I've always been a computer geek, even at the time I didn't have any computer at all. I think it all started back in 1986 when I occasionally read the German "64er-Magazin" and was fascinated by those machines that entirely obeyed you (well.. at least today ;-)) So I frequently rushed into the computer department of a local store and sat before one of the C128 they had there and tried some BASIC.
Some months later, I could convince my parents to buy a C128D. I wrote some small games and basically played around with the machine, nothing spectacular. The disk drive was out of order, however. It worked, but after writing a disk 10 times or so, the disk was entirely destroyed. First we all thought this was some mistake caused by ourselves, but later I realized that this was really a hardware failure. The guys from the computer stores were *so sorry* that they couldn't find it but required giant repair fees about 4 or 5 times. So we bought another C128, this time without a 'D'. I even succeeded in learning some Assembler, but this was still a bit too hard for me (it was terrible to do 3 branch commands in order to test for a "lower-than" condition on a 6502).
Nevertheless, it was around this time that I got to know a guy whose real name was Florian (later known under handles such as "Accomplice", "Herr Sol", "Sol"). We used to go to the same class in school, where we were a group of three boys owning a computer. I can remember we were exchanging self-created Boulder Dash levels for some weeks -- on paper, because Florian and the third one had Atari machines.
I don't know why, but in August 1990, I suddenly had a brand new A500 on my table, and wow was it cool. I fiddled a bit with AmigaBASIC, played lots of games and learned about the machine. I admit, I also had some problems with the Lamer Exterminator virus, I can remember that one. Around that time I still frequently visited some computer stores and one day I met a person hacking eagerly on a A1000, coding some kind of crack intro. The guy called himself TAP, which meant something like The Allied Power or similar. This was a very amazing experience for me which convinced me to buy a book about MC68000 Assembler and start with the real thing. I met him again some months later, telling him proudly I have started coding, but that was all of it -- I never saw him again. Without him, you wouldn't read this text, I guess.
On the Amiga, I began programming stuff that used OS calls, but later, I switched to hardware register programming (which was, back then, the only possibility to create real demos -- nowadays, with fast computers, and non-standard hardware, using the OS is easier). My first "demo" coding projects were done under the name MCS (meaning: Magic Cracking Service - wow). I remember that I used this pseudonym on the C128, too. However, nothing got cracked and much less got released, because I didn't have any serious scene contacts -- just some local friends. Boy, was that a hard time -- most of them had Atari ST's, and 1990 was still the time where not all of them had realized that the Amiga was indeed the machine that ruled.
Well, some days or so later, I realized that I couldn't crack and made a new group with Florian called MDS which meant Magic Demo Service. Not better either, but I really built some intros with line vectors and stars routines and the copper bar equalizers which were so modern in demos at that time. The earliest one I still have is from December 1990. I called myself "Dagobert", Florian was "The Undertaker". Florian stuck to drawing graphics, whereas I was active in all the three most important areas of scene work: coding, music and graphics.
We kept doing those funny things for about one year, and at the end of 1991, we changed our group name to Shape and released a music disk. "Released" is the wrong term, however, since we copied it to only one friend, who didn't have any contacts on his own. During this year, I became active buying demos from PD distributors. I spent quite a lot of money on buying scene stuff, but I do not regret this. The last order was due to a big advertisement which announced all the good stuff from the Party 1991, the first really big scene party. Wow, that stuff was really good!
In the beginning of 1992, we chose completely new names: Raw Style and Accomplice from the group Accooon (yes, three o's since we wanted something different). I wonder how my handle sounds to a native English speaker. At least to me it sounds a little bit odd today, but it's too late for a change anyway.
At that time, I started to write to some people whose addresses I found in disk mags. That was the way I got to know Killraven/Paradise, Howie/Laserdance and Scope/Balance. When we released our first intro "Odds & Ends" which was no more a funny (that means bad) production but quite state-of-the-art, we were asked to join Paradise. And that was the real beginning of our scene career.
The Party 2 at Christmas 1992 was the first scene party we ever attended. I met some of my contacts, mostly out of my own group, and had a great time sleeping on my chair while the demo competition -- well, admittedly not the whole one, but some demos didn't quite reach my consciousness.
The demo scene is what I lived for in my early days as a programmer.
I didn't care much about other forms of programming and merely kept
hacking more or less nice effects, not really having a clue about
structured programming and software design. Besides coding, I also
did a lot of music using various tracker programs, and I can't really
tell which of both had the higher priority at that time.
