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The PiStorm doesn't emulate the chipset, so not sure what you mean by "accuracy". Obviously the instruction timings won't be exactly like on a real CPU, but the various generations of "real" 68k chips also differ greatly.

But if you want the cheapest, nothing beats just running UAE on a 15 year old PC laptop indeed. (Just remove the swollen batteries first, heh.) But that's also not "real hardware", where this discussion started.

One of the main takeaways for me from the Gerp No CPU Challenge compo was, that most Amiga coders refuse to do AGA stuff, even if you take away their CPU. :) Having done my sarcastic remark, may it be different this time around!


While I 100% understand the allure of an uniform demo platform, the '060 was really "close enough". Since it always will be the matter of where you draw some lines. Just ask the NTSC C64 lovers over the pond... :) Also, let me be Captain Obvious for a second and point it out, that the least uniform platform ever, the PC, also became the largest ever by far. Anyway. I get it, of course. By not having to worry about hardware differences, one can push the limits further and harder, in another direction.

You still have to verify that it runs correctly on real hardware.

Like Blueberry said:

Exactly - This is what I love, too. Even with everyone watching on youtube, to me it matters that other coders are writing code on the same spec platform. And it's also why I prefer making games for consoles over PC and mobile platforms - if something runs 60fps for me, it runs 60fps for everyone.

Grip said:


This level of variation seems close, but it isn't good enough if you try to push limits, set records, or do cycle exact magic. You write your demo on a machine that runs at 2.05x speed, and your 50fps effects may slow down and ruin your timing on a 1.99x expansion machine - that just sucks. So if those numbers are correct, I'm a fan of sticking to the unexpanded vanilla a1200 spec.

For the 030/040/060 demos, variation is the norm. That's perfectly fine, those demos are great, but they are a different tier of platform, much more similar to the PC scene, and not what I love.

Maybe I lost a bit track of the discussion when the PI-Storms got in (which run much faster than 060s ever did).
When discussing "stock" 1200, fast-mem should be out of question because it never existed "out of the box" - at least not in the same box as the 1200 ;)
When it comes to a hard drive, it did exist out of the box and makes a big difference:
The machine comes with 2MB RAM and during the run-time of a demo you want to fill that up a few times. That can easily fill 3 or more disks and that simply means you are creating a demo which runs at a quite different pace.
For me (looking from the 060-perspective) that's basically like doing an A500-demo with a bit more beef and colors. That's an interesting extra challenge - but in a way, also a different discipline.

Absolutely agree. Also, fastmem expansions cost somewhere around €180 back in the day, almost half the price of a stock A1200. Not exactly comparable to the half meg expansions for the A500.

To be clear, when I issued the challenge for "Vanilla A1200", the target config that was in my mind would allow multi-loading from HD. I do see the arguments both for allowing it and for forbidding it, and I am fine with either. Whichever motivates the most people to compete. :)

It did not occur to me that a demo that is incompatible with faster CPUs but requires HD might be in conflict with the Revision compo rules. Some years past, the Revision compo machine featured a Blizzard 1260, which can be easily disabled. But nowadays, it's an ACA1260, which does not (AFAIK) have that feature. So in practical terms, recording such a demo would require either removal of the card or a separate A1200. I don't know how much of Charlie's reservations stem from this hassle, but it seems we will need to bend or change the rules (as currently written) in any case. Good call from Charlie to initiate the discussion to get this agreement in place well ahead of time.

Dear gods of Amiga democoding, can we please please please have more vanilla A1200?

My Wonderful original Amiga 1200 prods list has some gems that noname missed. I watched these on my stock Amiga 1200 when they came out and recently on a mini-demoscene gathering we organized:

- Aurora by legendary Stellar .
I could not believe this ran on my Amiga 1200 when I ran this back in the day.
- Cuzco by Oxygene
Aside from still very active leonard, it is Oxbab coding on stock A1200. Very smooth.
- syndrome by Balance
I think old timers all know this one and just forgot how great and underrated it was.
- Zero Gravity by Scoopex
I call this one "the awakening of Antibyte"
- 4ko by Polka Brothers
I can't be the only one remembering this stock Amiga 1200 40k intro with superfast voxel?
- Alien by Scoopex
I see noname praised it too, and just forgot to put it on his list!
- Comadose by Passion
This 40k ran well on stock Amiga 1200 despite the quite advanced 3D
- Nitte by Passion
Buttery smooth 40k also by Passion and another Boogeyman, generations ahead as they say

IMHO Legendary Eastern Europe prods (us former communists could not afford fast RAM and accelerators):
- Wit Premium by Freezers
Everything runs in one frame, the Beethoven music is so Polish Demoscene Techno it hurts, sync is wild and ... the axe!!!!!!!!!!!
- Moments by Old Bulls
Old Bulls transgressed the unwritten demoscene rules and got reactions similar to say bifat's Toxic Modulo, so people forget they have some really really nice stock Amiga 1200 prods
- Zoombi by Union and PIL
Wonderful fast Amiga 1200 codercolor prod that Norwegians and Swedes are probably going to puke at, but Finns might like?
- No Future by Tilt
Another grand transgressor of unwritten demoscene rules and circlejerks, Tilt made the only punk production on a stock Amiga 1200 that has tons of pre-recorded animations that Photon is going to love and praise, but also some very creative smooth effects on stock Amiga 1200.
They actually sing in this prod and it sounded super super cool to the 13 year old me back in the day. Fuck the system! (just quoting them here)

This discussion finally motivated me to properly revisit and clean up my old A1200 HD collection.

