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 (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")
The Atari demo scene started to peter out around 1993 as the popularity of the 16 bit micro's was overtaken by the relentless advance of the x86 based PC. Some nostalgic demo's have been released since and several demo's have enjoyed revivals running on ST emulators such as STonX and PacifiST.
See Demo Scene
- A history of the Atari Demo scene [1] (http://wwwbrauer.in.tum.de/~brandtf/ataridemos.html)