Thanks to Warp, I spent most of my morning looking at old Amiga demos.

In particular, I remember as a young teenager reading a review of a demo 
named "Jesus on Es" by LSD. The reviewer clearly rated it extremely 
highly. I always dreamed that one day, I'd get to see this apparently 
legendary demo.

Well, about a year ago, I discovered an online video file of the demo. 
(Presumably made using a TV digitiser.) It's compressed to hell, so some 
of the visual effects don't come out very well. I'm also fairly sure 
some of the shorts aren't that jerky on a real Amiga. [Because I've seen 
other programs do it smoothly on the same hardware.]

The results of watching this were... well, interesting. The demo is 
pretty tame, technically. It doesn't "do" all that much. In fact, the 
visuals quickly become downright repetative. But the music... damn, they 
just don't *make* music like that any more! I can remember when you used 
to be able to go into shops and *buy* music like this. But alas, rave 
music is now unspeakably unfasionable.

Damnit, I *like* rave music! :-(

Of course, there's rave music and there's rave music. Sometimes all you 
get is distorted sounds and pointless audio samples over a repetative 
beat. And sometimes you get something really enjoyable to listen to. I 
can't define exactly what the difference is - surely if I could, I'd be 
very rich by now! But let me put it this way: the music to this demo is 
the good stuff.

Yes, it sounds crunchy and low-tech. But that's how rave music is often 
meant to sound, so the Amiga's hardware is no real limitation here. Heh, 
back when rave music was actually popular, the idea that you could make 
it with a mere home computer didn't seem so ridiculous. I mean, this 
demo pumps out high-wattage excitement almost as good as any CD you 
could buy in the shops at the time. (Count how many Prodigy samples you 
can hear...)

So yeah, the demo doesn't do very much. But what it does, it does with 
style. It's only throwing some pixels round and playing back some 
samples, but the overall effect is quite good. I sat for a full 30 
minutes watching this thing. The visuals are a little poor in places and 
could *really* do with more variety. But the rest is really quite good...

I did wonder a little why the reviewer liked this demo so much. And then 
I found videos of some *other* Amiga demos - some much newer. Although 
many were significantly technically superior, few were as much fun to 
watch, and almost none had decent music. It is kind of impressive to see 
realtime 3D lightsourcing and texture mapping on a machine with an 8 MHz 
CPU and no FPU, but... beyond being technically impressive, most of the 
demos are boring to watch.

Note: Jesus on Es fits on 2 double-density floppies. (DD = the one 
*before* HD. Holds about 720 KB or something, NOT 1.44 MB.) Running it 
*requires* two physical disk drives, and a specific variant of Amiga. I 
am almost 100% certain my Amiga won't run it - too many modifications.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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