During our recent house move I discovered my long lost Amiga 1200 in the attic. It had stopped working properly a long time ago but I couldn’t bear to dump at the time. However, I had no room to store a broken relic so it had to go. Along with the Amiga 1200 went my huge collection of public domain demos. These demos came on single or double low density 3.5″ floppy disks and were self contained and self booting programs that, once loaded, would play up-to-the-minute moving graphics along with an 8-bit tune or two. Anyways, I just found a few stray demos and was about to throw them in the bin too when I thought I would quickly Google them…and I’m glad I did. It turns out that there are still communities that are interested in the demos, like the Amiga Demo Archive, and the search quickly pointed towards YouTube (Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier!?). Like I said, I had loads and they varied in quality but there were a few that stood out for various reasons and I managed to find every one I was looking for :-)

While many of them don’t really do it for me now, my all time fave’s still manage to hit the spot –

Mina Omistan

Fairlight – 242

Part of the reasons I loved these demos was because of the 8-bit tunes. I was making my own music with OctaMED at the time so was totally into the whole scene. I was constantly amazed at what people were doing with limited sampling time and limited tracks. Soon after the nostalgic warmth came a horrible realisation…with all the disks that I dumped were all the ones with all my old tunes on! The first electronic music that I wrote :-(

Ho hum! Worse things happen…