Newtek Demo Reel 2

[rhester72]

Pulled due to copyright nearly 25 years ago, this hard-drive-only demo requiring 9MB (!) of RAM was long thought to be a unicorn, seen only within the hallowed halls of Newtek...until I saw this video:

[ Show youtube player ]

Where...on...earth...is...it?!? =)

Rodney

[Pat the Cat]

Interesting find. Sound would appear to have been redone from the original.

Video appears authentic. I think that was captured rather than digitally rendered from the original Amiga release.

Years ahead of its time, that demo. Broke way too many rules trying to look "cool" at the time too.

[emufan]

never seen before. i found a Demo Reel II which holds some digitized images only.
more of a version 0.5.
if you have a yt account, write a comment and demand his harddrive image

[Pat the Cat]

They might not have. It could have been captured from a video tape of the demo.

[emufan]

possible, but the description under the video talks about emulation.
so there is at least a tiny chance, the demo software still exists somewhere.

[Pat the Cat]

Well, I definitely haven't got. I saw it, never got a copy of the files.

TBH there just weren't that Amigas around that could play it. It wasn't that compressed really, but IIRC it did have a custom player. It had to, to change resolutions on playback. Standard anim format just wouldn't do that.

Originally Posted by emufan

never seen before. i found a Demo Reel II which holds some digitized images only.
more of a version 0.5.
if you have a yt account, write a comment and demand his harddrive image

(Deep breath) OK.

I've been dreading going there, but I ain't got nothing to lose nomore.

[Pat the Cat]

Demo reel 3 is Super-HAM, dynamic HIRES as Newtek put it. Stills mostly but pretty, good as it gets for OCS or ECS Amigas. Mostly translated 24 bit, but all K colour and mostly hires, which is kind of impossible with regular CBM screen modes.

[ Show youtube player ]

Am pretty sure you have to use those to watch it, in terms of chipset. AGA you have to swtich down, or maybe doesn't work. Should work if you switch but I never tried I think. The mode isn't AGA quality but it's closer than you might think, so if you do find one, it is a true advert from Newtek correctly sourced so you SHOULD be able to have legally anyway. The Adf or file copy of the original is legit, in my professional opinion. Disk 1 is iffy because of very long loop sample of a copyrighted work. It could be argued the sound quality is crap compared to the original, but some artists are funny about this sort of thing. Art of Noise, Pyranomia.

[emufan]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

Well, I definitely haven't got. I saw it, never got a copy of the files.

TBH there just weren't that Amigas around that could play it. It wasn't that compressed really, but IIRC it did have a custom player. It had to, to change resolutions on playback. Standard anim format just wouldn't do that.

1988 and 8 mb ram expansion - i can imagine newtek gave out some demo disks to some professional costumers on some fairs, but those already vanished or dumped what they had from the amiga times

(Deep breath) OK.

I've been dreading going there, but I ain't got nothing to lose nomore.

thank you for posting the comment/request on youtube
the uploader seems still active on yt, last uploads 3 weeks ago.

#1) there are some more demos i cannot find from the Ne(w)tekDemoStation folder:
Maxine HeadRoom and SeeMonkey - cannot find them anywhere.

#2) i put my little Newtek demo collection into the zone, at least one of them is not yet on the ftp:
Newtek.Demo.Reel-Collection.zip

Demo Reel (1987)(Newtek)[WB].adf
Demo Reel 1 (1987)(Newtek)(Disk 1 of 2).adf
Demo Reel 1 (1987)(Newtek)(Disk 2 of 2).adf
Demo Reel 3 (1989)(Newtek)(Disk 1 of 2).adf
Demo Reel 3 (1989)(Newtek)(Disk 2 of 2).adf

[rhester72]

Heads up on the Demo Reel floppies (1 and 3) - EVERY set in TOSEC has been modified in some way from the original, and nearly every set contains at least one corrupt file.

I'm working on it.

Rodney

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by emufan

1988 and 8 mb ram expansion - i can imagine newtek gave out some demo disks to some professional costumers on some fairs, but those already vanished or dumped what they had from the amiga times.

Oh no. It was definitely made available by some PD Libraries at the time and for years afterwards outside the USA. Some hard drives even shipped with it pre-installed (ahem). Long after Newtek binned it and denied any liability. The thing is, advertising material is PD. If they had just used scenes from adverts of the movies, they could have been much more bold about the matter. I think it was Fox that bullied them into backing down.

The big problem was keeping a set of floppies (it was multiple disks, I'm pretty sure) intact. Bit rot and viruses were rampant, and even loudspeakers could damage them beyond playback. And once it was pulled, it stopped turning up at the magazines. In floppy form from PD Libraries, anyway.

I saw it, but I never laid hands on a complete set. When I arrived at format, they were consigned to the "blank disk" box already.

