Made a demo disk archive

[Photon]

Started out as a megademo collection to try out my Gotek this Xmas, but the Gotek arrived after the holidays and so it never happened.

Anyway, I rustled up some more disk images I had and downloaded some more and made an archive with some randomly selected but mostly not randomly selected trackmos, megademos, packdisks and demos in ADF/DMS form.

It's OCS (Amiga 500) only, from 1987-1995, if that's your cup of T-101.

I made it mostly for me, but if someone else enjoys it feel free to share or host. It will be in my Dropbox until it's full, then I have to make room for demowork files.

Get it here, an extra click is required to get to the 286MB download, contents browser and readme.

[Z3k]

Thank you! Pretty nice selection, some very exotic intros. Must admit i didnt know a whole dozen of the feautured demogroups, still counted 5 italian crews.
Regarding your website i borrowed the cheat-sheet, it's solid gold.

[Photon]

You're welcome

And if some demo gives you trouble, you can follow this guide (which is aimed at running any OCS demo straight on real hardware from A500-A4000, not just the ~2000 demos in my archive).

I also uploaded some utilities for making your own demo disks that you can save as adf/dms and share.

[Z3k]

At first i was afraid that years in front of the Commodore 1084S made me half-blind since i could not find the utilities link. Then i digged in the html code and found them.
The link have the same aspect as normal text, no underline, not a shadow or different color or effect on mouseover, drove me almost mad
Now that i found the hidden utilities dir could you please tell me what scxboot3.0 does? since it's 1kb long i presume it's a bootblock but i'm still thinking of a way to write it in a real or adf disk. Thanks for the useful guide too.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Z3k

since it's 1kb long i presume it's a bootblock but i'm still thinking of a way to write it in a real or adf disk. Thanks for the useful guide too.

If you need to write a Bootblock to disk (be it a virtual one or not), InBoot is your friend

[Photon]

I've uploaded ScxBoot3.adf there instead that has the bootblock on it.

To install just the bootblock on other disks, boot it holding right mouse button, then insert disk+F3 to install the bootblock on that disk.

This disk happens to be formatted as OFS to work as a packdisk template for kick 1.2 and up, it has some suitably old demos on it that you can delete. (Or format a disk with FFS for 1.3 and up and put the bootblock on it if you want.)

[Mark Wright]

What an authentic and respectful collection of Amiga essentials :-) It's nice to see a properly curated selection that brings back genuine memories!

It's all too easy to forget, thanks to the efforts of projects like TOSEC over the years, just how much we take for granted the hundreds of thousands of Amiga-related artefacts we've so readily obtained, only to store them somewhere on our external hard-drives, having to wade through duplicates and unfamiliar names just to get to the important bits each time we fancy a fix of nostalgia.

It wasn't always this way. Back in 1997 when I started the sometimes-remembered Lazarus website, at the dawn of Amiga emulation, we were hoping to somehow source and gather together the few hundred items we believed would ease the pain for the average faithful Amigan, now reluctantly forced to jump ship. Little was available then but, quite quickly, our collection grew. We were acting as curators, with an eye on the classic.

Who among you can remember a time when a Yahoo (or Aminet) search for treasures like "DOC Megademo", "Vortex 42", "SAE Amazing Tunes", "Spreadpoint", "Rink-a-Dink", "Budbrain" or (er..) "Triangle - The Big A" would yield no results? We eventually put that right (apart from the last one.) But we never imagined that, in just a few short years, virtually everything ever made for the Amiga would eventually be unearthed and made so easy to access. Small acorns, etc.

But anyway, I'm rambling. I suppose what I meant to say is that - and I know everyone will have their own take on this - among the 683,514 Amiga demo-related files you own, only about 471 are worth your time. And they're all here. ;-)

[UberFreak]

Thanks for this collection Photon!

If I'm not mistaken, the Gotek firmware does not support DMS, so will have to be converted back to ADF.

[Photon]

Yeah, at least 1.05a doesn't. It was really up to the kind soul who scanned the disk for preservation which format to use (probably 40% are DMS here), and it's up to Mr. Messinger to add support in the firmware

Here is a dms to adf thread. Might have a go at a conversion actually Or if you convert I can add your link or send it and I'll host it

[Superman]

ADF opus can convert them in seconds so it's no problem at all.

