Atari Demo Crews
revisited
on the
Web
(Part 1)
When I started to have a look at Atari Crew sites on the web I
thought it was a good idea, later it turned out that most sites
look very similar, not in design but the contents is always the
same (News, Members, Products, History, ...) which is a bit
boring for a single review with tons of websites. Not that I
have a better idea to design a demo crew website, but I guess
the result is probably best served in small doses, so I decided
to split up the big review and here comes part 1 of the big
Atari Crew Web Review.
Avena
The Avena website adds another case to the category of sites
that haven't been updated for quite some time. At least we get a
nice welcome screen with a sine sprite scroller. The other parts
of the well designed page are a bit sparse. For example there is
only one news entry, a link to wikipedia, a short description of
the group and a member list. Wow! Well, again the best thing
about the site beside the design is the "files" page which
contains screenshots, descriptions and download possibilities
for the Avena demos. Even the unfinished "Binliner" screens and
their latest PC product "0010 1010" are available.
URL: http://www.avena.com/
Checkpoint
Now let's see how checkpoint presents the remains of their
glorious work of the past. It seems checkpoint has also chosen
frames and the site is splitted into three vertical frames. The
left frame contains the navigation bar, the right one a famous
graphic by modmate and a logo and the centre frame contains the
actual content.
The last real update to the "news" page was in 2004, so it seems
checkpoints activities have come to a halt atm. Well let's check
the other 3 pages then. The "members" page shows a photograph of
all Checkpoint members and some information about their function
and contact data. It also offers links to their own homepages if
available.
The "releases" page contains screenshots and download-links for
a lot of Checkpoint demos, it also mentions the system
requirements and credits. This is for sure the most interesting
page of the Checkpoint site. Last not least Checkpoint offers
some links to other crews, magazines and the usual Atari stuff.
If you want some information about the Checkpoint members or
miss any of their releases a visit of the site might be a good
idea.
URL: http://checkpoint.atari.org
Cream Headquarter
The cream hq appears as a cleanly designed website which
contains of two frames. The top frame contains the site logo and
the navigation bar. The big lower frame holds the actual content
of each page. The navigation and orientation work like a charm
so let's see what we find here. Besides the common start page
with news, you can enter a page called "inside", it contains a
biography of cream and their products. I guess it's not
necessary to mention that the "stuff" section contains
screenshots, details and download links for the cream products.
The "jam" page contains TOS and Windows compatible versions of
the JAM player including various plugins and song packages. Well
there is another page called "misc" it contains links to
external websites, recent songs by Tao in different file formats
(mp3, sndh, sc68) as well.
In addition you can find a page with an email form, a diary and
a forum which hasn't been used so much yet, perhaps you want to
add a few words there?
All in all a nicely designed and very serious looking website.
If you miss any of creams releases or want to get in touch with
them, it might be worth a visit.
URL: http://www.creamhq.de/
Cybernetics
The Cybernetics site starts off with a nicely designed splash
screen. After clicking onto the Cybernetics logo you get into a
framed homepage consisting of three parts, a logo frame at the
top, a navigation frame on the left and a content page using the
biggest part of the screen. A real classic setup. Let's throw an
eye onto the navigation.
The homepage contains a list of members and some news for the
website, besides some of the members left their email-addresses
so you can easily get in touch once you remove the word NOSPAM
from the address :).
The bio link teleports you onto a page that contains the whole
history of the cybernetics from 1988 to 1999, if you are
interested in that sort of things make sure you pay them a
visit.
Another interesting page is called products and contains lots of
download links to perhaps all Cybernetics demos and
applications.
The Headline Demos contains lots of screenshots and detailed
descriptions of the most important Cybernetics demos. A lot of
pages cover their Relapse demo, where every screen is described
in detail. A similar grade of details has been used on their
Tools section which is surely interesting because of the famous
Synthetic Arts. You can also find descriptions and screenshots
for prototype products, like 90s arts, a collection of
soundtracks in MOD and MP3 format. Last not least you get some
nice GFA punchs and other goodies in the Bonus section and the
mandatory link page.
All in all a nicely designed site which is worth a visit or two
for sure, I am pretty sure you will find something nice there.
URL: http://cyber.savina.net/
Delta Force
This is a great site with very cool design. I guess everybody
knows that site already so I will keep the description short.
The site contains the fantastic "Atari ST DEMO HISTORY" which
covers major demos from 1987 to 1999 and an archive containing
most of these demos. There is also a page showing screenshots of
all demos which were done by Flix, a skin for Winamp - hmm, not
that great - and some nice documents about coding techniques
(some in German, others in English). Make sure you visit it at
least once if you have never been there.
URL: http://wwwbrauer.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~brandtf/df.html
Dune
Well what can you write about a website that hardly exists? Ok
they acquired a domain and MIC did a nice logo, but that's all.
Hopefully we will see some content here before dune goes
completely inactive...
URL: http://www.dune-design.com/
Replicants Memorial
Site
The Replicants memorial site is still under construction, what
can we expect there?
The site is nicely presented with lots of different Replicants
logos on top of the site, what I personally don?t like is the
fact that it has been created for a fixed resolution.
