UnderwareDesign.com - Retro Amiga Tech Demo Videos

[kevin]

Metal Combat - Planar 3D Engine Tech Demo For Amiga A1200

  This short video is taken of a tech demo I wrote for the Amiga 1200 way back in 1995/1996.  The demo is showing a planar based filled polygon rendering engine designed for A1200/020 systems with fast memory.  The idea was to render the spans with the CPU and interleave this with the blitter, which turned out to be fairly good solution at the time.

  While this demo was originally developed to test the viability of the planar rendering concept, the hope was it'd be fast enough to build a Virtual Fighter styled game.  With more optimization it probably would have been, but we didn't get that far.

  Code By: Kevin Picone
  Music By: Ardarc

 

Thesius XII Intro  (Amiga Game)

  This is the complete Title / Intro from our 1995 Amiga game called Thesius XII.   Sadly the game was never 100% finished,  but even so, back around 2000/2001 we released an 'as is' version with three levels, but it's missing lots of polish.

 Thesius XII is yet another side scrolling shoot'em up game from those days, loosely inspired by such classics as R-Type & SilkWorm (was a big fan of that) and any other shooter of that time really.   The game was designed for stock Amiga 500 running 7mhz 68000cpu, 512K Memory and Original Chip Set.   The intro might look pretty plain today, but I remember it being fairly challenging to get the running at speed on the stock hardware.  
 
 If you into a bit of nostalgia, you can download Thesius XII from our site.

 Developed By:
 http://www.underwaredesign.com

 

Thesius XII Intro Options Screen (Amiga Game)

   This is a clip of the Intro / Options Screen from our 1995 Amiga game called Thesius XII.   The game was designed to be fairly flexible, so the user could enable or disable some of the key features during play.  For such things as the explosion particle count, parallax effects, sound and even some tweaks for homing missiles.

  The Homing missiles are probably my favourite section of code in the entire game.  I remember a lot of work into them at the time, and looking back they seems to work fairly well.

Thesius XII Level 01 Terminal (Amiga Game)


 This clip is from Level #1 Terminal  from our 1995 Amiga game called Thesius XII.   The terminal was meant to give the player a briefing about the up coming level as if there was some type of short to the game..but it's a shoot'em up... so... overkill... erm yeah... :)

  In retrospect, there's a lot more stuff going on it here than I remember, from dynamic palette and resolution splitting, through to wire frame vectors to chunky image scaling.     If you look closely (even in the video), you'll notice the screen is in both low and high resolution. The top section is in 32 colour low res (everything above the terminal window),  with palette splits on every scan line through the video window.    The terminal window at the bottom is in hires 16 colour. There's copper resolution switches on every scanline.. This makes the text in the terminal look a lot cleaner, but places a lot of extra drag from gfx hardware.   Making it one of the hardest parts to write at the time..  

Thesius XII - High Score Entry

 This is a clip of the High Score entry screen from our 1995 Amiga game called Thesius XII.   Looking back on it, this is perhaps my favourite piece of music in the game,  even visually I'm fairly happy with it.
 
Art By: Ben Hemming
Music By: Lars Jensen
Code By:  http://www.underwaredesign.com


 

(Broken) Reality 1994/1995 Amiga Tech Demo

   The original goal of the Reality project  was to  create a Wolf 3D / Blade Stone styled 2.5D game engine for Amiga A1200 / 020 with  Fastmem.  It was pretty ambitious at the time, and looking back I wouldn't say that we ever really met our objective, but certainly gave it a good shot.   The only down side was that almost nobody got to see it, so here's a warts and all version!

  The version shown here is about the only code that still assembles.  There's newer versions of the source code, but they're missing lots of external files.    None the less, this supports textured walls / floors with flat shaded polygons.  

  For polygons,  the  original idea was to draw  triangles as vertical spans, so they could be clipped against the walls 1D z buffer.   But sadly that's not in this version.   The walls are connected together line segments, to draw the view, we get a cone of verts and draw the walls attached (to the verts) into the depth buffer.    The floors clip to the smallest wall segment in the buffer, so sadly there's a lot of overdraw, not to mention  the funky texture slipping....