[jbl007]

I doubt converting with ADF Opus will only "takes seconds" because you will need to add every file from every directory manually to the batch converter. I used xdms like this:

find Photon\'s-Demo-Disk-Archive/ -iname '*.dms' -print0 | while read -d $'\0' file; do xdms -v -d $(dirname "$file") u "$file" && rm "$file"; done

However xdms complains about some corrupt files:

ALL-megademos-87-95/89/POWERSLAVE-MegademoB.dms
ALL-megademos-87-95/91/Energy&Xerox-Mina1.dms
Musicdisks/taipan-rapiscrapa.dms

These files are duplicated:

./Megademos/Megaforce-Megademo.adf      
./ALL-megademos-87-95/88/Megaforce-Megademo.adf

./Megademos/AURORA-IntruderMegademo.dms
./ALL-megademos-87-95/91/AURORA-IntruderMegademo.dms

./Megademos/Kefrens megademo 8-1.adf
./Megademos/Kefrens-MegademoVIII-A.adf
./ALL-megademos-87-95/90/Kefrens-MegademoVIII-A.adf

./Megademos/Megaforce-Megademo2.dms
./Megademos/Megaforce-Megademo2-10-88.dms
./ALL-megademos-87-95/88/Megaforce-Megademo2.dms

./Megademos/Kefrens-MegademoVIII-B.adf
./ALL-megademos-87-95/90/Kefrens-MegademoVIII-B.adf

./Megademos/TSP-Megademo1-metallion-3-88.adf
./ALL-megademos-87-95/88/TSP-Megademo1.adf

./Megademos/KEFRENS-MegademoVII.DMS
./ALL-megademos-87-95/89/KEFRENS-MegademoVII.DMS

./Megademos/SAE-SCX-Megademo.adf
./ALL-megademos-87-95/89/SAE-Megademo.adf

./Megademos/VISION-Megademo2.dms
./ALL-megademos-87-95/89/VISION-Megademo2.dms

./Megademos/RSI-MegademoA.dms
./ALL-megademos-87-95/89/RSI-MegademoA.dms

./Megademos/SP-Megademodisk2-metallion-5-88.dms
./ALL-megademos-87-95/88/SP-Megademodisk2.dms

./Megademos/Phenomena-Megademo-6-89.dms
./ALL-megademos-87-95/89/Phenomena-Megademo.dms

./Megademos/Antitrax2010-Megademo.adf
./ALL-megademos-87-95/87/Antitrax2010-Megademo.adf

./Megademos/IT-Megademo.dms
./ALL-megademos-87-95/89/IT-Megademo.dms

./Megademos/RSI-MegademoB.dms
./ALL-megademos-87-95/89/RSI-MegademoB.dms

./Warlocks-ADF-Archive/Revenge.adf
./ALL-megademos-87-95/90/Fraxion-Revenge.adf

./Warlocks-ADF-Archive/GrodanBoll.adf
./Trackmos-and-demos/GrodanBoll.adf

./Trackmos-and-demos/SODAN&MAGICIAN-TechTech.dms
./ALL-megademos-87-95/87/SODAN&MAGICIAN-TechTech.dms

send it

Where to? And how?

[Photon]

Thanks for the feedback, yes, I expect a few bad images, they could still work so I'll keep them if I get a working adf out anyway.

Updated archive links coming up, if you don't want to re-download it here's a script to drag and drop convert dms files in a single folder, only tested on XP. Put files on the desktop and drop files on the Drop! shortcut.

(On XP, long path names cause trouble so move the collection to the root and rename the top folder Photon's-Demo-Disk-Archive to a single letter - and you must replace/remove & in the file names. Clunky...)

[jbl007]

Originally Posted by Photon

Thanks for the feedback, yes, I expect a few bad images, they could still work so I'll keep them if I get a working adf out anyway.

Yes they run well. xdms has the -f option (Override errors). I didn't test it...

long path names cause trouble

I think it's because some file names have spaces. I wonder if windows powershell can do it better.

[jbl007]

Aargh! The fake guru of Budbrain Megademo I gets me every time I watch it.
"Oh f*** it's crashed!"
"Oh wait, it's not."



Megademos/megademo_i-disk*.dms

Are there more demos with fake gurus in it? Sorry for off topic...

[Photon]

OK! ADF-only archive added, available from the same place. Yeah, the converted disks should be good, tried a few in my Gotek and they worked fine. I guess Android emus and Minimig etc are also ADF-only?

(And no, & removal and make the total pathname+filename length shorter is only so the Windows (XP) console can run the script. Spaces are fine.)

[SaphirJD]

Thanks for releasing such a nice collection, will download of course

[Yulquen74]

Thanks!

[lyzanxia]

Still love this demoarchive...perfect OCS collection.