First Amiga Digital Environment Demo Contest

Amiga.org is organizing the first ever AmigaDE demo competition. Demos may be written in any language of preference, but the end result must be either compiled down to Virtual Processor code or must be Java Bytecode. The demos will be shown at the World of Amiga South East Show, which is being held in the UK on the 3rd of November 2001. Read more for more information regarding the Amiga Digital Environment and Amiga demos. Mike Bouma has the details.“The Amiga Digital Environment is a joint development effort between the Tao Group and Amiga Incorporated. The AmigaDE is a platform independent operating environment which allows software to be run binary identical across different processor or host OS platforms. On some devices it runs as the sole operating system, although it can host itself on other kernel architectures while hiding the host from its user or it can even act like as an ordinary application from within the host operating system.

The VP language is an assembler language for a Virtual Processor. A translator tool is available for almost any CPU architecture to translate this code into the native assembler language of the target platform. In addition the most efficient Java Virtual Machine currently available is entirely written in this VP language and very soon we well see numerous small computing devices like cellphones and PDAs using this JVM. Although VP code would be more efficient than applications written in Java bytecode there are many more Java developers. This is an important reason for Java to stay an important language for the AmigaDE years to come. Also it should be noted that the Java language is getting more and more popular within the DemoScene.

In my previous article I wrote about the Amiga Lapsuus demo which won the combined demo competition at Assembly`01. Some people discussing this demo thought it won an animation competition and although the creators would most certainly take that as a compliment I must clarify that everything was calculated in realtime. For instance the total filesize of the demo is under 7 MB, while an animation with the same level of quality would have been hunderds of megabytes.

For Amiga.org`s demo competition there are two categories one for demos with a maximum size of 64K and one with the maximum of 4K. This DivX movie of the demo “1000%” for the Amiga will give a good idea of what is possible by efficient programming in under 40K of filesize. Also you need to be an extremely efficient programmer to make something impressive in just 4 kilobytes. For instance here`s a DivX movie of the 4K amiga demo Humus, which won last year`s Assembly 4K competition. (“Humus 2” by push entertainment won this year as well.!)

If you want to participate then start coding right away. (BTW the famous Amiga Boing! demo has also been rewritten in VP code.) Also note there are tons of applications available with source code to help you start learning the VP language. For instance this VP written tunnel effect demo could be helpful to get started. Think about how cool it would be to be able to show your demos on 16bit-color phone and PDA displays or running your demos identical through AmigaDE players on different host platforms!”

Mike Bouma