Downloads of cracked games? Surely not, you have to look
somewhere else for that. The start page contains the latest news
and update information about the site. Another page contains a
very brief history from the beginning in 1988, where Hofa, A-
Team and Shogun joined their forces to create a major cracking
crew. The name Replicants was found by the only member of
Shogun, who called himself Ninja. As you know the Replicants
became members of the Union later and I guess some of the former
Union members won?t be too happy to find the Union called a
?cracking association?.
The next page contains just a list of the member of the
Replicants and the crews which fusioned to become the
Replicants. It would be more interesting to get a bit more
information about the different guys and their roles in the
crew.
The most interesting part for oldskool fans is for sure the
Cracktros page, it offers you a small collection of 5 intros on
2 subpages, which isn?t really what I would call stunning, but
on top of the page you find a small link called the ?intros
browser? if you follow this link you will find another 83
intros, nice. Surely a cool possibility to have a look at all
these prehistoric raster and scroller screens. And again sorry
for all the retro-gamers, the intros have been separated from
the games, so you can only download the intros.
As you can guess from the notes above, the link called ?cracked
games? doesn?t contain any download links but a huge list of
games that have been cracked by the Replicants. I think you
won't be astonished by the fact that the Replicants didn't crack
a single game made by Thalion or Eclipse, respect for that.
Two other sections are available from the site, but only one of
them is yet functional. The Links section isn?t yet build it
seems, and also the guestbook seems to be a bit thin yet.
Overall you have to be a Replicants fan or an oldskool fanatic
to find something really interesting on the site. The
information on the site is a bit sparse, but the site claims to
be still under construction so perhaps there is more to come.
URL: http://replicants.free.fr/
The
Watchmen
WTF are the watchmen? Never heard of? Well you are in good
company then. Anyway let's take a closer look at their website
and prods. On their frontpage they state that TWM (The Watchmen)
were active between 1989 and 1992, the site is presented with a
yellow font on black ground and a watchmen logo in the top right
corner. The whole site is offered in two flavours "frames" and
"no frames", the only difference seems to be the navigation bar
at the top which doesn't scroll out of the window in the frames
version.
You find some information about the names of the crew members
and two links to their current homepages. Below that there are a
few links to their demos. Like the "New Order Demo" which
features a noisy sample and two one plane scrollers or the
DefCon1 demo which never loads completely, but crashes right in
the loading screen - a simple byte bending scroller. The Big
STOS demo surprises you with flickering rasters and five
screens, none of them is really impressive but it's not bad for
BASIC. Another demo is called "Things that made us go hmmm...",
hmmm a palette animation FX with some text on it? Ok, press
space to get some more gfx and a sort of main menu, which gives
access to a few more mediocre screens, however you can see an
improvement here. It also seems that TLB helped them a bit with
the demo, at least you can find comments in one demo that allow
to draw that conclusion. The last two pages cover an intro for a
sample disk and an early demo of a game using 4 way sync-
scrolling, a running hero and NO enemies :). Perhaps the most
advanced piece of code you find on the Watchmen site. Overall
the site describes all the watchmen prods in a proper way and
has also a decent amount of screenshots to give you an
impression about all the screens. What it lacks is a description
on which system you can actually run those screens. Most
watchmen demos seem to be really touchy about the machine and
TOS specs. One of the screens didn't work at all (I gave up
after three tries with different configurations). Who might want
to browse this site? Friends of TWM and their fans, as well as
anyone interested in the not so famous branches of the tree of
demo history :).
URL: http://www.duo-creative.com/twm/
Unlimited
Matricks
When you remember the most important demo of ULM called ?Dark
Side of the Spoon? you probably think about very technical and
polished stuff with nice sounds. The frontpage of the ULM site
however is very simple. It contains a few links, one leads to
the history of ULM with lots of details about the demos and why
they where created, a really nice read. It also contains a few
statistics and a list of all ULM releases. It would be nice to
have some disk images for download here too.
Most of the other links are dead, which is proof of the fact
that the page isn?t that well maintained.
Apart from that, the most stunning part is a javascript/html
remake of the ?Dark Side of the Spoon?. Well done Gunstick. This
part of the site is worth a visit on its own. If you have ST-
Sound and Modplug installed it also plays the original music
from the demos. The main menu of the demo can be operated with
the mouse, while most other screens are just screenshots.
Intro - fully functional / sample
Loader - fully functional / YM
Main Menu - fully functional (without parallax background) / mod
Playfield Screen - screenshot / YM
Ball Projection Demo - screenshot / YM
Lost Boys / Twiddle Screen - screenshot / YM
Respectables / A little Bit of Everything - screenshot / YM
Parallax Distorter - screenshot / sample
Lost Boys / Caniballistic Deforgy - screenshot
Overscan 3D - screenshot / YM
Wrong Door - screenshot / sample
Unlimited Sprites Demo (behind the door with the different
pattern) - screenshot /YM
URL: http://www.cpu.lu/ulm/
Cyclone / X-Troll for Alive, 2005-12-15
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