Anyway, in the following years, I was a member of several known
(note the clever avoidance of the term "famous") groups, such as
Paradise, Infect, Alcatraz, Essence, Jetset, Complex and Polka
Brothers. I found much inspiration, intellectual challenge, very
interesting people (some of which are good friends today) and a deep
understanding of 68k Assembly ;-). In the later years,
starting with 1994 or so, I also became interested in more serious
application programming and started my AGAiff and ProNET projects, both of which have become
useful pieces of software, accepted and used by a wide range of
people. But this is not really the topic of this page, so let's
continue with the demo scene...
Since January 1995, I've been a member of Lego, and that's where I'll
stay the rest of my scene life (I'm getting old, you know
;-)). I haven't been doing any demo coding for quite some
time now, but I've been one of the main organizers of the mekka & symposium parties until 2002,
after which this party series has been discontinued. I joined the
Symposium team in 1995, which fusioned with the Mekka team in late
1996 - a perfect combination which had been organizing Germany's best
and largest annual scene party ever since.
Today, I can also proudly call myself a Farbrausch member, even though I haven't been involved in the famous The Product (fr-08) intro; but this group is a friendship thing anyway, and our members all live in Hamburg or the rest of Northern Germany, too.
The only software project related to the demo scene that I'm still more or less actively working on is the Un*x music tracking software SoundTracker.
Below is a nearly complete list of all intros and demos I've ever
released, in reverse-chronological order. I'm saying "nearly
complete", because I can remember that I made a lot of crack intros
(for Crystal, Interpol and some other groups), but I don't know if
they ever got released or not. If possible, I've added links to the
respective pouët.net entries, and
download links. The older productions will probably crash on anything
else than a standard A500. But then again, you could use UAE - in fact, that's the
tool I've used to generate the snapshots of the non-AGA Amiga demos below.
| Farbrausch | fr-minus-06: Ghetto Rocker
(pouët.net)
Released at Breakpoint 2003. A fun production (yes, really, some people didn't understand this) based on an Arte TV (?) documentary about Booty / Ghetto Tech music. The music is based on the second part of the Goldrausch track which was left out in fr-09 for lack of time. |
| Farbrausch | fr-09: Goldrausch
(pouët.net)
Released on Takeover 2001. I made the music for this PC fun demo on The Party 2000, using my own SoundTracker software. |
| Lego | Cosmonautic Jazz
(pouët.net)
(Aminet)
Released on Mekka & Symposium 1998, 7th place in the Amiga demo competition. This is a project which we had been working on since 1995! Needless to say that it turned out completely different than originally planned. And instead of a "thank you" that you actually read this far, I will tell you how to get to the really cool hidden part: Simply press both mouse buttons in the end scroller! |
| Lego | MS98 Invitation
Released on The Party VII (40K competition), and inspired by an old Paranoimia crack intro. Old-school seems to be a trend now... The cool music was done by Pink/Abyss and is a C64 conversion of the Savage tune. This intro works on all Amigas with at least 512K of memory. |
| Lego |
Loading
(pouët.net)
(Aminet)
There was this Friday evening in July 1997 when Ronny/TLS, Decca and me met at Decca's place. There were these two modules that Ronny had on his hard disk, and he thought they would never gonna be released. There was this cool intro sequence which was made for Cosmonautic Jazz a year ago and never released (designed by Sire). And there was this cool idea Herr Sol had some time back to create an intro called Loading. All this was quickly combined into this spectacular release. |
| Elke |
Toilet Flush EP
(Aminet)
A music disk (May 1997); the story goes like this: Ronny and me made a cute techno module and sent it to some other guys on IRC. We were very proud to receive nine remixes, four from the famous Jormas! All this was put together (again) in a hurry by me. So it's probably not perfect, but in any case worth a look if you are into serious Techno. |
| Lego & Teklords | Symposium & Mekka '97
Invitation Intro
Released on The Party VI (27th to 29th Dec-96). Knowing that it had to be finished for The Party VI, Ronny/Teklords, Herr Sol/Lego and me (Raw Style/Lego) took our Amigas five days before and worked on this intro, which has probably got a very new stylish design. It contains everything you must know about Symposium & Mekka '97. |
| Various | Symposium '96 Invitation
Demo
Released on 28-Feb-96. Crash/Polka Brothers, Azure/Bizarre Arts and Fuben/Oxyron gave me their routines on a SCALA meeting, and I put them together, designed all the stuff and coded the diskmag part (which is the only part which runs on every machine, by the way ;-)). Herr Sol made most of the cool textures and clip arts. Basically this intro sucks: the design is ugly and the music isn't better either. |