AF was a beast for requiring floppy disks, you see. Most of the copy was typed on Amigas. That meant crossloading via PC floppy onto the Macs. For everything. Inclulding screen grabs of software. AF wasn't special in this way, if a target computer could be used well for wordprocessing, then it was used for word processing. It bonded the writers to the machine. Not for C64, spectrum titles, but everything else was sourced on the magazine subject machine at one point. That's where Future started. Using CPM based Amstrad CPC (Colour Personal Computers) to write copy on. They were OK for that, if you had a WP on ROM. Loaded in one second, spell checkerr too.

I grovelled. I pleaded. I begged. I cried. I tried flattery, bribery, corruption, blackmail even. Nothing worked. Never was I allowed to lay my hands on a network card, plug it into the office A2000, and just do things the easy way. Fear over network disruption outweighed any possible increase in productivity. Basically I wasn't trusted. Other mags just went ahead and did it and stuck two fingers up to the Network people. Instead, I ended up with a Mac plonked on my desk next to an A2000. So I could format my own floppy disks. This was seen as a "productive" use of my time.

Every time you wrote an article or needed to transfer screen grabbed pictures, you had to format a blank PC disk (on the Mac, so a Mac could read it). If it didn't format, it was trashed. No point keeping a dud.

About half of the PD library disks came from ONE source. Ray Burt Frost. RBF software. He loved that demo. At Amiga shows he would have it running. I guess a lot of PD Libraries did similar things. Including 17 bit maybe, before they did games. They certainly kept the post people busy sending bags of new material in.

Later on, after I had stopped coming in to the office, an Amiga was setup on the Network. By then screengrabs were always digital anyway. They were captured on a Mac, but only for lowres game screens, never hires. It wasn't that good at grabbing quality perfect from a raw Amiga video output.

Toaster wasn't an option. That was Sony's doing. Although whether by choice or necessity, I never found out. Toaster relied on a Sony chip, and they never did a PAL version for some reason, only an NTSC version. If Newtek could have built a PAL Toaster, they would have. Maybe. Maybe they thought that wasn't necessary, ultimately. I sure heard that way, and Newtek called a lot of nasty names too. I think they were victims of their own success. They kept succeeding, but CBM did not.

Sony certainly would have earned a tidy sum from all those Toaster sales, if the myth is true. Maybe that's what tipped them off. They rolled it big and are still rolling it big on games. I must admit, I tried following the wave into Sony, but I had another path to follow. I guess I could have really pushed and made it with them, but they certainly didn't need me, and I guess I didn't need to be part of Playstation. They had some really nice people. Michelle Harris did go that route, and she was a GREAT person to work with at Format. She went through EA first though. A brilliant female success story in a male dominated industry. She earned that, but she never wrote a word that appeared in the magazine, I think. Advertising, liasion organization, and show / live event organizer. I met her and talked at the London launch, and admired the work, and told everyone Playstation would dominate the UK game industry for five years minimum. Some were scornful at my words, but there you go.

[emufan]

I had a look at the public domain index website, but no results searching for demo reel.
newtek gave only some dynashow results.

some 17bit cdroms are on the ftp.
in file "17Bit - Collection - Disc A - Contents.txt" they talk about a demo on disk 81/82,
but they are not listed in that index - #80 & #83 are listed. 2 disks is a bitless for 9MB req. but dunno.

17Bit - 559 NEWTEK DEMO II - 2 disks and req 1MB ram only.

you had an interesting time working for AF, thanks for some insight. good read

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by rhester72

Heads up on the Demo Reel floppies (1 and 3) - EVERY set in TOSEC has been modified in some way from the original, and nearly every set contains at least one corrupt file.

I dumped set 3 last year (from original floppies) and submitted to TOSEC, but it takes a while before anything is included in the collection.

Ok, I posted the video.

The files were copied off of the Demo station from Tim Jenison's TV Museum in Topeka. (At least when it was in Topeka, I have no idea if he ever rebuilt the place when the company moved to Texas.)

This came off of an internal CD of various Newtek stuff called "Newtek 101"

In the case of the video I ran it in an emulator (It was not an easy task as the demo is flaky on real hardware)

I don't believe they ever really released this demo as it was touchy as hell and it was using in house software. It required hefty system requirements at the time and would have been on at least 10 floppy disks. On top of that it was never polished for public consumption.

I expect listings for it in PD collections were another demo mislabeled.

Here is a the dump of the demo station with every demo (Release and unreleased)

https://lurking-grue.com/transfer/NewTekDemos.zip

[emufan]

welcome,
thanks for sharing, I'm about to have alook. thanks alot

#1) on wb/kick 3.1 you have to set the executable flag for the programs in the archive,
they were lost, when packed as zip. but it does work.

it does work out of the box, if you run them on a wb/kick 1.3 system.

thanks again

#2) is there a way in amigados do add a protection flag recursively on any file in a given path?

Originally Posted by emufan

welcome,
thanks for sharing, I'm about to have alook. thanks alot

#1) on wb/kick 3.1 you have to set the executable flag for the programs in the archive,
they were lost, when packed as zip. but it does work.

