psteffn@CATICSUF.CSUFRESNO.EDU (Paul Steffn) (06/24/91)
8What's with this 'hahahahahahahahahahaha' stuff? Do you perhaps disagree
that C is not the best way to interact with the amiga coprocessor? You
are NOT much of a programmer then. You don't have ANY appreciation of
the Amiga video hardware by just accessing it through system calls
until you actually work with it directly. No offence to any of the
Badge graphics demo programmers but let's be real! Take a look at any
of those C graphics routines and then take a look at Shining Vector
Exterminators or Quartex Substance [or CryptoBurners Seventh October
or Crusaders Tuff Enuf] demos. If you can't tell the difference, you
might as well be sitting in front of an PC with a CGA card.
I'm an assembly programmer and I work alot with low-level programming
on both the ST and Amiga. A friend and I are hoping to put out a
mega demo [the first produced in the USA, perhaps?!] and even looking
forward to somehow having both an ST and Amiga loader on the same disk
that shares graphics and sound data [why not?! most demos are only 5%
program code and 95% graphics and sound data]. If anyone wants to
talk demo programming on either computer, you can correspond with
me via my e-mail address. I'd like to get in touch with people who
are interested in programming or even just demo watching.. I have
no way of accessing ab20 right now but I have about 70 disks of
just demos.
If you want to get started with demo coding, I think it is really best
to also know a bit about electronics. You can really go along way if
you understand how the blitter and copper are interfaced and how the
DMA works. Doing a good demo requires keeping track of how many cpu
cycles each routine takes and how many you have before each vblank.
It's much more advanced than programming in C. My personal favorite
assembler is ASMone which is identical to Seka in it's setup but it
has been infinitely improved. It has a built in debugger and monitor
and an impressive text editor.
If anyone wants to correspond, I'd be happy to chat...
Paul Steffen
psteffn@caticsuf.csufresno.edu