AMIGA Emulator vs YouTube
Megademos, trackmos and intros – they are graphical presentations programmed in Assembler. With the challenge to make the impossible possible on a 7MHz machine. Very low level programming with highly optimized code. In the days before Direct3D and OpenGL you had to be a bit more creative to make fancy 3D animations in real time. (Ahhh – sweet memories!) For a couple of times already I tried to get an AMIGA emulator working to play all the cool old classics and have them preserved for eternity as a video. (No idea whether my old AMIGA 500 still works these days). Unfortunately the results with the different emulators where quite mixed. Especially in the last production I have been involved in we must have done something really quirky. It just refuses to work on any emulator I’ve come across so far. (It’s amazing how complicated it seems to be to properly emulate an old 7MHz AMIGA even on a new 1.3 GHz Intel machine!) Now recently I discovered that even our last production made it onto youtube!! Yay! Not further need to muck around with the emulators!
While at that time I was very proud of the moving mirror part and even the rotating circles it looks quite lame these days …with all the power the graphics boards give you. But it was fun. The vector calculations, the optimized square root approximation, the sin/cos optimization, the line drawing algorithm where we counted clock cycle, the smart circle algorithm. And all in good old 68k Assembler.