Among the included productions are Nucleus and Modulae, probably the most well loved and beautifully executed demos to be found on the IIgs, as well as the playable demo of the group’s take on the pseudo-3D shooter Space Harrier. I recently covered this release over at TouchArcade, and will grab a bit of it to further set the stage.įTA and the associated groups Apple Chemical Software (ACS) and Second Sight Software were well known in the pre-web online Apple II communities for their to-the-metal, assembly-coded demos, games, and utilities that pushed the Apple II to its limits. See FTA’s best loved demo, Modulae, running under PC emulation. And, it’s a very interesting release in a way that I won’t here discuss, as I like the app available for all to download…

It’s a free app that provides a means for folks to see these GS programs running “live”, as opposed to in video form, which just isn’t the same. They have been hard at work on ActiveGS, a front-end for the Apple IIgs emulator KEGS, perhaps best known as the web plug-in that powers the Virtual Apple ][ website which allows anyone with a modern browser to play Apple classic games on the web.įTA has recently released an iOS version of ActiveGS bundled with a number of demos and games of theirs and associated groups. (I didn’t admit this at the time, mind you.)įTA hasn’t faded away into nothingness like so many demogroups of yore. The Amiga demos I had to show were clearly more technically impressive, but FTA’s demos were polished beyond most anything I’d seen on the Amiga. (The GS actually had much nicer audio hardware, but it was hobbled by a mere 64K (kilobytes) of audio RAM as compared to the Amiga’s 1MB.) And it was FTA demos with which they countered my volleys.

Of course, the Amiga was vastly superior from a technical perspective, but the IIgs was a nice machine and these guys were among the faithful. Arnold, Chris and I engaged in a bit of friendly ribbing of the platform rivalry sort - me with the Amiga and those guys with the IIgs. The IIgs demoscene was a smallish one, and without question the most prominent demogroup for the platform was a French group known as the Free Tools Association or FTA. They were quite impressed with the Amiga demos I showed them and were thrilled when Apple IIgs demos started to appear on the scene. I had that Amiga for a few years, but had recently been an Apple IIgs user, and a few friends of mine were still rocking the IIgs, among them of MacRumors, TouchArcade and AppShopper and of AppShopper.

I called up The Board, a local BBS run by Myron Sothcott, and downloaded a demo called Raster Magic by Megaforce. I saw my first true demoscene production (or “demo”) the night I received my mail order Amiga 2000 back in 1989.

Long-time readers may be aware of the fact that I’ve long been a big fan of the demoscene.

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