NVScene 2014 Session: Demo effects on the classic Amiga (Aske Simon Christensen)

Note: this recording is of questionable audio and video quality, however: it's the only one we have of this session, therefore we decided to make it available anyway - we hope you enjoy it! Slides available for download at https://files.scene.org/view/parties/... This talk will take the audience 25 years back in time to the childhood of real-time graphics. We will take a technical dive into the Amiga graphics hardware to discover how a machine of such modest computational power could produce such amazing graphical effects for its time. We will look at several classical demo effects and discuss how they were achieved. Aske Simon Christensen has been coding demo effects on the Amiga since 1992 and on the PC since 2005. He has a strong fascination of size-limited demos and is one of the authors of the Crinkler compression tool, which is widely used in the demoscene for compressing 4-kilobyte intros. Professionally, he has a PhD in computer science and has worked for ARM building the shader compiler for the ARM Mali series of GPUs. He is currently employed in the bioinformatics industry.