Demo Software
Most demos were written in 68000 assembly language, although a few were written in C and other languages. To utilize full hardware performance, Amiga demos were optimized and written entirely for one purpose in assembly (avoiding generic and portable code). Additional performance was achieved by utilizing several co-processors in parallel with the 68000. These co-processors include, Copper (a co-processor for synchronizing custom chipset writes to video display sync) and Blitter (a chip capable of quickly moving blocks of graphical data from one position on the screen to another). Sometimes performance optimizations were so aggressive that operating system control had to be disabled during a demo to avoid a crash or to achieve real-time rendering.
Antitrax 2010 (ATX) released the very first "megademo", called Antitrax 2010 Megademo, in 1987.
Eric Schwartz produced a series of animated demos that ran with MoviePlayer, an animation software package similar to Macromedia Flash. The animated demos drew heavily on the whimsy and graphic style of comic strips.
Red Sector Incorporated (RSI) produced a piece of software called the RSI Demomaker, which allowed users to script their own demos, replete with scrolltext, vectorballs, plasma screens, etc.
Full demos range from under 128 KB to several megabytes. There have been several thousand demos produced in many countries. Some active demo countries were Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, UK, Poland and others.
Read more about this topic: Amiga Demos