New Discovery

Many moons ago, back in the mists of 1988 I was working in a well-known computer store and got to know the local Amiga users. They ranged from mad role-playing geeks, demo makers, cracking groups and even commercial game creators.

Twilight, the company who made WWF, Elf and several other Amiga games often popped in to test their latest game, and my name even appears in the high scores of Elf. The guy who wrote Honda RVF, Ed Hickman (also responsible for several Spectrum games like Apple Jam and Zig Zag) was also a regular. We all once went for a spin in his Porsche… oh happy days…

Anyway, back to the topic… digging through some old CD’s recently dragged up my collection of Amiga floppy disk images, for use on emulators. I knew I had my games (Baldy and Talisman) plus my commercial video titler (Video Ease), but what I also found was something I had forgotten about!

Amongst the things we did in those early days included trying to make our own demos. We had one written especially for the shop by a local demo coder named Mr Bit Blitter (I think) and spent many hours typing away the text for the scroller…

That is sadly missing… It went when I sold my Amiga, and several attempts to recover it have failed. But, I did make two attempts myself under the name of Squatter (taken from the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch). The first one was a hack of an existing demo – I just replaced the pictures and sampled music, that is also missing… but the second…

Don’t get too excited here, but the second one was a kind of slideshow with music. All done by myself, and it is this demo I have found. There is no fancy machine code, just a menu that allows you to view a picture (hand drawn by myself using Dpaint) and listen to some music (created by me too using soundtracker) at the same time. OK, it’s not brilliant, but some of the pictures and music are quite good.. and I’m proud of a few of the tracks. Some of the music samples were from a friends synth and samples from Faulty Towers grabbed by myself.

I will add it to the download section shortly, in case you want to have a laugh, but here are some screen shots.

It was great to see the pictures again, and listen to that music.

Yeah - a dude on a jet-bike...
I think I copied it from a game advert...

Another game advert copy.. possible Bombozal?

Yep - something from The Jungle Book..

Some people refused to believe I drew this, they thought I had somehow ripped it from the game (Dragon's Lair). But honestly, I drew it from screenshots. He has a leg missing - something that always bugs me!