Very early Archimedes Demos

[aidanthegasman]

I'm going back a long way for this one.
When my high school got its first Archimedes, I remember seeing some demos which made my jaw drop at the time.
One was an animation of a Union Jack flag, moving in the wind, using light-shaded filled 3D polygons, and programmed by David Braben (1987). I've managed to trace that one: if anyone wants a copy, please let me know.
Another was a window which opened on the desktop. It contained a filled-3D polygon render of the word "Euclid", rotating in real time. If anyone has a copy of that, I'd love to see it again. We all had fun opening multiple copies of it until the processor was slowed right down. Happy days.
A final one was a moving 3D demo as if you were moving through a town. I remember roads and lampposts and possibly buildings. Sorry to not have more details.
If anyone knows where I could get hold of these early Archimedes demos, I would love to see them again, just for a trip down memory lane. Or if there are any others which were released around that time, it would be fascinating to see them too.
Many thanks in advance,
Aidan.

[helpful]

Some Euclid film files linked from here - https://rougol.jellybaby.net/meetings/2020/jun.html

[aidanthegasman]

Thanks for that link, Helpful. I searched through all the films. The Euclid one is there! It's a different colour from the one I remember, which seemed to be beige, but otherwise it's the right one. I had thought that the Euclid film was rendered in real-time rather than being a film loop, but of course my memory is so fallible that it's quite possible I'm wrong.
The only other one I seem to remember is the Newton's Cradle one, although there was a similar animation on the Amiga, so perhaps I'm getting mixed up.

[ChrisB]

The newton's cradle one was (I think) a demo for Claire's "Render Bender" ray tracer. You can see pictures of it on the box cover here:

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/ ... er-Bender/

The Flag demos (There were some with multiple flags) were real time as there were keys to manipulate the flag.

edit - Seems they are here:
viewtopic.php?p=73987#p73987

[acorn_fan]

The only demo I can think of moving through a city is Liquid Dreams - black background and white dots forming buildings, roads, etc? I've got it somewhere if that sounds like the one.

[Dave Footitt]

ArmAxess did one with a city, is that perhaps?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFexL64Cy14

[SarahWalker]

Ghastly Colours A Go Go (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPQRF1KiHmk) has roads, lampposts and buildings. It's not exactly 'early' though!

[mark71]

In the efforts to preserve the contents of my many Floppy Discs i bought 30 odd years a go there are two discs bought from Beebug with my then as new A3000, Clares Demo Disc Sound and Music and a Animation Disc.

Attached is the zip file containing the HFE's of these discs. has the 3D Face demo and a City demo along with some early Ray tracing.

To use you will need a RiscOS2 machine or Arculator running RiscOS2, as wont run otherwise.

[Pernod]

In the efforts to preserve the contents of my many Floppy Discs i bought 30 odd years a go there are two discs bought from Beebug with my then as new A3000, Clares Demo Disc Sound and Music and a Animation Disc.

Nice, can you also post a photo of the disc labels for reference?

[IanJeffray]

Assuming these aren't copy protected, can we get them in some more accessible format than HFE ?
(Or, how do "open" an HFE image without a lot of what looks like fuss and bother)

The colours on the screenshots here look a little mangled, so I'd like to run them to check if it's just a screenshotting issue, or the roriginals were this poor

[Pernod]

Assuming these aren't copy protected, can we get them in some more accessible format than HFE ?
(Or, how do "open" an HFE image without a lot of what looks like fuss and bother)

Export them as 'RAW sector file format' using HxCFloppyEmulator from http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emu ... l#download

[IanJeffray]

Assuming these aren't copy protected, can we get them in some more accessible format than HFE ?
(Or, how do "open" an HFE image without a lot of what looks like fuss and bother)

Export them as 'RAW sector file format' using HxCFloppyEmulator from http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_emu ... l#download

See the bit where I said "without a lot of what looks like fuss and bother". I find it very frustrating that people are using increasingly more and weird formats for posting stuff.

[mark71]

Assuming these aren't copy protected, can we get them in some more accessible format than HFE ?
(Or, how do "open" an HFE image without a lot of what looks like fuss and bother)

The colours on the screenshots here look a little mangled, so I'd like to run them to check if it's just a screenshotting issue, or the roriginals were this poor

The screenshots was taken using snip in Windows 10 with Arculator running the demo. Arculator and RPCemu can read HFE directly as it will keep any copy protection after Greaseweazleing.

Will export them as img, and rename it as adf in HxC.

[IanJeffray]

Arculator and RPCemu can read HFE directly

Well that's impressive! I got the first disc to run but the 2nd bailed with "Undefined font colour" which is amusing - will poke later. [EDIT: Runs fine with RISC OS 2]

What I'm curious about is that the R,G,B ramps have horrible banding in which surely can't be as originally rendered on real hardware -- I see the same as the screenshots with Arculator though - yuk!

[mark71]

In the efforts to preserve the contents of my many Floppy Discs i bought 30 odd years a go there are two discs bought from Beebug with my then as new A3000, Clares Demo Disc Sound and Music and a Animation Disc.

Nice, can you also post a photo of the disc labels for reference?

[aidanthegasman]

Just a reply to you all.

