Atari Demos
1. Subjectively selected by Dbug↩
The Phaleon Gigademo (1992)
The Phaleon Demo, the biggest demo ever released on the Atari, has been released in 1992, the 20th of may.
It came on 4 disks full of demos from various crews.
In fact, the Phaleon Demo is the ultimate production of this period in term of "always more". Shortly, you have to know that at this time the competition reaches a very high level, and if you release something average you were consider as lamers.
In this logic, it was normal that we try to do "more" everywhere; so the Phaleon has more disk, more featured groups, more menus, more long scroll texts, more loaders, and so on...
Fortunately, many excellent screens help having a finally good demo.
How the demo is organised
- Intro
- Main menu
- Animated loading screen
- Many independent screen
- Reset demo
First, it does not have ONE loading screen, but TWO.
It's interesting, because on memory limited machines a little loader that just displays "LOADING" is faster to use that the full featured loader that plays sampled music with star field...
Second, the Phaleon does not have ONE menu, or even TWO menus... it does have FOUR; which are detailed below.
Finally, the reset demo is interactive, and allows the user to enter comments about the demo, and so you can know who visualise the demo.
Unfortunately, a conception problem forbid to skip the questionnaire filling to watch other people comments.
It sucks, but we were short in time as usual... Only one more bug !
The menu of menus
The only meaning of this menu, is to allow the user to choose which way he wants to use the Phaleon Demo.It gives the choice between the Shadow of the Beast menu, the Dungeon Master, the fast menu, and the sequential Amiga loader.
For your pleasure we have taken the time to extract most of the scrolling messages, some written by Zae, some by the Angers team, you can find them spread over the left and right columns.
As you will see, ZAE was very good when he had to type kilometers of senseless bullshit, as well as out inability to write gramatically correct english.
The Shadow of the Beast menu
A Shadow of the Beast (the well known Amiga game) remix, with a 50 fps frame rate, left and right over scan, rewritten David Whittacker music, and so on.This menu requires one megabyte of ram, but it's more usable when the ST has a least two megabytes since the menu and the loader have to be reloaded after each demo with one megabyte.
The Dungeon Master menu
A full featured Dungeon Master remix, with sampled sounds, auto mapping, cheat codes, multi language support, teleportation areas, and random encounters.A half meg ST is enough, but for the same reasons than the Shadow menu, a one megabyte ST is strongly recommended.
Alternates menus
A simple list menu, that allows to directly choose one demo screen. Of course, it's the most efficient even if technically it has no special interest :)Used with the fast loader, it allows to see all demos on a 520 ST without having to reload the menu or the loader.
A sequential "Amiga like" loader, that simply load all demos screens one after another.
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The Phaleon Demo also included some preview screens of games being developed.Krom, a role playing game developped by DNT Crew, with some coding help by Mit:
A demo-reel of soon to come products from Expose Software.
Best of
Here are a few videos of some of the best parts1 of the Phaleon Gigademo:ACF Guest Screen:
A refreshing presentation, uncommon on the Atari ST at the time.
FOXX Guest Screen:
One of the older screens in the entire demo, but I really liked the way it looked.
Chaotic Motion Guest Screen:
Some nice looking and fast mandelbrot
Legacy Guest Screen:
Some nice 3D with a digital soundtrack
Bud-Next:
Because sometimes you don't need 50fps and stunning effects to be enjoyable.
Illusion:
Because I was right to push for having some STe specific demoscreen!
Download Disk 1
Source code
Demozoo
Pouet