Spent the last few evenings happily going through demos, and today from The Black Lotus to Virtual Dreams (nice part of the collection), checking what actually still fits the vanilla A1200 target we started talking about recently :)

The original quick recommendation list has now grown into a curated set of currently 172 productions that should run on a vanilla A1200 or stay reasonably close to that target. I also provide an archive with all of the releases for your convenience.

Started a separate thread for it here: A1200 Fun

Suggestions, omissions and compatibility corrections very welcome :)

@Blueberry:
The problem with HDD loading, that it's not only about "disabling the Blizzard 1260". And it's not even about the ACA. But it was always going to be introducing a 3rd compo machine spec in the end, which I really dislike.

For example: OK, I disable/remove the '060. But the entire system is set up to run _WITH_ the Blizzard. This means mounted HDD partitions and whatnot will eat up _a lot_ of chipmem. Even more so with FFS, less so if I use a modern FS (which is already far from stock, but whatever), but it's definitely not something most people are savvy with. So I need to provide another HDD, that is prepared for "stock" 3.0/3.1, which leaves as much chipmem free as possible (because trust me, if people can find an excuse and creative solutions to push the memory limit, they WILL do it). I don't want to deal with "but it werkz on muh system, you suck" stuff.

So OK, I remove the accelerator, and swap the HDD. Fine. Or is it. The rules currently say, the HDD entries can go up to 20MiB in size (compressed). That is absolutely a no-go for a stock 1200, IMO, even IF we allow HDD loading. That just leaves way too much space for abuse and essentially smearing the line between what is an animation and what isn't.

So essentially _in practice_ (with all the time constraints and whatnot in mind at Revision) what we need is a 3rd compomachine (stock 1200), with a special HDD setup, AND to top this off, a special rule that says, OK, the maximum stock 1200 demo size is say, 4MiB. Or whatever the scene says it is realistic for that machine.

All of this is doable, of course. But I did NOT want to open this can of worms, of adding a 3rd compomachine spec with special rules, because the current stuff is convoluted enough, and already a source of constant whining about how "unfair" things are, because muh OCS, and "'060 isn't a real Amiga". And then add the mess of 16:9 and 4:3 capturing on top of this. Please, don't. Just run from a floppy.

Not to mention what I said before - most people won't run this from their real system anyway, until someone comes up with a WHDLoad patch for given demo, because 99% of the world's A1200 are expanded to oblivion. I still think a stock 1200 is a fantasy console, for the challenge's sake.

I guess the bottom line for all what I wrote above - if you want to run from the HDD in the compo, you obviously can. Just make your entry also work with the accelerator. OR you really target the stock system, and then make it work from a floppy disk, which is also fine. Is this really such a big ask, that I'm way off with my expectations?

@Charlie:
You just wrote a pretty accurate elaboration of what I had in mind when I used the word "hassle". :)

Come to think of it, what I really want with this challenge is to pay homage to the 1993-1994 era of vanilla A1200 demos. While I have had the same thought as Hellfire, that it could be nice to stream lots of data from HD (and also agree that a HD can be considered part of a traditional "stock" config), such a setup is not really representative of the demos of that era. As mentioned earlier, demos requiring HD were really the exception. Most were either single-file or came on at most 3-4 floppies.

I understand your reservations towards adding a third official compo machine config. But maybe doing so will actually result in the least amount of hassle in the end. Then you can state the requirement that such demos have to run from floppies, and thus it will be clear what is accepted.

Nexus 7 fits on, and runs from, a single floppy. 880k Fast File System should be enough for everyone ;)

Just to be clear: assuming that by "a floppy disk" you mean "a few floppy disks" (just like for A500 demos), I think this is perfectly reasonable.

I always thought, that the "art" part of the demoscene wasn't only about the technical art, but the creative art as well

One issue with hard drives is that each partition eats a bit of memory. Booting from floppy could be an advantage, since you can then disable all HDD partitions in the early startup menu.

Yes, 100%. Currently technically there's no rule how many disks an entry can be, AFAIR. We always assumed even with 1-2 disk entries, runtime is more of a limiting factor - which was proven true again this year, in an unorthodox fashion.

But anyway, I was thinking in limiting it, just to be very clear what flies and what doesn't. Which would then apply to all entries, regardless of "platform" (OCS/ECS or AGA). We had a number of 2 disk entries already. We might even had an entry with three, but I can't remember... What would be a good number as a limit in your opinion?

If the point is “historical accuracy”, as a viewer: Two. Because most people I knew had an extra disk drive (especially A1200, where Workbench came on five disks), and then you could run without a manual swap :-)

how many multi-disk demos from that era actually work with multiple drives rather than swapping?

I dunno, I didn't have access to many demos at the time. But a large fraction of games did just fine.

Well, 3D Demo 3 is 3 disks, so anything less than that would be a de-facto tightening of the rules. For A500, that's one for pre-loading, one for on-the-fly loading and one for the end part. For A1200 without fastmem, it would be two for pre-loading and one for on-the-fly loading (hence the maximum number of disks that a demo can reasonably take up without needing disk swaps while the demo is running).

More than 3 disks for a demo is rare. That's things like Odyssey (5 disks) and Twisted (4 disks).

Well, as long as you don't go to 11 disks like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, I guess it's fine… I recall there was quite a bit of disk-jockeying there.

50% of the prods were done using copper showdown editor which is - as of now - OCS/ECS only (because vAmiga is OCS/ECS only). At least for this specific compo I would say this was mostly due to tooling and not a general AGA refusal.