3. Choosing a platform

With an aligned team newly built, primed, hazed and ready to go, our first collective decision towered above us: for which Atari platform were we to develop an intro?  Whilst such a level of granular detail is of little-to-no interest to the broader demoscene, history has consistently demonstrated that this decision still requires careful thought.  Each potential platform has its own pitfalls - as well as its own committed Atari fanbase.

At our first "Caulky and the Nutmeg Mine Away Day", we identified two core hardware choices:

Atari 520 STMF

Choice A: Atari 520 STMF - Reflecting the classic preference of the Atari connoisseur, the 520 STMF has been target platform for some of the greatest demos ever seen on home computers.  Famously, back in the day this configuration was used by a swathe of Atari royalty figures, including Mad Max of TEXT, Manikin of The Lost Boys Of London, Birdy of Happy Packer, Ian Christ of Quango Inc., Speculum of Automation and the fiercely crew-independent and iconoclastic He Who Laughs Last, Laughs The Loudest.  It was also on the 520 STMF where famous effects such as scroll-texts, sprites and rasters were first invented and showcased.  We were keen to continue this legacy.  This was especially the case because sound on the 520 STMF is known to be (i) shit and (ii) hard to programme, thereby accruing us more "technical merit" brownie points from the rest of the scene.

In the end though, with much regret we had to rule out the 520 STMF as a target platform for our work.  This is because it is only equipped with 0.5mb of memory.  This amount is entirely unsuitable for storing and playing back a full pop song - even if using the Happy Packer twice over.

Atari 1040 STE with 4mb RAM and unlimited HDD storage

Choice B: Atari 1040 STE with 4mb RAM and unlimited HDD storage - The other choice that we considered at length was to "max up" to an Atari machine with almost unlimited capabilities.  Its configuration is so powerful that it was recently declared demoscene standard, whether you're like it or not.  The enormous capacity effectively enables a near infinity of full pop songs to be stored and played back in a single demo.

Quickly though, we concluded that it was not at all appropriate to use this platform either.  This is because demos that use a 4mb STE with HDD remain extremely controversial within the demoscene.  The controversy arises because it is possible to create an animation using commercial PC video editing software, and then simply play the outputted video back directly from the STE's hard-drive using its powerful hardware.  Such an approach ultimately requires no coding at all, and has now been used in several Atari "demos" including Bad Apple, The Coder's Guide To The Demoscene and, most shockingly of all, the NSFW SpaSTiba 2024WE (NB: readers should not click this link at work or school, as the downloaded binary unrepentantly displays graphic images of some bloke being noshed off by a cat).

Given the overwhelming issues described above, we were therefore left with no option but to somehow find a middle ground.  These constraints led to us adopting choice C: a 520 STMF boasting 8mb of RAM.  This platform is ideal because it allows us to showcase our significant coding skills by producing full pop song playback without the support of those STE hardware "cheats" described above.  Moreover, the generous 8mb of RAM enables us to efficiently store any full pop song without technical barriers.  The only disadvantage to this approach is that 520 STMFs with 8mb RAM do not actually exist.  However, careful configuration of the Hatari emulator can allow modern-day users to imagine just what this could have been like had 1980s Atari engineers been slightly more forward-looking.