  The demo in the video, is running through the WinUAE emulator with an image of my A1200 hard drive.  Most stuff seems to run ok, except the (AsmOne) assemblers ?, not sure why,  but the combination seems rather unstable.  So when you factor in the obvious bugs in my code ! :),   this is best I can get it running in the short time available :( ... Hence the  "Broken" Reality title....  Shame,  I was enjoying the nostalgia.

Code By:  Http://www.underwaredesign.com
   Art By: Raven (Textures are from Heretic)
 Music By: Ardvarc

 

Vic Vision  - Convert C64 Images To IFF (Amiga Program)

   Vic Vision is a program for Classic Amigas that converts raw Commodore 64 graphic images into Amiga IFF format.   It was developed for 64 artists, demo / Game coders, nostalgia freaks,  who might be moving onto the Amiga and would like to take their favorite artwork with them.

    Vic Vision supports many popular formats directly, such as FLI, AFLI, CFLI, Blazing Paddles, Koala, Raw Hardware Sprite Data, 8*8,8*16,16*16 fonts and many others, and also incorporates a custom format editor, allowing users to add support for either their own formats or any other that we've overlooked.


 

Z Rotate (Amiga)


This as a (very short) clip of another retro Amiga AGA effect.  This is one a slightly different take on the regular Z-Rotate that was common at that time (Min 90's).     It was later released as part of the experimental PLLB c2p package. Pllb is a set of C2p routines aimed at A1200 / 68020 with Fastmem.

 The demo is running _not_ running real hardware here sorry, my A1200 died long ago. None the less,  you'll be able to find the demo on my site soon enough.  

 http://www.underwaredesign.com

 Gouraud Cube (Amiga)

   This as a (very short) clip of another retro Amiga AGA effect, the classic gouraud cube.. Original,  I know :)..  Sadly the  video compression kills the shading a bit though.  Not too sure when this was first made now,  probably been 1995/ 1997.   The gouraud code is as you'd imagine it, pretty slow in retrospect.    I think, it was only ever released as part of the experimental PLLB c2p package.  Pllb is a set of C2p routines aimed at A1200 / 68020 with Fastmem.

  The demo is running _not_ running real hardware here sorry!, my A1200 died long ago. None the less,  you'll be able to find the demo on my site soon enough.

   http://www.underwaredesign.com

AGE Example - Loading 256 Colour Picture In AmosPro

 In very short this video we see the AGE library wrapper being used from AmosPRO.  The demo frame work sets up the library,  create a screen, loads the 8bit (256 colour) IFF, creates a copper list and then displays it.  

Developed By:
http://www.underwaredesign.com

Compressed Anim Replayer (Amiga AGA)


This clip is showing a decompression system written for Amiga AGA 68020 systems back in around 1997/1998.  The routine was written as a demo part where the objective was to get the animation data as small as possible, while retaining around a 10/12fps replay on real Amiga A1200/68020 hardware.   

The original animation consists of 120 frames, where each frame is 160x * 128y in 64 colours.  The raw planar data for the whole animation weighs in at approximately 1440 odd K, even though the packer uses chucky pixels.   

  The packer uses a three pass filter,  stage one handlers string style byte repetitions, then there's a type a control byte replacement,  with a bit merger pass at the end.  The final code (which is big mess :) ),  is long away from the original delta block / tile style packer, I'd intending upon using.    But it worked out ok in the end.   

The compressed anim comes in 859K, so it's about 40% reduction over the raw planar version.   What's surprising today though, is that ratio is still better than just LHA / LHX / RAR / ZIP'ing the original raw anim.  But they're generic, and this was crafted to pack this animation and only this animation.   

Developed By:
http://www.underwaredesign.com

[kevin]

Thesius XII Game Play

  Thesius XII game play demo. This video is taken from a game developed by Underware Design way back in 1994/95 for Amiga home computers. Unfortunately the game was never fully completed so this video shows the state of some of the opening levels at the end of development. This version of game was assembled and built back in the early 2000's as an 'as is' version which can be found on our website.

