The scene continues to live and perform impressive feats enjoyable throughout. The disk can be emulated without problems or run on real hardware
One of the notable duels in the history of the video game was the one fought by Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga, the two great 16-bit computers in the West – in Japan the Nec PC 9800 absolutely dominated. In the markets where these machines were most widespread, there were countless pitfalls to find out which was the best machine, which one had the best version of a game, which one had better graphics and was better heard … (not so different from today, only in smaller circles and without an internet accessible from your pocket). In addition, both machines have an exciting intrahistory full of stabs and mops that went beyond the professional.
One of the recurring debates revolved around the sound of both platforms. Amiga had a fantastic handcrafted sound chip created on demand called "Paula", designed to be the continuation of the legendary SID of Commodore 64, while with the ST instead it opted for a generic Yamaha YM2149F, one of the most widespread options around that time. On paper there should have been no possible discussion, although the inclusion of a native MIDI port in the ST ended up transforming it into a powerhouse of musical composition from whose sound professional careers and great themes emerged (the melody of Your Woman, by White Town , now brought back into fashion by Dua Lipa, is sound created with an ST, as well as Ray of Light by Madonna or some songs by Mike Oldfield, to give some examples). In any case, this is a simplification of the situation because the musical situation at the time was quite complex with the division between own synthesizer sound and the increasing use of samples, recorded sound that was already becoming a possible reality in the video game thanks to the memory increase over 8 bits.
History of the 16 bit demosesce
In any case, after completing the necessary history lesson, what we are dealing with is something very unique. From the more active demoescene around these machines, people who keep working and producing software, demos and music on these machines, we get a truly interesting production: over 12 hours of ST demoescene sound packed with engaging tunes, some of them truly emblematic, emulated in Amiga, thus saving the historical rivalry between both platforms. A complete journey through time spanning decades of independent production to the present day, condensed into a single album that will serve as a memorable accompaniment for lazy afternoons.
Oxygene logo
The album, produced by Oxygene for the meeting of the scene in Revision 2020, can work perfectly on an Amiga with 1 Mb of memory, if you have one on hand, or it can also be emulated. It is prepared to work without the Kickstart rom (the necessary component to be able to emulate a Amiga legally), so you only need to download an emulator like WinUAE, unzip the zip, indicate the address of the disk (which ends in .adf) and make sure that the system to be emulated has 1 Mb of Memory in total (the default configuration is 512 kb on chip and another 512 of slow memory, so it should work without touching anything).
Once started, the intro you can see at the beginning of this news will start and it will start playing music randomly. It has an extensive menu organized in different themes, temporary moments or groups that we can manage with the mouse to choose if we want something in particular, but it does not work sequentially so once the topic is finished it will jump to another randomly, and so during those 12 hours if we don't touch it. At the end of the list we will find very interesting technical details about the emulation process
A great way to discover a way of understanding music that lasts today.