| Lego | Fawn Tear
(ftp.amigascne.org)
(download the soundtrack)
Released on 03-Oct-95. A demo without stunning effects, but lots of colorcycling and stretching and bending graphics. Definitely psychedelic, and my absolutely favourite. Sire did a great work designing all the patterns! I can remember that this intro was finished in quite a hurry on a Wednesday, because the next day I had to go to the army (my first day); so it's a kind of good-bye-to-the-scene intro ;) |
| Lego |
Boom
(pouët.net)
(ftp.amigascne.org)
Released on the BlackBox Symposium 1995, 22th April. A very nice 64K intro with a quite cool Voxelspace engine which runs in 80x128, 12bit true color and 25 fps even on a standard A1200 without FastMem!. Made the first place at the intro competition ;) At this time I was regular user of the BlackBox BBS and we got to know the BlackBox Symposium organizers. In the course of events we organized one of the best German parties for '96. |
| Ben.E and Raw Style | Roy Black,
Redemption, Hartcorevibes
Released in April 1995. Absolutely useless intros, absolutely without sense for anyone but ourselves. All three done in one week. Try to get them! ;-) yEAH kEWL eLITE rOOLEZZZZ |
| Mainzelmännchen | Superunknown Released on 5-Feb-1995. A fun production of some guys from Hamburg: Crash, Tron, Chaos and some other S.C.A.L.A boys. As opposed to the other list entries, this demo does not feature code by me -- I only made the music (and I have absolutely no reason to be proud of it) |
| Complex |
PeeWee
(pouët.net)
Released in June 1994. My first big one-file demo. Sphere mapping, Voxelspace, Rotating Zoomer. That's it. It once was on place 11 in the Eurocharts. It was around this time that I got to know a lot of prominent sceners in Hamburg like for example Crash of Polka Brothers and Chaos and Tron from Sanity. Well, I already knew Crash a bit longer, otherwise this wouldn't have been a Complex release ;-) |
| Jetset | Armageddon
(pouët.net)
(ftp.amigascne.org [original DMS])
(Aminet [fixed one-file version])
Released on 18-Feb-94. A trackmo for ECS Amigas; I later released a one-filed and Enforcer fixed version for newer amigas. Already found the hidden part? Watch the demo and wait one minute after the end! I believe this is the most famous production of mine. That's at least the feeling I have after having got to know a lot of people on IRC. blast, BTW, was the one who urged me to make the one-file fix. When watched with UAE 0.6.9, this demo crashes at the part when the wobble-blenk vector should come. I have no clue why, tho... |
| Jetset | Kotzflash
(ftp.amigascne.org)
Released in January 1994. Very nice Packmenu, two releases were made, then Stearo kind of left the scene. Stearo, we had a great time, thanks for all you showed me! |
| Desire | Prime Time
A Packmenu which I coded for Agony/Desire aka Paragon. I've not been a member of that group. The first production coded on my new A1200 and thus the first production fully compatible to that computer! ;-) |
| Paradise | Total Orgasm
Another Packmenu, this time in "Holzbein-Design", with a very cool routine which dot-morphs between two logos, great design (IMHO). I don't know whether it has been released or not, it couldn't have been more than one issue. I'm really sorry about that! |
| Paradise | Imitiertes Holzbein
(pouët.net)
(download gzip'ed ADF)
A "Halber Hoden Dezign" Production. Released on 17-Apr-1993. I'm very proud of this thing, because it's got a very "stylish" design and music. Strange intro... great! The very first release I could really be proud of, since it contains some up-to-date coding, as opposed to my previous releases. Fucks up on everything that is not an original A500, so don't try it on an emulator :-) |
| Infect | Turbo Ripper Intro This intro, as well as the newest version of Infect's Turbo Ripper, has been released on The Party II. It contains a routine of mine, but I was not credited. Fuck you for that, have you been very angry that I was only two weeks in your group? The routine can be seen in a later fun production of mine, Roy Black. |
| Paradise | Orgasm Producer A Packmenu, which was orginally made for Stearo, but instead was then released by Killraven two times in his Magical Zone series. Quickly forgotten because not very good. You definitely don't want to see a screenshot. |
| Paradise | Balistro
(ftp.amigascne.org)
Released in October 1992. My second release ever, and... boooy is it bad ;-). I wonder why I haven't been kicked out of Paradise, I guess it's because all the members have been so nice to everybody. Hi Nose, Tedric, Matt, Sam, all the others... |
| Accooon | Odds and Ends
Released on 20-Jun-1992. This was my very first public production, a cooperation between a guy now called Herr Sol / Lego and me. Shortly after this, we joined the group Paradise. Our addresses were mentioned in the intro and actually one coder, who was a member of Vision Factory, wrote a letter to me a month later, stating that he wanted to join. Can you imagine how we freaked out? Yes, ROGer, still remembering you! |
