A woman’s silhouette dances across the screen, melts into a different dancer, and is swallowed by a strobing white flash. Words in an art deco script flash up for a frame or two and vanish, and the rave track underneath keeps getting faster. State of the Art was made by Spaceballs, a group from Norway, for a stock Amiga 500 with 1 MB of memory, and it won the Amiga demo competition at The Party in Denmark in December 1992. Amiga Format reviewed it three months later: “These demos are becoming an art form.”
Fast facts
- Group: Spaceballs, from Norway.
- Released: at The Party, Aars, Denmark, 27 to 29 December 1992.
- Placing: first in the Amiga demo competition, with 585 points.
- Platform: Amiga 500 with 1 MB of Chip RAM, on one floppy disk.
- Credits: code by Lone Starr and a second Spaceballs coder, graphics by TMB Designs, music by Travolta.
Winning at The Party
The Party 1992 was the second of the big Christmas gatherings in Aars. The organisers counted 2,500 visitors. Twenty-four Amiga demos were ranked, and State of the Art won clearly: 585 points against 354 for Anarchy’s 3D Demo II and 182 for TRSI’s TrackDemo. It was Spaceballs’ second competition win of the year, after Wayfarer won the demo competition at The Gathering in Norway that April.
Dancers from videotape
The dancers are real people. Jimmy Maher’s history of the Amiga, drawing on Spaceballs’ own disk magazine R.A.W., identifies the main dancer as a former disco-dancing champion who was the girlfriend of Lone Starr, the demo’s chief coder. She was filmed on videotape. Lone Starr then spent five months writing a tool to turn the outlines of the recorded dancers into vector shapes. In his own account, another member of the group “had some ideas of how to save animations from videotape as 2d-vector figures”, and with the finished program “I could morph, zoom and move objects, and it was able to do animations up to four planes.”
Tracing live footage like this is rotoscoping. Because the dancers were outlines rather than pictures, the program could morph one into another. Amiga Format was impressed by exactly that: “Stunningly quick vector polygons display a variety of dancers, in a James Bond-style silhouette, who are sequenced to the music. After a dancer has strutted away, it is quickly morphed into another, and the transition is so smooth it’s incredible.” Behind the dancers ran “beautiful copper backgrounds”: colour changes made line by line down the screen by the Amiga’s copper coprocessor.
On the Amiga, a solid shape was usually drawn with the blitter: it could draw a polygon’s outline in its line mode and then fill it. Public sources do not describe the demo’s drawing code in that detail.
The demo was written straight to the hardware. It boots from its own disk without AmigaDOS, and in its original form it used fixed memory addresses, so on an Amiga set up differently from the one it was written on it was likely to crash. Maher records that members of the group Skid Row later fixed it to run on other Amigas, and added their own verdict to the title screen: “How could this demo win????? Lame programming and useless trackloader.”
Music and style
Travolta’s soundtrack is rave music, and the demo borrows the look of a rave. Maher describes the strobe sequence where the whole screen flashes between black and white from frame to frame, and the ending, where the tempo climbs “beyond the capability of any human musician (or dancer)” before cutting to silence and a credits screen: “Phew! Spaceballs: Simply State of the Art”. Amiga Format found the music “quite ravey, but it’s not up to the standard of” LSD’s Jesus on E’s, reviewed the month before: “Where State of the Art shines is in its graphics.”
Arguments in the scene
Not every scener agreed with the voters. Many demo coders held that effects should be calculated in real time, not played back from recorded data, and State of the Art was almost all playback. When R.A.W. collected opinions on the best demos of 1992, Chaos of Sanity wrote that Lone Starr “should get himself a videocamera and make music videos NOTHING is realtime in this prod”. Dr. Jekyll of Andromeda asked “Is this a demo?”, and Laxity of Kefrens wrote that “you cannot convince me that a bunch of jumpin’ zombies make a winnerdemo”. Lone Starr’s answer was that “we won because this demo had a new different style, and it was a demo all kinds of Amiga-owners would enjoy, not only the coders.”
Outside the scene
His answer held up in Britain, where public-domain libraries sold demos to people who never went to a party. Amiga Format reviewed State of the Art in its PD Demo Zone in March 1993, and the same issue’s letters page suggested that “the guys who wrote the State of the Art demo” could make a self-running advertising demo for the A1200 in high-street shops. It then appeared in the monthly best-seller lists that libraries sent the magazine: third at 17 Bit Software in May 1993, second at NBS in June, and still ninth at Visage Computers in September. By July an American public-domain dealer was advertising it in AmigaWorld as an “Awesome demo with silhouetted dancers, cool backdrops, hot music!”
The demo also reached television. In November 1993 a reader of the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review reported seeing it running on a video wall behind an interviewee in a programme about hackers on the Australian ABC’s current affairs show Attitude. In 1997 the Italian Amiga Magazine, looking back over the Amiga scene, called it the demo “that more than any other suits the outside public”, and said it had been used in music videos.
Spaceballs followed it at The Party 1993 with 9 Fingers, again built around dancers traced from video. In May 1994 Amiga Format’s Steve Bradley, complaining about how few demos held a viewer’s attention, wrote that “few demos match the standards of State of the Art, Jesus On E’s and Nine Fingers.”
Sources
- The Party 1992, competition results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): visitors, Amiga demo competition placings and scores. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/theparty92/results.txt
- The Gathering 1992, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Wayfarer first in the demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/1992/thegathering92/results.txt
- Amiga Format issue 44, March 1993, p. 177: PD Demo Zone, Andy Nuttall, review of State of the Art (Cynostic PD disk D0031, “1 Meg Chip RAM”); and the letters page reply about an A1200 shop demo.
- Amiga Format issue 46, May 1993: PD Demo Zone, “Top 10 Demos of the Month” from 17 Bit Software.
- Amiga Format issue 47, June 1993: PD Demo Zone, “Top 10 Demos of the Month” from NBS.
- Amiga Format issue 50, September 1993, p. 158: “Top Ten Demos of the Month”, from Visage Computers.
- AmigaWorld, July 1993: public-domain mail-order advertisement, disk DEM 152.
- The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, vol. 10 no. 11, November 1993, p. 4: “Media Watch”, on Attitude.
- Amiga Format issue 59, May 1994: Steve Bradley’s feature on public-domain demos.
- Amiga Magazine (Italy) issue 94, November 1997, p. 22: history of the Amiga demo scene; State of the Art in 1992, “codice di Lonestarr, musica di Travolta”.
- Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), pp. 187–190: the demo’s structure, hardware requirements, the dancer and the conversion tool, the Skid Row fix and the scene’s reception, citing Lone Starr’s “Making of State of the Art” and Spaceballs’ articles “Woman of State of the Art” and “Best Demos of 1992” in R.A.W. issue 5, May 1993.
- Demozoo, production entry for State of the Art (web, secondary): release date and credits. https://demozoo.org/productions/2/