At Assembly 2006 in Helsinki the main demo competition went to an Amiga demo. Starstruck, by the Swedish-based group The Black Lotus (TBL), scored 10,891 points. Fairlight’s Windows demo track one came second with 7,330, and Kewlers and mfx’s 1995 third with 6,796. The Amiga it was written for was not a stock machine: the group’s notes ask for the AGA chipset, a 68060 processor at 50 MHz or faster and about 50 MB of fast memory, and they say that at the party itself the demo ran in WinUAE, an Amiga emulator for the PC.
Fast facts
- Group: The Black Lotus.
- Released: at Assembly 2006, Helsinki, 3 to 6 August 2006; final Amiga version 11 April 2018.
- Result: first in the demo competition, 10,891 points.
- Platform: Amiga with the AGA chipset, a 68060 at 50 MHz or faster, about 50 MB of fast RAM and 2 MB of chip RAM; later converted to the Atari Falcon.
- Credits: code by Rubberduck, Kalms, Erique and ReJ; music by Blaizer; graphics by Tudor, Louie and Duffe; Falcon conversion by MiKRO.
The Assembly win
Assembly’s results list Starstruck in the same “Demo competition” as the PC entries, not in a separate Amiga category, and it won by more than 3,500 points. By then TBL had won the Amiga demo competition at Breakpoint in Germany three years running, the last time in 2005 with Ocean Machine.
The demo’s hardware requirements explain how it was shown. Commodore’s own Amigas used the 68020, 68030 and 68040 processors. Starstruck asks for a 68060, a processor none of them used, together with around 50 MB of fast memory. The group’s notes to the final version say that the Assembly screening “was run in WinUAE”. Demozoo’s tags for the demo list what is on screen: an animated sky, projected shadows, a robot and an underwater scene. No public source describes how the code produces them.
Awards and the final version
The Scene.org Awards gave Starstruck their best graphics and best direction awards for 2006. The best demo award for that year went to the Assembly runner-up, Fairlight’s track one.
TBL never released a finished Amiga version at the time. MiKRO of Mystic Bytes converted the demo to the Atari Falcon, and the group fixed visual glitches and improved performance along the way. Most of those fixes went back into the Amiga code, but the Amiga release stayed at its party version. Before Revision 2018, according to Kalms and Emoon’s notes, people began asking what had happened to it, and Britelite of Dekadence persuaded Kalms to go back to the source code, which was “lying around in Dropbox”. The final Amiga version came out on 11 April 2018. “12 years is not exactly quick,” the notes admit, “but yes, this is the final version.”
Sources
- Assembly 2006, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): dates and place, demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2006/assembly06/results.txt
- Kalms and Emoon, “Final version of Starstruck”, text file with the final release, 11 April 2018 (web, secondary copy): the WinUAE screening at Assembly, the Falcon conversion, the 2018 release and the hardware requirements. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2006/assembly06/demo/tbl-starstruck-finalversion.zip
- Scene.org Awards 2006, archive of winners and nominees (web, secondary): best graphics, best direction and best demo. https://awards.scene.org/archive.php?year=2006
- Breakpoint 2005, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Amiga demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2005/breakpoint05/results.txt
- Demozoo, production entry for Starstruck (web, secondary): release date, credits, the Falcon conversion and tags. https://demozoo.org/productions/25001/