THE BIG DEMO DIGITAL DEPARTMENT
This demo was the very very first demo I was exposed to on my shiny new Atari ST for my Christmas present and I was blown away by the sheer number of tracks on one disk.
Ofcourse, I was young and didn’t know much about Operating systems, floppy disks and mouse pointers! it was a time when things like “how do I make a copy of this disk!” to “what, do I just put this in the side there and turn machine on?”
Seriously!
When I was from a background of just running around building go-karts and hurting shins and cracking heads on skate boards.
Then to the Sinclair Z81, to the Spectrum Plus 2 WITH A TAPE DECK!
Shortly messing around with poke and peek instructions learning where things went, wasnt long until I realised I could POKE instructions into area’s of memory and randomise usr$ to that location and watch the system…… crash… crash. then suddenly got something that seemed to create some sort of millions of colours! HOW does a machine with only 7 colours produce this! so I ended up working out that the CPU was fast enough to combine and merge colours and the TV as it was was slightly slower so a blue and a green made some other colours. Ofcourse I never knew how to save this stuff to tape.
ANYWAYS, On this christmas day. I unboxed my Atari ST complete with mouse, and a TRUCK LOAD of games!! where did mum get these!!!
SO In goes this disk. “the big demo” and this loaded up and the colours! WHAT THE HECK! COLOURS SO MANY!
As I scrolled down listening to tunes I’ve never heard of before. Never knew the names of the greats! Rob Hubbard, Daglish… you name it I never know them! SHAMEFUL!
I quickly learned much more as I scrolled down, ” Digital department “… WHAT?
“PUMP UP THE VOLUME!”
Ok, SO I DO THIS and was greeted with my first EVER REAL music being produced from a computer!
As this machine did its thing and played these tunes over and over, I thought, WHY only 6 tunes here.
Ofcourse I had no concept of how memory was managed on this machine.
All I knew was that it at 128Kb and a disk drive…… I did NOT know at the time that this had 512kb and ROM and an OS, and much MUCH more.
As these tunes played, it became apparent that my favorite tune here was the SANXION-LOADER and hours of listening to this
Anyways : I have now searched HIGH and LOW for the original .MOD format of these tunes. AGAIN never realising that this was written on some software that was probably customised for THIS demo only? (still dont know too much how this was done!)
The Song Below is downloadable.
It is a recreation of the tune I hear on the demo, so most of the effects are very accurate. I DID the best I can though
