Book-Chapter in The Flame Wars

I have been invited to write a chapter on my demoscene hobby, which resulted in a 12-page spread with many pictures and anecdotes. This post contains my copy of the text before final layout. It tells my way though 16-bit computing from November 1989 until our Amiga 500 demo “The Loop” in 2023.

On the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the Motorola MC68000 16-bit processor in 2024, Microzeit Publishing released a book about two of the main rival homecomputers that used that CPU in the 1980s and 1990s: the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. Originally started as “STAMIGA: The Flame Wars” on Indiegogo in 2023, the book was released as “68000: The Flame Wars“, subtitled on the cover as “system battle of the home computer revolution”.

Here are a few pictures of the book, followed by the text. I added some extra photos at the end of this page.

The Flame Wars, pp. 256-257 — The Flame Wars, pp. 254-255

“ST-AMIGA Memories of Leif Oppermann, a.k.a. Noname/Haujobb

November 1989 not only saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, but also the arrival of my first 16-bit machine. The choice of which as an upgrade to my 8-bit machines did not come easy. I read about the amazing capabilities of the new generation of home computers in my monthly computer games magazine “Aktueller Software Markt” (ASM). The amount of colours (512 or 4096) did not make a big difference to me, coming from a computer with a fixed palette of sixteen.

Atari and Amiga both had the MC68000 CPU which allowed game studios to easily target both machines at the same time with little extra effort, and it showed. Many games did not really take advantage of the Amiga chipset and so the games looked almost the same to me. But there were CPU intensive vector games like Starglider 2 that were even faster on the Atari because of the higher clock speed. And then there were the beautiful games by Thalion, which were specially optimised for the Atari by people with a demoscene-background. All this made me interested in the Atari ST. It was also the machine that was developed under former Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel, which was a bit of a mystery to me at the time.

BASIC steps to the Amiga
Sound has always been important to me. With seven years of music education, I could see myself using the Atari’s MIDI-interface and sharp monochrome monitor to further this interest. But my keyboard didn’t have MIDI, my budget was limited, and the colour monitor would have added to the bill. I was interested in either learning a new instrument or programming and maybe even making something of it in the future. Becoming a professional musician seemed unrealistic and so I decided to learn to code. I made first steps in Basic on the C16 (the first ALDI computer in Germany) and later on my C64c. I also wanted to learn 6510 assembly, because I knew that this was the basis for the games. But when I bought a book on the subject, it was too awkward for me to read, and had pages of hex dumps instead of a disk in the back. It was very inconvenient and I couldn’t get anything to work with the tools that I got from friends, either. So I skipped the 6510 assembly and rather did some sports and played with my friends. I decided for the Amiga 500 which had the better chipset. It was way over my budget, just like the Atari ST, and so I had to rely on my parents and asked for it as a birthday gift. As I only got the C64 with disk-drive, monitor and printer over the previous two years, they asked me to sell that on in order to support the purchase.

The magic of chip music
The demoscene only really caught my attention on the Amiga when I went to secondary school in Stadthagen, a county town in northern Germany. At first I liked my originals very much, especially Nebulus. And then the animations and sounds of the intros in front of the fountain of cracked games that kept flowing in from the schoolyard caught my attention. This was so much better than on 8 bit, where Jeroen Tel was my favourite musician! Later I discovered that many of these tunes were also game sounds, and most of the ones I liked were either made by Jochen Hippel himself or using his routines and created with Future Composer. I mean tunes like the iconic “Arcane Theme” by Zetrix, which was a cover of Future Freak’s “The Last Hero” from the C64. I still like the sound of those tunes to this day! While visiting a new Amiga friend I told him during a cracktro how much I liked the sound and he replied, “If you like this, I have something better”. He searched the disk and we launched the “3D-Net-Analyzer” by D.O.C, which was coded by Unknown. I was blown away by the audio-visual quality, and especially by Romeo Knight’s track “Crack of Dawn” which was full of cool samples. This was unheard of for me at the time! I had several versions of the early Soundtracker v2 line, many of which were coded by Unknown or Mnemotron, and played around with them. But I settled for Exolon’s StarTrekker for usability reasons and made a few tunes with it. Protracker appeared around the same time. School friends told me that members of The Special Brothers, an early Amiga team, were from our school which left me in awe. Unfortunately, I was too impressed to ask them for coding advice at the time, which was surely a mistake, as their coder Alloc was really friendly. I also heard about their local battles with TCC Design of Red Sector Megademo fame, which were from our area as well.

In the eye of the storm
Apparently I was living in a hotspot of the German demoscene without knowing it! I realised that living in a rural area was no obstacle. Being part of the scene seemed to be less about the location and more about commitment, communication, and cooperation. I just needed to improve my game and eventually meet like-minded people!

I bought a copy of AMOS The Creator, an integrated development environment for a game-oriented Basic that originated as STOS on the Atari and caught my attention earlier. I spent countless hours in front of my computer enjoying the solitary experience of learning to program from a good manual. I wrote graphical effects, a small game, and spent a lot of time on my own disk file system with command line interface. As a testimony to my family’s background in hardware technology (an uncle founded a large electronics mail order business in the 1970s, and my brother followed in 1990) I have also had modems since 1992, the first of which I bought at the Interradio show in Hannover. I used it to browse the local bulletin board systems (BBS), download tools and documents, and connect with other Amiga people.

