Index: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Home > Atari demos

The Atari Demo Scene can probably be traced back to a group called " The Exceptions" (TEX for short) who created a series of music demos (enhanced with a bit of scrolling text and some nice rasters) in 1987. In 1988 the Atari Demo scene really got going with the release of the B.I.G. Demo which was a large collection of music ported from the C64 by Jochen Hippel onto the Atari ST.

Since the B.I.G. demo various crews continued to push the limits of the Atari ST hardware with both clever efficient coding techniques (pre-calculated sprites, table driven calculations etc) as well as utilising undocumented hardware bugs/features (synchron coding, border busting, sync scrolling).

The Union Demo (1989, the first big multi-crew, multi-screen demo)
The Cuddly Demos (1989, The Carebears big splash in the Atari demo scene)
The Decade Demo (1990, by a UK based group called " Inner Circle")
Ooh Crikey Wot a Scorcher (1991, the last by a group of brits known as " The Lost Boys")

Beside the big players, a lot of unknown crews were active during this time, mainly preparing to become game developers, which in fact was the dream job for a lot of demo scene members. Crews like X-Troll for example hadn't released much demos to the public but went straight into developing ST games.

The Atari demo scene started to peter out around 1993 as the popularity of the 16 bit micros was overtaken by the relentless advance of the x86 based PC. Some nostalgic demos have been released since and several demo's have enjoyed revivals running on ST emulators such as STonX and PacifiST or more recently on SainT or STEem.

See Demo Scene

Linkage

A history of the Atari Demo scene [1]

Demoscene

Read more »

<Hide>

Topics: Atari Demos, Atari ST, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800...

Atari STThe Atari ST was a home/ personal computer system released by Atari in 1985. The "ST" allegedly stood for "Sixteen/Thirty-two" which referred to the Motorola 68000's 32-bit internals with 16-bit external buses. Other theories say that ST really stood for	AtariFor the concept in the game of go, see Atari (go term). Atari Inc. is now the name of a French-owned (ex. Infogrames) game software company. The original company Atari was a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles, and personal computers, and it	Atari 2600The Atari 2600 released in 1977, was the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. It was originally known as the Atari VCS for V ideo C omputer S ystem and the name "Atari 2600" was first
Atari 5200The Atari 5200 was a video game console introduced in 1982 by Atari. It was created to compete with systems from Coleco and Mattel. It was both technologically superior and more cost efficient than any console available at that time. The Atari 5200 was, i	Atari 7800The Atari 7800 was a video game console released by Atari. The 7800 was designed to replace the floundering Atari 5200, and to once and for all re-establish Atari's market supremacy against the Intellivision and Colecovision. With this system, Atari addre	Atari JaguarThe Atari Jaguar and the Atari Lynx were the last two Atari systems to be developed, but because Atari did not want any direct involvement in hardware production they were produced by outside contractors. In 1990, Flare Technology (a company formed by Mar
Atari Lynx	Atari demos	Atari 8-bit family
Atari Transputer Workstation	Atari Teenage Riot	Atari BASIC
Atari Panther	Atari Jaguar CD	Atari Games

Non User