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The Public Domain Scene.
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  The Amiga has had a very well established '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 promisingly, 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 will see 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. Personally 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!!!

  Perhaps what is needed is one of the major Acorn magazine to
feature a 'learn coding' series of articles, featuring all the
'naughty stuff which staff at Acorn have nightmares about' such as
direct memory access (shock horror!), writing to the VIDC
(aaarrrggghhh!) etc.

"The Acorn PD scene is meandering along - where it is heading - who
knows!!"

By Phill Coleman from the Data Stream.

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