Into the world of AGA
In 1994, I got an Amiga 1200 with a hard drive and one day downloaded “BATO” which was described as a sci-fi slideshow made by students. The end-scroller revealed that they lived close to me. I immediately called and visited their graphic artist JCS. Soon after, I met their musicians CDK and Marc as well, and joined the team: Sector 7. I was no longer alone and doing everything on my own. Now I was part of a team and could concentrate on coding! We made our first two releases within a few months and went to parties and fairs. Our first trip was to the Amiga Fair in Cologne which unofficially had a small demo party called “Coma”. Our second trip was to The Party 1994 in Denmark. We had been reading about it for years in our Amiga magazines, and now we went! It’s where all the big demo groups went to release their major productions. We were more than excited and even had a small release to bring along.

From Symposium to Mekka
After leaving school and during my civil service, I concentrated on learning MC68000 and MC68020 assembly language in 1995 and 1996. My modem was crucial for getting in touch with other people. Shoutouts to Fastjack/Haujobb and Touchstone/Essence for helping me to get started and later collaborating with me! I heard about the Black Box Symposium 1995, which started the tradition of having German demoscene parties at Easter. Organised by Gandalf/Phantasm (R.I.P.), it later merged with other parties and became known as Symposium in 1996 and then, after another merger, as Mekka-Symposium from 1997 to 2002. The party was within an hour’s drive and we became regular visitors. Our team Sector 7 released their first intro called “Heat” in the compo at The Party 1996. Unfortunately I missed it on the bigscreen during the compo, as I was too tired from the long drive to Denmark and my friends couldn’t find me in the massive sleeping hall to wake me up.

Synergies in demos
In 1997 we made our first major demo “Synergy” and released it at a multi-platform party called SILIConvention that also included Atari and Acorn compos. This was interesting for me, as the other parties we went to did not have such compos. After Synergy we were contacted by my mailbox friend Jazz/Haujobb and asked to join forces. They made a demo in cooperation with Scoopex called “My Kingdom” which won The Party 1997. Since 1997 Haujobb has become a really big name in the demoscene, with people joining from other groups. We must have had over 40 members at some point. With so much talent in one group, my attention turned towards easing collaboration for coders. And so, I worked on a base-code that would facilitate this through well-defined and reusable interfaces as a static library. This helped with the separation of concerns and the ability to focus on writing effects without repeating low-level code. Our 1999 demo “Mnemonics” used this system and featured code by Fastjack, Touchstone and myself. It won the Mekka-Symposium demo competition and the Scenery Amiga demo of the year award that year. It also came in handy when I applied for an industrial placement during my studies at the “Mekka-Symposium, Elitegroup, and Scala HQ” at VCC Hamburg with Gandalf and Chaos/FEB.

From scene to science
My initial years of scene activity came to an end in 2000 with the release of “Back to the Roots” and a visit to Assembly in Helsinki, Finland. I studied Media Informatics in Wernigerode, a beautiful town in the Harz mountains with a University of Applied Sciences that was founded in 1991. The course seemed fresh and promising, and the infrastructure was new, as everything had been installed after the German reunification. During my undergrad and subsequent PhD studies at the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham, UK, I came to appreciate the benefits of having worked with artists, developers, and other stakeholders in collaborative computing projects since my demoscene days. It helped me to be better at my job. And it also drew me back into the scene after my studies. It was a great pleasure to go to Breakpoint with old friends in 2009, just after the global financial crisis, and make plans for a return demo in the year after.

Cross-system cooperation
Hellfire and I teamed up to find a good way of mixing high-level C code and low-level assembly code to make Amiga demos. Optima, JCS, and Muffler joined in, and we were game with “Prototype 1” at the last Breakpoint in 2010.

Since then, and as time allowed, we slowly cultivated our hobby over the years. Collaborations with external artists became the norm. We started working with Slayer, Codi, and Jazzcat from Ghostown on demos like “Last Train to Danzig” (2015), or “Beam Riders” (2017), and with Optic/Focus Design on “Signals” (2019). Audio-visual integration became more important to us and we started using a PC-based sync tracker called “Rocket”, which allowed us to time the demo and its effect parameters tightly to the beats of the music while developing on the PC, and then cross-compile everything for the Amiga. We documented our approach to demomaking and publicly released our code and the documentation as the “Haujobb Amiga Framework” in 2019.

Back to the roots
I am grateful to have such a wonderful hobby which for me is all about creative coding and making something good looking out of the limited capabilities of old computers, synchronising it with music, the flow and its solitude, teamwork with friends, meeting like-minded people at parties, and taking part in friendly competitions on the big screen. I feel privileged that I was always surrounded by exceptional talents. Our group Haujobb has even grown again recently with the arrival of our new coder Peabrain. And I am very happy that together with Ghostown and my old friend Virgill we made a demo called “The Loop” (2023) for the machine that came into my life in November 1989.”

Leif Oppermann. 2024. My Name is Noname of Haujobb. In 68000: The Flame Wars. Microzeit Publishing, 254–265. Retrieved from https://microzeit.com/products/stamiga-the-flame-wars

If you want to buy the book, try the discount-code “NonameSpecial-10” which Marco kindly provided. “Damit bekommt man 10% Rabatt auf die Produkte in der Kategorie 68000 Anniversary, ergo Buch und Flame Pack. Du kannst den Code gern bewerben, wo es dir angebracht erscheint.” I don’t know if the code is still valid, but it was reportedly working last year.

Bonus-Material

I was browsing through photos when pondering about the past and writing the text. Here is a selection of personal highlights from my journey that were not fit for the book. Nevertheless, the demoscene is a social community, so shout-outs to all friends and sceners that I met over the years.