Mindcandy Volume 2: Amiga Demos Finally Here!

It has been 4 years now since the release of Mindcandy Vol.I, which featured PC Demos and was a huge success.

The waiting is over and it was absolutely worth it.

Mindcandy II - Amiga Demos - is now finally finished as well. I was on their notification list for years and didn't trust my eyes at first when I got the email that it is available to order now ... at last.

The Demos were originally written for the Commodore Amiga Computer and are available for download on the Internet for free.

You can enjoy them paying absolutely nothing, if you have the hardware to run them. Most people don't, including myself and even the ones that used to have one don't have a working one anymore (that includes myself too hehe).

The Demos

1. Megademo by Red Sector Inc.


2. Mental Hangover by Scoopex


3. Enigma by Phenomena


4. Voyage by Razor 1911


5. Hardwired by Silents & Crionics


6. Human Target by Melon Dezign


7. World of Commodore by Sanity


8. State of the Art by Spaceballs


9. Desert Dream by Kefrens


10. Groovy by Lemon


11. 242 by Virtual Dreams (Fairlight)


12. 9 Fingers by Spaceballs


13. Arte by Sanity


14. Friday At Eight by Polka Brothers


15. Love by Virtual Dreams (Fairlight)


16. Nexus 7 by Andromeda


17. Deep - The Psilocybin Mix by CNCD & Parallax


18. Closer by CNCD


19. Tint by The Black Lotus


20. Sumea by Virtual Dreams (Fairlight)


21. Captured Dreams by The Black Lotus


22. Killer by CNCD


23. Relic by Nerve Axis


24. Smokebomb by Ozone


25. Klone by Dual Crew - Shining


26. Concrete by Ephidrena


27. Perfect Circle by The Black Lotus


28. Lapsuus by Maturefurk


29. Fate Fits Karma by MadWizards


30. Silkcut by The Black Lotus

The two demos I care about the most are on the disk. I was probably not the only one that was demanding to have them on the disk during the pre-selection process 3 years or so ago. The two demos are my alltime favorite: "Hardwired" by Silents & Crionics and "Desert Dream" by Kefrens.

"Hardwired" won the 3rd prize at the very first "The Party" Demoparty in Denmark in 1991. The Demo "Odyssey" by Alcatraz won 1st prize but did not make the disc (you will understand why, if you get the chance to see this 40+ minute demo ;) and "Voyage" by Razor 1911 was second. "Voyage" made it on to this disc as well.

"Desert Dream" was the last great Demo on the Amiga 500 IMO, after that did the AGA Demos on the then brand new Amiga 1200 dominate the Amiga Demo Landscape. Ironically was "Desert Dream" only released a bit before "Second Reality" from Future Crew was released for the PC and closed the huge gap in quality between AMIGA and PC Demo Scene. For a period after that were Amiga and PC Demos head by head in quality but the PC eventually surpased the Amiga Demos and eventually dominated the scene.

When Commodore closed computer production at the end of the ninetees a lot of great Amiga Demosceners switched to the PC which was more and more becoming a normal household item and continued their great creative work there.

The only minor "bummer" is the fact that "9 Fingers" by Spaceballs was selected instead of the surprise winner of "The Party 1992" - "State of the Art", also by Spaceballs. "State of the Art" was new and different. "9 Fingers" is maybe better than "State of the Art", but it was only a naturally improved version using the same concept as "State of the Art" and thus less revolutionary. I will be able to live with that though.

Update 12/26/2006: The DVD finally arrived today. The List of Demos on the Mindcandy Website is incomplete and so was the List in this blog post. The disc has 30 demos and not 29. I fixed the list above. The missing demo is "State of the Art" by "Spaceballs" :D . Yeah! Okay, that means: No Bummmer anymore as stated in the previous paragraph ... Now it is only A.W.E.S.O.M.E!

The Disc was made for the Demosceners of the early and mid nineties, but that does not mean that it is only something they will be able to enjoy. No, for them is this DVD a "must buy" (or they were no real scener anyway).

For everybody else is this a small piece of computer history. Pleasant designed with matching music running in the background. Not a boring book that gives you the tech details like "imagine this, the computer this was designed for had less than 10 Mega Hertz tact frequency and was 8 bit. Today's home PC's have 2, even 3 GIGA Hertz and are 64 bit" ... yeah, whatever that means :).

