1373: Steem-Powered

Although I grew up with the Atari 8-bit range of computers, some of my fondest early memories of using computers and playing games relate to that range’s successor: the Atari ST. Unlike the 8-bit range, the ST was a 16-bit machine with an 8MHz processor, either 512K or 1MB of memory, support for MIDI, hard drives and floppy disks that held up to 720K of information. It was a huge leap over the 8-bit systems in many ways — though it did suffer from an appalling soundchip that actually sounded worse than the 8-bit range’s POKEY chip in the hands of anyone other than the most skilled chiptune musicians.

I had a sudden urge to revisit some old ST memories the other day, prompted partly by a discussion with Andie on the subject of chemistry, of all things. (Andie’s in hospital right now, if you didn’t know, so discussions naturally turn to vaguely medicine- and science-related things on occasion.) Our discussion caused me to randomly remember an old Atari ST puzzle game from Psygnosis and Blue Byte called Atomino in which you had to create molecules by attaching atoms to one another and not leaving any… err… connecty bits (I’m not a chemist!) dangling loose. Remembering turned into downloading the Steem emulator and a copy of the game just to see if it held up. And it does!

I played Atomino for a bit until the emulation crashed (I think it was more a problem with the dodgy pirate disk image rather than the emulator itself) and then suddenly remembered a few other things — specifically, a few entries from the demoscene that I used to enjoy indulging in on occasion.

The demoscene is an odd old beast when you think about it, but it was a popular movement that, I believe, is still going on today. For the uninitiated, a demo disk was exactly what it sounds like: it was something you booted up when you wanted to demonstrate what your computer was capable of. More often than not, said demos were technically impressive in some way — they might use graphical trickery to get more than the normal 16 colours on screen, for example, or they might show off by putting graphics in places where it was normally “impossible” for the ST to render graphics. They’d often have good music, demonstrating skilled chiptune artists’ mastery of the ST’s crappy three-channel sound chip, and they were also often notable for quite how much stuff they fit onto a single disk.

One demo I remember particularly fondly — and which I successfully found a disk image of, so am enjoying while I type this out — was called The B.I.G. Demo. I can’t remember why we had a copy with our original computer — chances are it was one of the disks acquired via my dad and brother’s attendance at the local “computer club” (actually more of a local piracy swap meet — everyone was at it in the ’80s and early ’90s) that adorned the several big boxes of 3.5-inch floppy disks we had for the ST.

Anyway, The B.I.G. Demo was pretty neat. It wasn’t the absolute flashiest demo I’ve ever seen, but it was cool. It had graphics in the borders, it had 256-colour visuals, and it had renditions of a wide variety of music from the 8-bit era. In fact, the main point of the demo was to act as a jukebox, providing access to a huge number of C64 classics in glorious ST-o-phonics. There was also a “Digital Department” menu that loaded separately and included digitised (more than likely MOD file-based) renditions of a number of the same tracks. Aside from this, though, everything in The B.I.G. Demo was loaded into the ST’s memory, meaning no loading breaks whatsoever — not bad for a 512K machine.

One of the most interesting things about many of these demos was the scrolling text that inevitably adorned them. In many cases, the length of the scrolling message in the demo was the source of considerable bragging rights for the developers — not an unreasonable boast, given that when you only have 720KB tops to play with on a double-sided ST disk, even a short bit of text can and will eat into that space significantly.

The B.I.G. Demo had a whole bunch of scrolling messages, including one on the main screen that bragged about its lower border artwork, and the demo’s crowning glory, the B.I.G. Scroller. This was quite simply a scrolling message that whizzed past in large print and would make you quite dizzy if you watched it for more than a few minutes at a time, but reading the whole thing would take you a significant amount of time. I can’t remember a lot of the content from the B.I.G. Scroller (and haven’t tried to read it since re-downloading the demo), but more often than not these “scrolltexts” took the form of stream-of-consciousness ramblings from one of the demo’s creators, and were often quite interesting to read. In many ways, I guess they were a precursor to stream-of-consciousness blogging, and they’re certainly an artifact that is very distinctive to the late ’80s and early ’90s.

I haven’t kept up on the demoscene since I was a daily user of the Atari ST but I’m sure this sort of thing is still going on. I wonder how long the longest scrolltext is today?