<h2>Atari ST</h2>
<p>
One day a friend of my dad visted and brought round a new computer
called the Atari ST. Several things impressed me about this machine,
not least the fact you could have a whole 16 colours on the screen at
the same time! Around this time I realised the Spectrums game playing
days where limited. I had also outgrown the venrable Dragon. This was
the machine I had to have, and it would also be the machine I would
really cut my teeth on as a programer.
</p>
<p>
Although I wrote a few utilities in GFA-Basic like a full Car Wars designer
and event resolver it was the "Demo Scene" that gave me a chance to become handy
with 68k assember. I credit my experience with the low level bitbashing
of demo coding for the skills I find so useful today in low level embedded hacking.

<h4>The Demo's</h4>

<p>
Myself, my brother and a couple of school friends started a demo group called
ST-Squad (imaginative name huh?). Our first few demos where sample demos (basically
I would sample several sections of a track and then monkey around with the order to
do a basic re-mix of the soundtrack. In these demos John did most of the code (he
later did a screen for the Decade Demo as well as some Amiga games). I mainly handled
the music and sample playback routines (mainly optimising them). The demos where
<ul>
<li>The Ghostbusters Demo</li>
<li>The 007 Demo</li>
<li>The Batdance Demo</li>
</ul>
During the time of those first few demos we met Laurent who was an artist who would
go under the handle "Master". I also met a very talented coder called Griff. It was
around this time we got together with Electronic Images and spent a weekend at Count
Zero's house and coded up the "Decade Demo". I did not contribute much but moral support
for that demo. However after that I did a few standalone demos and continued
experimenting with various demo routines.
<p>
The only real demo that I "officially" released was a single screen demo called "The Amazing Demo"
which featured graphics from a scottish artist who went under the name "Alba".
<p>
Some of the other hacks I was pleased with from the time included:
<ul>
<li>Sprite-code generator - created optimised sprite drawing code based on the sprite itself</li>
<li>Scriptable 3D viewer (based on original engines by Griff and the Dynamic Due?).</li>
<li>A multi-waveform generator - could create various format tables for demos</li>
</ul>
    
<h4>The Music Players</h4>
    
<h5>Trackers</h5>
    <p>
    
    Trackers was a generic term applied to multi-channel sample sound
    players. The original was a program called Soundtracker which ran
    on the Commodore Amiga. Where the Amiga has a custom sound chip
    to sum the four channels of sample data, the ST had to do this by
    hand.

    </p>
    <p>
    
    There where two principle trackers available for the Atari. These
    where:
    <ul>
	<li>TCB Tracker written by Ander Nielsen of The Care Bears
	    democrew</li>
	<li>?Synctracker? written by memebers of the Sync demo
	    crew</li>
    </ul>

    There was also a multi-channel sample player written by 2 Bit
    systems called Quartet.