Ah yeah, the files were burned on a CD around 1996 and bounced around windows machines ever since so I expect something like that would happen. I could try going back to the original CD that was burned on an Amiga but it may also have the same problem.

Off the top of my head I couldn't say how to set them recursively.

I think it would only run on 3.1 and never tried it on anything else. But yeah a stripped down setup should launch it. It really needs all the ram it can get <Chip and fast> but I bet if you give it too much chip ram it wold break.

[emufan]

i guess it is ok, how you made it. one could use a directory manager like Directory Opus or Diskmaster to get some assist on setting the "E" flag. on the command line it is:
protect FILENAME ADD RWED

i think there is a way to write a little loop one-liner, which goes though a directory tree.
maybe someone else may help here.

i had some graphics corruption in the demo reel #2 on wb3.1 , works ok in older wb 1.3.
those dynamic hires slide show gives wrong colors here in emulation, on both systems. maybe an emulation issue.

minor issues only. good you joined and preserved these things

#1) what you can do is creating an iso of the cdrom, you can do on a mac or pc.

Originally Posted by emufan

i had some graphics corruption in the demo reel #2 on wb3.1 , works ok in older wb 1.3.
those dynamic hires slide show gives wrong colors here in emulation, on both systems. maybe an emulation issue.

It should be an emulation problem as these things were pushing it on the real hardware. I had to fiddle with the emulator to get any of them working well enough to record them. My only working hardware is an Amiga 4000 with toaster/flyer and these things have problems on AGA chipssets.

I can make an iso of the CD later this weekend, It contains copies of toaster releases 0.9-3.1 and other various odds and ends like ToasterLink, internal tools and Workbench releases.

Also it has Topeka Doom

https://lurking-grue.com/transfer/TopekaDoom.zip

This was a skinned version of doom where the map was the NewTek Building in Kansas. It was originally going to have the monsters skinned to be ex employees that had been kicked out of the company at the time (Kiki, Paul Montgomery etc) and then the plan was to leak it online. It got mentioned in Toaster User magazine and it took the fun out of it so it never got finished. As I remember it was Mike Danger that leaked it despite the people involved asking him not to. It was mostly used for after hours lan parties.

This needs to be run in Dosbox and Topeka.bat would patch the wad files and start doom. I doubt it can run on 64bit windows at this point.

I also have the complete internal Toaster effects making environment with source code which I think did get lost at the company in early 97ish.

I'll dig around to see what other ephemera I have.

[emufan]

Originally Posted by Lurking_Grue

It should be an emulation problem as these things were pushing it on the real hardware. I had to fiddle with the emulator to get any of them working well enough to record them. My only working hardware is an Amiga 4000 with toaster/flyer and these things have problems on AGA chipssets.

my setup, is not a clean wb3.1, it's packed with a lot of tools. this might be an issue aswell.

I can make an iso of the CD later this weekend, It contains copies of toaster releases 0.9-3.1 and other various odds and ends like ToasterLink, internal tools and Workbench releases.

this sounds promising - but remove the workbench releases - we are not allowed to share them or kickstart images, copyright thing.
but everything else is of no problem
some weeks ago, Newtek allowed to share it's latest VideoToaster CDrom - so these things are ok.

maybe there is something for my Lightwave-Toaster collection endeavour.
perhaps you have something from the missing section - or something we still do not know of.

Also it has Topeka Doom

https://lurking-grue.com/transfer/TopekaDoom.zip

This was a skinned version of doom where the map was the NewTek Building in Kansas. It was originally going to have the monsters skinned to be ex employees that had been kicked out of the company at the time (Kiki, Paul Montgomery etc) and then the plan was to leak it online. It got mentioned in Toaster User magazine and it took the fun out of it so it never got finished. As I remember it was Mike Danger that leaked it despite the people involved asking him not to. It was mostly used for after hours lan parties.

This needs to be run in Dosbox and Topeka.bat would patch the wad files and start doom. I doubt it can run on 64bit windows at this point.

about to test this one too. thanks

I also have the complete internal Toaster effects making environment with source code which I think did get lost at the company in early 97ish.

I'll dig around to see what other ephemera I have.

oh wow. where have you been all the years
every little bit is much appreciated.

[emufan]

Originally Posted by Lurking_Grue

This needs to be run in Dosbox and Topeka.bat would patch the wad files and start doom. I doubt it can run on 64bit windows at this point.

it does work here on win7 64 bit using a 32 bit version of dosbox.
there are some doom clones out for the amiga, so i think someone will make it work on the amiga aswell.
why did they kicked kiki - she wanted more money?

Originally Posted by emufan

maybe there is something for my Lightwave-Toaster collection endeavour.
perhaps you have something from the missing section - or something we still do not know of.

oh wow. where have you been all the years
every little bit is much appreciated.

I think I probably have some of the things listed. I have every release CD up until late 1996 that were made. I'll have to dig though them to see what I have thats on the list.

For things I can supply photos of I also have a prototype of an Amiga on a PC card that was never finished.

Makes me wish I have dug around for forums like this earlier.