The Amiga has had a very well esablished 'PD scene' for a number of years,
one of the bigger libraries needs to sell 80,000 discs just to break even.
The scene (for want of a better word!) on the Acorn machines started off
fairly promising, with groups such as Brothers In ARM, ARMageddon et al.
releasing demos that were pushing the machine, then all of a sudden they
disappeared. Brothers In ARM were on National Service, ARMageddon, like many demo coders had moved on to commercial projects.
Is a second wave of coders now coming through? With the launch of the A3010, the Acorn range could at last compete with the Amiga - does this mean we willsee an explosion of PD akin to that on the 16 bits? Not really - the A3010
has been around for about a year, and although there have been a few new
'groups' the general 'scene' is still fairly lethargic when compared to the
Amiga. The price of the A3010 has come down even further now - does this
mean we will at last see a rapid expansion of the scene. Personnally I hope
so, but I doubt it!
Demos are popular, but to be honest, high quality demos are few and far
between. BytePool Productions are creating some high quality stuff
(especially Nirvana), but it seems that we are back to square one as most
demo coders are still finding their feet, and hence the quality of most of
the demos is no better than the earliest stuff released. Once this new breed of coders have learnt all the basic stuff, then they can begin to push back
the boundaries, experiment with new routines and generally show off!!!
