Did the 68k machine have a presence in the demoscene?

[ymk]

I don't think it's an issue of economics or access. Plenty of the most impressive demos for a given platform were made long after it became obsolete.

If you were a game or demo developer, why would you choose a Mac?

No standard low-res graphics mode means rendering to a Post-it note sized window.

The video hardware is dumb as a post, lacking even VGA-style 2D scrolling.

If Apple were remotely serious about gaming, they could have provided a pixel-doubled 320x240 mode at little cost.

What makes demos interesting is combining the capabilities of the hardware in unconventional ways. There's no Mac demoscene because there's nothing interesting about the hardware.

 

[avadondragon]

Personally I think MacFlim is the most demoscene worthy thing I've seen on a Mac.
Full motion B&W video playback with sound on an 8Mhz 68000 machine?!

 

[MrFahrenheit]

There was also a really powerful tool that shipped for free with every Macintosh (up until a point in time), called HyperCard.

HyperCard: part programming language, part game maker, part data organizer, part presentation maker

Anyone from 8 to 80 could learn to use it in ways unique to them. Some made stupid silly animations. Some made card games and other sorts of fun. MYST was first made using HyperCard, for goodness sakes. Some used it for serious work, like databases and invoicing systems.

No other personal computer ever shipped with a GUI as advanced and as powerful as the Mac, prior to about 18 years ago, and no other personal computer shipped with a programming tool as simple and easy to use as HyperCard, free with the system.

 

[Daniël]

I don't think it's an issue of economics or access. Plenty of the most impressive demos for a given platform were made long after it became obsolete.

Because of the nostalgia of the olden days of bedroom coders and the demoscene, which the Macintosh lacked because of the economics and access.

 

[Byrd]

Personally I think MacFlim is the most demoscene worthy thing I've seen on a Mac.
Full motion B&W video playback with sound on an 8Mhz 68000 machine?!

Forgot about MacFlim - agree it's the best modern "demo" we can have. Utterly amazing work.

After Dark screensavers are also nice "demos" - being high res, smooth and some nice effects in many plugins.

 

[ymk]

Because of the nostalgia of the olden days of bedroom coders and the demoscene, which the Macintosh lacked because of the economics and access.

How many children were introduced to computers through Macs in school?

How many parents bought a Mac as a result?

How many Atari, Amiga or Commodore made it into schools? None where I grew up, though PCs had a decent share.

68K Macs have their strengths, but impressive full-screen animation isn't among them.

 

[1200XL M.U.L.E.]

@ymk - My Jr. High School had Macs, maybe 7 to 10, in several classrooms. They were mostly used for word processing. Several of the kids there ended up with a Mac in the home because of this.

My High School had a couple full-blown Mac labs, much for the same purpose: word processing and some simple education applications. I was in the journalism class and the yearbook class. Each class had their own Mac LC (or some pizza style machine - can't remember now) and I remember using some sort of DTP program on them. I can't remember the name as it was almost 30 years ago.

I never heard of Atari, Amiga, or Commodore in any schools where I grew up. When people thought of Atari they pictured a 2600. Nobody knew what an Amiga was except for one kid from Germany in one of my classes. Commodore equated to the C64 which was just a "toy computer" by then.

I don't know what was happening at the university level though. The university I went to had Sun Sparc based workstations and some PC workstations. I imagine a lot of the hardcore demo coders cut their teeth on those machines, leveraging the mathematics they learned in class.

 

[MrFahrenheit]

@ymk - My Jr. High School had Macs, maybe 7 to 10, in several classrooms. They were mostly used for word processing. Several of the kids there ended up with a Mac in the home because of this.

My High School had a couple full-blown Mac labs, much for the same purpose: word processing and some simple education applications. I was in the journalism class and the yearbook class. Each class had their own Mac LC (or some pizza style machine - can't remember now) and I remember using some sort of DTP program on them. I can't remember the name as it was almost 30 years ago.

I never heard of Atari, Amiga, or Commodore in any schools where I grew up. When people thought of Atari they pictured a 2600. Nobody knew what an Amiga was except for one kid from Germany in one of my classes. Commodore equated to the C64 which was just a "toy computer" by then.

I don't know what was happening at the university level though. The university I went to had Sun Sparc based workstations and some PC workstations. I imagine a lot of the hardcore demo coders cut their teeth on those machines, leveraging the mathematics they learned in class.

For Mac DTP, there was PublishIt! Easy, and our school had a license for Ready, Set, Go!

 

[NJRoadfan]

How many children were introduced to computers through Macs in school?

How many parents bought a Mac as a result?

How many Atari, Amiga or Commodore made it into schools? None where I grew up, though PCs had a decent share.

68K Macs have their strengths, but impressive full-screen animation isn't among them.

Replace "Mac" with "Apple II". Macs did not really have a presence in education until the early 90s when the LC came out. Even then it wasn't universal as many districts went PC instead. The Apple II also had a demo scene.... and Publish-IT!.

 

[ymk]

For Mac DTP, there was PublishIt! Easy, and our school had a license for Ready, Set, Go!

Desktop publishing, HyperCard, spreadsheet, etc are nice, but red herrings for the purpose of this topic. I'll agree that 68K Macs were great productivity machines.

Replace "Mac" with "Apple II".

My school district had both. We were using word processing and typing tutor software on Apple IIs as late as 1996.


