Saturday, February 25, 2023
Game Covers - Virtual Worlds (Commodore Amiga)
Tuesday, September 06, 2022
Game Covers - 3D Construction Kit 2 (Commodore Amiga)
This product is an amazing leap forward in software technology. It brings you the most powerful and impressive utility for your computer - but is really easy and fun to use.
After a further 18 months of research, using new proprietary techniques, the award winning Incentive team have developed the follow up to the original 3D Construction Kit.
With a host of new features, 3D Construction Kit 2.0 is truly at the leading edge of Virtual Reality. The inclusion of a data disk full of pre-designed items and scenes means you no longer have to create all your own 3D objects from scratch. Simply look in the special colour catalogue, choose the object you want and bring it into your environment. There are cars, houses, boats, trees, furniture - all you need to form the basis of a virtual world.
Just imagine. You can design your own dream house, then drive or fly around it, making changes - colour, shading, shape, detail, layouts, sounds, animations - anything you want.
When you know what Virtual Reality is all about, you can really let your imagination take you into a different world!
A PDF copy of the instruction manual can be downloaded here via the Unofficial 3D Construction Kit website at www.3dconstructionkit.co.uk
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Now That's What I Call Stuart's Favourite Music 56 - Markus Captain Kaarlonen (Space Debris)
Way back, before I got a Commodore Amiga in 1992, I used to look forward to visiting our family friend Colin who wowed me on each visit with his Amiga 500. He would show me the latest fantastic audio/visual demos on that computer. Remember, I still only had an 8-bit Commodore 64 at that point, so hearing (and seeing) a home computer play back music that featured realistic sounding instruments and effects was totally mind-blowing. These demos were part of the massive 'demoscene' that dominated the Amiga and other micros in Europe during that time.
At its peak in the late 80s to mid-90s, the Amiga demoscene featured some fantastic songs, many of them created using the freely available Sound Tracker software and saved in .mod format. Most were released during demoscene parties that took place all over Europe.
Countless .mod files were made for the Amiga, but one of my all-time favourites is a track called Space Debris, written by Markus Captain Kaarlonen. The song took part in a music competition during the Anarchy Easter Conference Party in 1991and came first place unsurprisingly. Besides having a fantastic melody, the song really pushed the Amiga and proved you could create incredible music with only 4 voices playing at the same time.
Sound Tracker made writing and composing music so much easier and accessible to people like me who had an interest in writing music, but not the skill of being able to perform or the money to buy fancy hardware and sequencers. Space Debris and many other mods are what got me into writing my own 'tracked' music.
Computer and VGM (Video Game Music) may not be everyone's cup of tea, but give it a listen if you've not heard it before. Remember, this was created on a computer that came out in 1987!
And if you think that version sounds a bit dated, then try this amazing modern remix by D4XX