If you watch the DVD together with a old school scener and you see him suddenly overly excited about a specific part of a demo that might not get you excitement up to the next level don't worry. It only means that it was hard to do back then. Say something nice like "fascinating" and continue to watch the show.

If you are still undecided, download for free the Trailer and/or the preview disc for free to get a glimpse of the complete disc which is packed to the roof with OVER 3 HOURS of old school entertainment.

If you are from the US, then you can order the Mindcandy Volume 2: Amiga Demos DVD from Amazon.com, Germany Go64.de, UK David Poves, Canada SceneStuff and Hungary Tomcat's T-shirt Shop.

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Contest Ruling Is Finally In - Special Bonus Prizes Revealed

The ruling for the ANSI/ASCII Text Art contest at deviantART is finally in. I blogged about the end of it and my personal favorite about a week ago. Unfortunately did the other judges not agree with me.

What surprised me a bit was that skylined's entry did not even make the top 5, but it shows how different the opinions of the 6 judges were. Being voted #1 by one judge does not make it a sure win.

Somebody that was voted #3 or #4 by all judges has a much higher chance of winning.

Here is how the judging works. Every Judge has 15 points to assign, 5 points to the #1, 4 points to the #2, 3 to #3, 2 to #5 and finally 1 point to the #1. This makes 90 points altogether for all 6 judges combined. 5 points does not look like that much anymore, right?

Anyway, all entries can be reviewed here if you want to check them out. The 5 Winners are the following:

Next to the official prizes will every one of the five winners get a one of my "deviantART ASCII" Mouse pads (since all winners were ASCIIs), a small Magnet of my "deviantART ANSI" print and a post card of my ANSI print as well. I hope the winners will like the little extra bonus prizes. Merry Christmas.

Cheers,

Carsten

Space Art - Prints and Calendars

Alex Gibson aka Sphereuk is another of my favorite artists at deviantART which I would like to introduce to my blog readers and subscribers.

I did something like this back in April already for the artist with the name Dilekt. I just discovered planet and space art at dA at the time. Space Art now makes up a considerable percentage of art in my dA Favorites and virtually 100% of my dA Wish list.

I think that this is a good Idea, because it extend the reach of these mostly young artists that are still students for the most part. Spheruk, who is from Great Britain, for example just finished his first semester at the university. He studies design (surprise) and wants to become a game designer.

Because of the time he has to dedicate for 3D art and rendering did he say that he has to cut down on the time for creating space art. I hope he will not stop doing it, because his Space and Planet artwork is amazing.

I sent Alex an Email last weekend and requested that he makes a Calendar available at the dA Print Shop with the IMO 12 best of his space art pieces.
He promised to create one and I am looking forward to be able to buy it.

Here are the 12 pieces of space art which I ask Spheruk to use for the calendar which will hopefully become available soon.







In the meantime check out the existing prints by Spheruk at the dA Shop. He gets a cut of the revenue his prints generate. So if you buy a print, you will help Alex out and increase his allowance. You might now that students are poor and are grateful for every extra dollar they can get.

I already bought two other calendars from two other artists which I would like to show you.

Sci-fi Scenery CALANDER by Swaroop.B.G.Prabhavathi aka Swaroop.		Reflections Calendar by Andrea G-Zenith aka Anjicle.

I also bought some more of my own designs. The dA ASCII and ANSI Mouse pads. They are great gifts and make some of my friends happy. It's a great gift, because it is personal and practical.


Enjoy!

Cheers
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

The ASCII/ANSI Contest Is Over

Last week did the ASCII and ANSI contest at deviantART end. You can see all contributions to the contest here. I already made my judgements, but a few are still outstanding. That means that no results are available yet.

Yet I still want to present my personal favorite. The artists name is Berend-Jan Wever aka skylined.

His contribution is the 7bit ASCII called "Julia at Awakenings". Here is a small version of the image. It is not original size. Click on the image to get to the deviation which is in original size that you can clearly see that it is made out of regular characters which you can find on your keyboard.



I like the style. I like the ASCII logo of his name actually even better. Especially this one. .






Yep, it's a shark. I think that the Idea alone is already astonishing, let alone the realization by using simple text characters.


The following two logos look like "Disco" style.. without the bright colors hehe. I don't like them as much, but they are somewhat cool anyway.

This one seems to be the predecessor of the contest entry. The Idea is already visible, but the realization is much simpler than for "Julia at Awakenings".




Well, I am looking forward to hear the ruling. More to that later this week.