XtC's Amiga Guide >> Retro XtC

Well, I don't know how long it's taken to pluck up the courage to not only upload my Amiga history, but to actually put together narratives for most of them!  Welcome to the MIND of XtC - a little scary at times, but on the whole mostly harmless! ;-)

RELEASED PROJECTS

	Wayne's World Pong - 30/01/1994 The first release under the 'No Frills' label and possibly my most (in)famous contribution to world of Amiga software! I originally wrote a basic 'Pong' game for a work colleague, but decided I didn't want to write just a plain version - oh no! I sent the disk to 17BIT Software, who wrote back saying... The sound effects are great!  They had us in hysterics while we were playing it - schwing! They included it in their library as... 2989 WAYNES WORLD PONG The only thing has got to do with Waynes World is the absolutely amazing quality samples accompanying the game. Basically its just a bat and ball game. But get to the sound test and there are TONS of extracts from the movie, and they all read from RAM too. Despite being a crap game, it received praise from various Amiga magazines, except Amiga Power who didn't seem to understand why there was a 'Scooby Doo' sample ("Good one, Shaggy!") in the game - obviously, the reviewer hadn't seen the film.  In time, I'll add the reviews as I find them.  If you have a magazine with a review of this game, could you please contact me? xtc at amigaguide.org I also wrote another version that didn't need a keyboard, and would be playable from a cover CD.  I never submitted or released that version - until now. Excellent!  ...Not!  ;-) Original Version - DMS - 846,703 bytes. CD³² Friendly Version - DMS - 669,726 bytes.

	The Magnum Demo - 26/11/1993 The second release under the 'No Frills' label. I (XtC) used to work for a concessionaire for Wall's Ice Cream, and so it gave me great pleasure to help my good friend UVi put together this 'slideshow' - if that's what this production is classed as! Since this demo is UVi's little baby, I will let him explain it to you... UVi writes... "The Magnum Demo" came as a result of the new Vidi Amiga 12 digitizer I'd just bought with my student loan.  I was just scanning some stuff from videotape when there was a commercial for the Magnum ice cream halfway through.  Considering the adverts at the time were bordering on pornography, I figured it would be fun to see if I could get any dodgy shots from it... and I did! As Beavis and Butthead were pretty big at the time, and they spend all their time commenting about stuff on TV, I figured I could stick them both together and make a cool demo...  Not quite Jesus on E's mind, but maybe good enough so that I might be immortalised in the Amiga scene forever. I talked to XtC about the idea, and the next time we met up we pooled my dodgy clips and his long time AMOS experience, and created a monster. (sort of)  Unfortunately, once we'd finished putting the pictures to the sampled speech, we still had half a floppy disk left!!  Never wanting to waste a thing, we filled it full of Beck, accompanied by Beavis and Butthead headbanging.  Cool!..huh, huh, huh! Out of the 4 PD companies we put it to, only one agreed to take it, sending back in return a couple of demo disks.  But Amiga Format liked it and awarded us with "Culture Jammers of the Month".  I think that says something.  I'm not too sure what, but I it does.  Yes, I still have the magazine! Disk 1 - DMS - 647,901 bytes. Disk 2 - DMS - 730,455 bytes.

UNRELEASED PROJECTS

	Project XtC - 05/06/1995 - Unreleased (aka Towards Brimble's Thesmophoria) As the scrolly message in the demo points out, I originally wrote this demo in July of 1992 as visual companion to the music. In 1995, I re-wrote the demo to its current form. There is only one tune on this disk, and its a megamix of some of my favourite game music at the time.  It contains the following... Alien Breed (Well, one instrument at least) Gods Magic Pockets Project X (Rave Mode) Project X (Old Timer Mode) This was my first venture into mixing game music tunes together! Project XtC - DMS - 545,850 bytes.

