic Pack. It was a big thing with German mailorder companies that time, as the A1200HD was less value for money. They would come preinstalled with the case closed. Most of may friends had harddrives at that time.

I was about to give a few recommendations in addition to Psychedelic and figured I could start a list instead. So here is "A1200 Fun"-list with a few goodies of the top of my head.

First AGA-demos by Team Hoi didn't really cut it for me. I esp. liked Virtual Dreams demos like Love or Fullmoon, or stuff from Rebels, Polka Brothers, Sanity, Bomb, or Juliet & Case, to name a few. For me this short period of time was exactly the end of trackloaders (Origin, Motion, Roots, Iso) and beginning of more OS-support (basically everything else). Assembly 1994 already allowed for extra Fast-Ram and its winner Mindflow by Stellar required 2+2 MB. The Party 94 famously insisted on 2 MB Chip-only, so Polka's Twisted had to compete as a wild-demo and Nexus 7 won a glorious demo competition. Many demos in this list so far require multiple disks and have some kind of video or animation in it.

So yeah, interesting target. And what @Dodke said.

I can see arguments for both vanilla A1200 (68020, extra floppy not required (but supported if 2+ disks), no HD needed, no extra memory needed), and for a fixed amount of fastmem (2mb). But does anyone know if fastmem timing is consistent for all of the expansions?

The A500 1/2mb chip+1/2mb fake fast worked as a standard because almost everybody had the same minimum performance setup (and if you had real fastmem, or 1mb chipmem, you knew you had to test on someone else’s machine).

One lesson learned making Game Under Again (which targets vanilla A1200) is that WinUAE is amazingly accurate for A500, but not for A1200 (or at least for 68020). The full frame of updating took about 7 or 8 raster lines more on real hardware. So find someone with real HW to test!

Many advertised "zero wait states", which presumably means they run at the same speed, but I don't know if there were also slower boards that did insert wait states.

Trapdoor fastmem expansions report slightly different speedups in E.G. SysInfo. I've seen values between 1.99 and 2.32 times the speed of an unexpanded 1200 with various cards. Not a super reliable benchmark, but still an indication that you should be able to squeeze some extra cycles/frame in with a better card if I'm not misunderstanding something.

Almost all the demos @noname mention should work better (higher framerate) with fastmem, except perhaps Nexus 7.

Catabasis by Cocoon is a fairly recent (Well, 2017, but that's like three years ago, right?) demo for vanilla A1200, and one I like a lot. However I believe it, too, achieves higher framerates with fastmem. Experiment 2007 by RNO brings a 060 feel and aesthetic and I believe it runs in fullframe on plain vanilla, but Britelite probably knows more about that :)