Best demo
17 messages in this thread
What's the best demo you've seen? I have the wild copper and laser light
demos and a few more. I am looking for some of this caliber to show to a
friend. Seems there are so many "demos" that just scroll by miles of text
with music.
Many demos don't seem to run on my 2500 either, where they were fine on my
500… any ideas on that too?
Thanks, Rick
Let me try to remember… "Doc" was fairly good, as I recall. "BarBrian"
is the funniest one I've seen by a mile… None of the others really stick
to mind, though. (Wild Copper, of course, you've already mentioned…)
What is Laser Light? I don't think I've seen that one.
–>Steve Bennett
It looks a little like the copper demo, spinning graphics, but goes a
little faster. Wild music with it too. I have "Doc", that seems to work,
but whatever is going in at the top is jumbled. Also, the objects really
flicker alot. Have to check out barbrian! Rick
Steve, what's the trick to getting BarBrian to run? I've tried it with
and without NoFastMem on a 2000 and I get nowhere. It pops up with a
graphic that slides up onto the screen, and a voice from the left speaker
says "prepare to die". After that, it does! Nothing I do gets a reaction.
Also, I can't get MMM.ARC and CBC.ARC to run without a trip to the Guru,
with or without NoFastMem. Any tips there?
Finally, you mention Wild Copper — I haven't found that one. Do you
know if it's online? (I have a real weakness for that stuff, so I
appreciate any assist you can offer!)
=Tom=
I've run BarBrian with no trouble using NoFastMem, so I'm not sure what the
problem is. Unless… You don't by any chance have the new Fatter Agnus,
do you? I only have 512K chip mem in my machine.
As for Wild Copper, I don't think it's online. Some of the European
demos we've not posted in the past due to excessive offensive language in
the scrolltext, and I think the one part of the Wild Copper demo (there are
four…) which did get uploaded was one of these. It's part of a lot of
disk collections, though. Impressive indeed, even if a bit colorful in
language. (Although one of the four demos doesn't run very well at all on a
non-PAL machine…)
–>Steve Bennett
Yep, you guessed right on the Agnus — I've got the 1 meg version. But
I've got 1.5 megs of RAM, so there's still the usual 512k of chip mem that
most of that stuff looks for. You think maybe BarBrian is specific to
WorkBench 1.2?
That's a drag about the language in those demos — no wonder there
aren't more of 'em online! Oh, and I've tried MMM.ARC and CBC.ARC with
every memory arrangement I can think of. One or the other even makes it to
the first screen and then locks up before calling the Guru. It's real
frustrating! I know you guys wouldn't post 'em if they didn't work, so I'm
bound and determined to find a way to get 'em to work.
Betty Clay was gonna dig up a PAL/NTSC utility from one of the Fish
disks and post it — maybe that'll do the trick. 🙂
=Tom=
Hmmn… It *could*, I suppose, be a difference between KS 1.3 and 1.2, but
I rather doubt it, as the only real change was the autoboot stuff. I
suspect much more the 1M Agnus as a more likely culprit. (I wonder if
there's a way to make a 1M Agnus look like a 512K Agnus through software?)
–>Steve Bennett
I was wondering that too. But let me ask in a line by itself for
emphasis:
HOW DO I GET MMM.ARC AND CBC.ARC FROM LIBRARY 7 TO RUN? Does anyone
know? Does it require a specific operating environment or special hardware?
If you're the wrong sysop to ask please refer me to one that's had a
chance to mess with 'em. If it'll help, you can see my 2 previous messages
in this thread on the subject <grin>! Thanks.
As I recall ALL of the various demos (those two included) would run just
fine from CLI. About half of them required NoFastMem to be run. All of
them have been run on an A2000 with Kickstart 1.2 in ROM, Workbench 1.3
running, and the 512K Agnus. Aside from that, I dunno how to help out with
those any further. I'll try them again just to see if somehow the files
have been corrupted in any way. (I doubt it, though… You would have
seen a CRC error when unARCing them…)
–>Steve Bennett
Okay, here's the scoop. CBC doesn't require nofastmem. In fact, it runs
just fine on my A2000 with 2 Meg Fast, 512K chip, and 512K pseudo-fast,
right off the hard disk. If you can't get it running it's either the 1M
Agnus (quite possibly, but it would need to be really weird to do that,
unless you have the 1M Agnus and NO fast mem… It might require fast mem),
the 1.3 Kickstart ROM (really unlikely, IMHO, but who knows…), or you
have a 68020/30 you didn't mention to me… <grin>
MMM, on the other hand, requires NoFastRam (it comes with a program
called NOF which does basically the same thing, but I prefer using the real
NoFastRam…) to run. It also won't run off my hard disk. (Whether this
is due to background programs causing trouble, or it needs to run off a
floppy, I'm not sure…) I was able to run it by putting it on a floppy,
booting off a vanilla 1.3 workbench floppy, running NoFastMem off of the
workbench disk, entering the shell, and typing "MMM". There were a few
sound glitches late in the demo, but otherwise it ran just fine.
You might also try the vanilla 1.3 disk with CBC. Perhaps your startup
has something which interferes with it, which my startup doesn't have.
–>Steve Bennett
Excellent! You've given me hope, guy. 🙂 I've got a stock 68000 CPU,
but I had been running both MMM & CBC from the HD. I'll try it from a
floppy with a bare-bones boot and check it out.
I sure do appreciate your taking the time to mess with it. BTW, I share
your sentiments about the NOF utility — it may be an earlier version of
the NoFastMem release. I checked it out in a text reader (MuchMore,
which'll display things real well) and the two were similar except that
NoFastMem was bigger. I bet it has better error trapping, at least.
Anyhoo, I do have the 1.3 KS ROM, but I'll take a shot at 'em again.
Thanks! (BTW, I'll try BarBrian from a floppy too, just for kicks — maybe
I can get it fired up as well.)
=Tom=
If you run the Wild Copper demo with the Palbooter program the first demo
works just fine And you can see the whole thing.
R Niklos
I've never heard of Palbooter… Sounds like a nice program to have,
though…
–>Steve Bennett
Russ, I've been trying like crazy to find something like Palbooter. Is
it a commercial program or shareware? If it's shareware, would you be
willing to upload it?
=Tom=
Ok I'll upload it. It was put together by a friend of mine using a few PD
programs. It will let you boot your machine in PAL (with SuperAgnes only).
It also has a bunch of other options.
R. Niklos
Outstanding, Russ! I'll be counting the seconds. Heh, heh. Seriously, it
might help with some demos, etc. I've been looking at.
=Tom=
Some of MY favorites, besides the ones you & Steve mention, are (in no
special order): X-Rayz, SunRiders, Alcatraz, Alien, HellDemo, and
Bollintro. In the case of HellDemo and the like, not necessarily for the
subject matter — but the graphics techniques and the music are excellent.
Bollintro is an interactive one where you can change a multiplexed pattern
of spheres. Permagrin is neat, too, but it's graphics only (no tunes) and
as far as I know you have to reboot the machine to quit (although it'll
multitask okay it takes a good bit of CPU time). Ever hear of any of those?
Probably some of 'em are here in the libraries somewhere, I dunno. There's
a demo for a game called FutureWars that I saw, too, that's excellent.
=Tom=