	The Meg Ryan Slideshow - 12/01/1994 - Unreleased Not really sure why we never released this! My friend Nuts did some experimental tinkering in AMOS back in 1991 to put together a very basic slideshow of HAM images he had grabbed using his brother's (Firefly) Amiga video grabber - can't remember which. I was impressed at the quality of the grabs, but though that the whole slideshow needed something else.  I foolishly took it upon myself to write a more involving slideshow, complete with scrolly and music - for which I managed to gain Allister Brimble's permission to include his 'Wild West Kid' composition. This was the first of two unreleased titles under the 'Ryan Productions' label. Nuts writes... Well, this doesn't half bring back some fond memories seeing this on the net.  I remember when I first started this - my brother wasn't really using his digitizing equipment for his Amiga (he was also a big Amiga freak) so I thought that I would have a dabble. Who better to digitize than the gorgeous Meg Ryan?  So I did a collection of grabs from some of her most popular films at the time.  The best picture is the one you can see here on this site, thats the last one of the slideshow. Each grab was taken from VHS and most of them came out very well, some are a little grainy though. For the life of me though, I have no idea why I added the opening screen to Monkey Island to the slideshow!  I amended the text to read 'The Island Of Nuts'!! P.S. Apologies to XtC for me taking 3 years to do a really crap scrolly message for it  ;-)  Soz Mate. Well, the demo was finished in 1994, and only now has it been made public! It was written on an unexpended A1200, and I think it needs at least 1MB of Chip RAM! Disk 1 - DMS - 516,308 bytes. Disk 2 - DMS - 735,308 bytes.

	The Mariah Carey Slideshow - 1994 - Unreleased Not really sure why we never released this one either!  Actually, Nuts never got around to writing the scrolly text, so the (almost) finished version has exactly the same text as the Meg Ryan Slideshow! The second and last production released under the 'Ryan Productions' label.  Again, my friend Nuts did the video digitizing, and captured some decent HAM images of the Diva that is Mariah Carey. This time, instead of tracked music, I decided to add a huge 1.1Mb sample of Mariah's version of 'Without You' to accompany the slideshow.  All I can remember about writing this slideshow is how difficult it was to play a large sample from floppy disk whilst displaying images.  Needless to say, it requires at least 2Mb of memory! I'll get Nuts to add his thoughts on this other unreleased demo... Disk 1 - DMS - 649,536 bytes. Disk 2 - DMS - 734,981 bytes.

	Michael Jackson Sequences - 1992 - Unreleased Wow!  Now this IS old! This demo utilises a feature added to Audiomaster from version 3 onwards which allows you to set multiple loops within a single sample so that you can sequence it. As you can guess from the title, it contains sequenced music from Michael Jackson in the Extended IFF-8SVX format. Of the four tunes, Black Or White is the only full length sequence.  If you have a copy of Audiomaster 3 or 4 load this tune into it and watch the loop markers bounce all over the place! Disk 1 - DMS - 669,648 bytes. Disk 2 - DMS - 668,519 bytes.

	2 Unlimited, No Limit - 1993 - Unreleased Another sequence using Audiomaster. This sequenced sample occupies all the disk leaving no space for any front end, or even a player! Requires either the PlaySound command from Aegis (available on both the Ghostbusters and Funky Town disks) or Audiomaster 3 or 4.  If you watch the sample being played from within Audiomaster you'll be amazed at how much of the song re-uses itself! No Limit - DMS - 656,290 bytes.

	Ghostbusters (Instrumental) - 1992 - Unreleased Yet another sequence using Audiomaster. Not much to say other than this is a sequence of nearly all the instrumental version of the Ray Parker Jr. 80's anthem!  ;-) Ghostbusters - DMS - 559,916 bytes.

	Funky Town - 1992 - Unreleased This is the last sequence using Audiomaster. A full length sequence of the 1980 hit from Lipps Inc. Funky Town - DMS - 681,675 bytes.

	All My Attempts at 'Music' - Unreleased (262,784 bytes) 'Eat This' - My first experiment with noise.  Lots of original house samples in this one, but not really much of a melody! (106,978 bytes) 'Rock Type' - Big noisey drums - yeah!  I think to begin with I meant well, but completely lost it in the end!  Not sure why I did a cover of Push It by Salt-n-Pepa, but there you go!  This module is classed as unfinished! (300,972 bytes) 'Zero-G' - I purchased the first Zero-G CD back in 1992 - a resource for musicians with (IIRC) 1,000 instruments, breakbeats and sound effects spread over 99 CDDA tracks, and costing a whopping £50!  The two modules in this archive are a good example of what not to do with a CD of this kind!  ;-) (340,418 bytes) 'Sorry Allister' - This is the mix used in the Project XtC demo above. (914,286 bytes) 'Brimble On 17' - Ah, one of my favourites.  This is another megamix of Allister Brimble's music for the following Team17 games; Full Contact, Alien Breed, Project X (Rave & Old Timer), Assassin (Title & HiScore), Body Blows and Superfrog!  Completely mad! (844,293 bytes) 'Stars On Superfrog' - Done in exactly the same style as Brimble On 17, this module contains all the music from Superfrog in one crazy mix! All the above music file archives are in LZX format.