I'll use the terms "game" and "demo" here interchangeably since the demands on the system are similar. 68K Macs were poor at both for the same reasons.

Being a Mac gamer in the early to mid 90s meant watching groundbreaking releases from Apogee, ID, Epic Megagames, etc on your buddy's PC as you consoled yourself with King's Quest V and SimFarm. Most if not all of these PC titles used low-res VGA and because Apple had nothing comparable, Mac gamers were stuck on the sidelines through a whole era of fast paced side scrollers, fighting games and first person shooters. Mac ports coped with letterboxing, pixel doubling or interlacing, all poor compromises.

An impressive full screen 68K "demo" is the game Full Throttle. That it's playable on a 33MHz 030 is a small miracle. I'd expect other games built on the same engine to work as well.

In short, Macs' processing power lagged behind their displays and that didn't begin to change until the PPC.

 

[Daniël]

How many children were introduced to computers through Macs in school?

How many parents bought a Mac as a result?

How many Atari, Amiga or Commodore made it into schools? None where I grew up, though PCs had a decent share.

Exactly, the nostalgia that does exist for the Mac is mostly from their abundance in US schools, and for those who had it as a family computer in the 90s, in the early multimedia and internet eras. The nostalgia that the people using these computers have for them, fundamentally shaped the collector scene afterwards, including what people collect and use their vintage computers for.

 

[MrFahrenheit]

The game Spectre was a good, fast pasted game, that ran on 68k Macs.

 

[MacOSMonkey]

@Phipli SuperMac shipped PixelPaint (not SuperPaint). Also, SuperMac created and sold (to Adobe) what eventually became Adobe Premiere.

 

[Phipli]

Demoscene demos for Macintosh - Macintosh Garden

16 October 2021 Update - Disinfected the demo "Four Knights". (Mac Demo Amassment 1.2) Many thanks to mrdav and MikeTomTom. 14 August 2019 Update - Added two new demos: Liquid and Hell! (Mac Demo Amassment 1.1) Many thanks to Daxeria.

macintoshgarden.org

 

[Snial]

Good thread. I'd generally go with the "Macs were too expensive for kids; had no graphics acceleration and no low-res modes." thesis. Sure, I think there must have been a bit of demoing going on, but I'd add one more possibility: Mac users didn't care about the demoscene, because mostly they had different fish to fry. Here, I'm trying to think back to '86 onwards and why I never thought about Mac demos. It wasn't like I was completely unaware of the concept, I knew a few people at Uni (UEA, Norwich, UK) who had an Atari ST; probably one or two who had an Amiga and in 1988/1989 one person who had an Archimedes 310. I remember passing a computer shop in Norwich from time to time and seeing the Amiga juggling robot demo and thinking it was really impressive, but not wondering why I didn't see that on a Mac, even though I was aware that the ST crowd were seemingly always trying to reproduce Amiga demos.

I guess one aspect of it was that the Mac always seemed like a computer that was trying to get out of the way: presenting the smallest obstacle to getting what you wanted done. In that sense, everything we did was a demo for the Mac, because everything done demoed its ease of use. But the Mac hardware was never the target of its appeal. For example, the compact Macs were B/W and even by the standards of the day that was unimpressive: even an 8-bit BBC micro could achieve 640x256. My sluggish, 68008-based QL had 32kB of video memory and was more demo-friendly (and again, that reflects on the culture, QL users were obsessed with demoing its preemptive multitasking OS, because basically that's all we had given the tiny user and applications-base).

Oddly enough, there's more of an appeal in a retro Mac demoscene now, because the retro Macs are no longer the smallest obstacle to getting real work done, but fooling around with hardware or software tricks, just because we can, is. Hence, I guess why this thread pops up now, instead of on a BBS or MacWorld article series in 1989.

 

[Forrest]

I think the primary reason there were so few Mac demos was lower priced color Macs were not introduced until 1992 (LC II at $1240 list) and even these lower cost color Macs were 2.5 to 3.5 times the cost of an Atari ST, PC XT clone and Amiga. The Atari ST and IBM XT clones were available by mid 1986 for about $500 plus the cost of a monitor or TV, while the low cost Amiga 500 was available in 1987 for $699. By comparison the first color Mac II was released in 1987 for $3898 to $5498 and these machines were dedicated for business, desk top publishing, graphics creation, CAD or music creation - too expensive for home use.

 

[gcp]

Oh, somehow I missed this thread last year! Fun one...

I will have to dig around my archives and see what I can find. In the ~fall of ~1995 or so, some folks tried to get a 'demo scene' started up for the Mac; some of the nicks that I recall were PunkFloyd & Demos. They wrote some proof of concept demos that ran even on old, 030 class hardware. One I recall was a rotating, depth shaded cube that spun, grew, and shrank, and ran quite smoothly. I believe there was another that did a pseudo-3d 'flythrough', using a 2d grayscale image as bump-mapped terrain. And a third that implemented a high resolution animated flame effect.

These were cool little demos but nothing compared to the full-screen, synchronized to sound and music, multi 'scene' experiences like people were creating in x86 land. I think the coders who were interested in that sort of thing just targeted other hardware and systems. The developers that were drawn to the Mac generally had other interests. That was my sense of it, anyway.

I'll see what I can dig up. I might even have the source code for one or two of them.