(yes only a few years late :) )

[kevin]

Project Reality Amiga Tech Demo   Underware Design Promo VHS RIP 1995


   Welcome...   In this video we look at a raw VHS capture of our reality tech demo   that was  developed for the Amiga home computers, namely the A1200/020 with  fast memory.  I'm not too sure when this video was made now, but my best guess  would be late1994 / early 1995.

      This was one of our various tech demos promotion videos, trying to get funding  locally.   Back in those days, if you wanted to make games in Australia, you pretty  much needed to leave.. In retrospect we should have..  But it is, what is it..      We did send out various beta's back in the day, so if you have one feel free to upload the demo to Aminet and don't forget to send us an email to  UnderwareDesign.com


 

[kevin]

Looking back at DarkBASIC demos By UnderwareDesign.com Episode #01 (8Th Jan 2018)

In this video we look back at some DarkBASIC tech demos that i wrote way back in 2001/2002/2003. The demo include a pre-calc object visibility engine (portal), Sliding collision , Software shadows and bump mapping..

#darkbasic #basic #3d #techdemo #portal #visibility #shadowmapping #directx7 #direct3d #rayintersection...

[kevin]

Looking back at DarkBASIC Tech demos By Underware Design - Episode 02 - Terrain Test


Today we'll be looking at an early terrain mock up. Now unlike similar DarkBASIC demos of the time, that used the build in Matrix command sets, this one renders a height map in a 2d array, before dynamically creating a series of temporary X file models out of it. This allows for larger terrains, but the user needs to handle collision & line of sight. The goal of demo was simply test the performance of the idea while including particles and randomly placed objects in the scene.

The objects on the terrain are just simple textured boxes / sprite trees & spheres. The library dynamically reuses objects based upon the cameras view. Which allowing 1000's of objects across the terrain, but places limits upon the number than be in within a frame. This takes a lot of work off the DarkBASIC rendering engine.

#darkBASIC #3D #Terrain #olddemo

[kevin]

UW3D software Rendering Demo (2001/2002)

This is a video of #software #rendering #engine that I original developed way back in 2001/2002 just to get a representation of the world for the a pre-computed visibility tool for #DarkBASIC / DBpro and Blitz 3D called Visible Worlds..

The original engine included height map terrains and various primitive shapes such as cubes/ circles/cones/tubes and bunch of others.

Rendering wise it includes: Flat Shading, Gouraud Shading, 32 bit Zbuffering, Alpha Blending

This version of the code is mix of Blitz and C and the demo is running on a i7 laptop, although the video capture destroys the frame rate anyway..


Code By: Kevin Picone (http://underwaredesign.com / http://playbasic.com)

Music By: https://bensound.com/

#3d #softwarerender #softwrerendering #zbuffer #terrain #demo #2001

[kevin]

 Underware Design Logo Anim (1995)
 
Found this Underware design logo animation that was made by Steve Sheedy way back in September 1995. The anim was rendered in low res interlaced ham (4096 colours) and was probably made in light wave on Steve's #Amiga 3000 at the time.

[kevin]

Here's another Underware Design ray traced logo from Ben Hemming. You'll notice the typo in it :) which also appears in level 3 of Thesius XII but that's OK

This was rendered on an Amiga 1200 somewhere around 1995


The section picture is a revision of the UW logo from Thesius XII by Steven Sheedy

[kevin]

 

Reality Tech Demos (Amiga AGA)  1994-1995

In this video i'm looking back at my #Wolf3D / #BladeStone styled texture mapping engines that were written between 1994 / 95.   The videos looks at three different builds, the first is the initial ray cast version, the next is first polygon edition and third includes many of the long term gol features, from polygon 3d objects to 2d planes/sprites with depth queues for lighting.  

All programming by Kevin Picone / https://underwaredesign.com

Video Music:  #1 - Waiting by Andrew Langdon
                      #2 -Ticker by Silent Partner
                      https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music