First, thanks to David for the ArmAxess demo; that's not the one.
And thanks also to Sarah for the Ghastly Colours a Go-Go demo; that's not it either.

But amazing thanks to Mark! Those are the demos! I remember the ray-traced desk-lamp! I remember that spinning face. I even remember the ray-traced animations (Newton's Cradle and Crystal Gallery!). They run perfectly under Arculator.

The vector city is exactly as I remember it; ironically it's the least impressive of the demos. Although it has a faster frame rate and more objects than (say) Cholo or Elite, it just doesn't seem to demonstrate any capability that (say) a quicker, more colourful Beeb couldn't do.

My thanks to all of you who posted, and who took this request seriously.

I only have one remaining request, Mark, and that's if you could please convert those HFE discs to ADFs. Much as it's fun to run Arculator, my "main" Archimedes is ArcEm running under RiscOS on my Raspberry Pi, and it needs ADF files.

[philpem]

With the greatest respect -- if you can run ArcEm, you can download and run HxC and convert the files in less time than it would take to ask someone else to do it for you! Give a man a fish and all that ...

Or you could switch to Arculator, which supports HFE files and is at least still being maintained ... ArcEm hasn't seen a release since 2017 ...

[mark71]

Just a reply to you all.

First, thanks to David for the ArmAxess demo; that's not the one.
And thanks also to Sarah for the Ghastly Colours a Go-Go demo; that's not it either.

But amazing thanks to Mark! Those are the demos! I remember the ray-traced desk-lamp! I remember that spinning face. I even remember the ray-traced animations (Newton's Cradle and Crystal Gallery!). They run perfectly under Arculator.

The vector city is exactly as I remember it; ironically it's the least impressive of the demos. Although it has a faster frame rate and more objects than (say) Cholo or Elite, it just doesn't seem to demonstrate any capability that (say) a quicker, more colourful Beeb couldn't do.

My thanks to all of you who posted, and who took this request seriously.

I only have one remaining request, Mark, and that's if you could please convert those HFE discs to ADFs. Much as it's fun to run Arculator, my "main" Archimedes is ArcEm running under RiscOS on my Raspberry Pi, and it needs ADF files.

Hi Aidan

By popular request the adf files, not sure if the will work as not sure if there was some copy protection on them or not. Glad it brought back some memories, remember back in the day the running it for the first time, then getting annoyed when i upgrade to RiscOS 3 and it wouldnt anymore...... backwards compatibility on RiscOS has always been a bug bare....

Mark

[aidanthegasman]

Hi Mark.
Thank you very much indeed for doing this. Much appreciated.

To Philpem,
Thanks for telling me about HxC; I don't know anything about it, so if you could point me to a link or some other source, I'd be very grateful to learn how to do my own fishing!
I use ArcEm because I like to use my RISCOS Pi to emulate the Beeb and the Archimedes. I understand that I could do both of those things under Linux, but I prefer to use RISCOS.
FWIW, I have been a user of Arculator under Windows for some years, and I'm delighted with the latest upgrade which adds much more functionality.
Cheers.

[maniacminer]

Arculator and RPCemu can read HFE directly

Well that's impressive! I got the first disc to run but the 2nd bailed with "Undefined font colour" which is amusing - will poke later. [EDIT: Runs fine with RISC OS 2]

What I'm curious about is that the R,G,B ramps have horrible banding in which surely can't be as originally rendered on real hardware -- I see the same as the screenshots with Arculator though - yuk!

As I'm playing with the A3000 and I've got RISCOS 3.1 - I thought I'd give these discs a try. They both work fine, for the 2nd disc you need to change the desktop to 256 colour. Cool demos, I was into the Amiga demoscene BITD and never had an Archimedes, we had RM Nimbus and those were dinosaurs compared to the Archimedes!

[tricky]

I've never had an Archimedes although a doesn't many hours pawing over the manuals.
I have memories of a demo of a street scene with a helicopter with a search light scanning up and down the street. I don't know if you ever see the chopper and I could have imagined the whole thing, but does anyone else share my memories?

[kth]

I have memories of a demo of a street scene with a helicopter with a search light scanning up and down the street. I don't know if you ever see the chopper and I could have imagined the whole thing, but does anyone else share my memories?

In case the chopper was actually some kind of UFO, represented by a cone with spheres rotating around its base, the demo you mean might be the Render Bender demo "Close Encounters", programmed by Brian Trott for Archive magazine in 1989.
It was available from Arcade BBS as file #002976; I've downloaded it from a mirror and copied it to a disk image:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/qankf2u3 ... s.zip/file

[kth]

(Sorry for the large image …)

What I'm curious about is that the R,G,B ramps have horrible banding in which surely can't be as originally rendered on real hardware -- I see the same as the screenshots with Arculator though - yuk!

I seem to remember that on the monitor I used in the 1990s, a NEC MultiSync 3D, I had the monitor brightness set very low, so that colour bands in 256-colour modes did not look ghastly like this. Maybe it's just due to brightness and/or contrast, I don't know …

[wmd]

There was a second Newton's Cradle demo for the Archimedes, different to the one shown in the screenshot above. IIRC the scene was mostly blue, and the demo occupied the entire disc. Does anyone happen to own this alternate version?