Giants – the story by oRBIT/Giants
Background
Giants was created, as far as I remember, when Depth got rid of the swedish division in the 90s. The swedish organizer, D-Coy, came up with the name “Giants” that we adopted. We were about a handful members, but today I only have contact with a few of them. Me (oRBIT) and Wizard (who lived closed back then) spent weekends with coding Giant-stuff. He was remarkable better then me in math so he was behind the more technical advanced things, while I was more for the frequently used-basic-kind-of-routines. 🙂
When we were not doing Giants related coding, we were busy with “A/NES”, a Nintendo 8-bit emulator for AmigaOS (that I still fiddle on from time to time..).
Braindamage
D-Coy brought up the thought that we should start a chipmag, called “Braindamage“. D-Coy had tons of contacts and collected chip tunes from a bunch of skilled musicians. Added to this we should have some charts. It was trendy with charts during this time. D-Coy sent out a form to all his swapper-contacts (with his fake-stamps that later got him busted :)). With this form people could write down enter their favorit demos etc. and sent them back (by snailmail). We counted the votes and I believe the charts were complete for the 2nd issue of Braindamage. Some articles were also written (the majority I suspect we wrote ourselves).
I have memories that all texts in Braindamage required some manual work. Line feeds should be on right place, and some other formatting had to be fixed afterwards. To code such things for line feeds etc was nothing you wanted to spend time in assembler so it become manual work. 🙂
I believe that code behind Braindamage was remade more or less from issue to issue so any reuse of code was minimal.
The night train
Braindamage was replaced later by other diskmags that Wizard coded, “The night train“. It was a complete new diskmag-engine and after have coded X amount of number of Braindamage, he had achieved some skills that way so it was technically more advanced than Braindamage.
In recent time, I have dissambled Braindamage (to make them work on AGA-machines for instance, sadly we have nearly no original source code left). It brings back lots of memories from the good old days, “seeing” our old code again. We had slightly different codestyles, me and Wizard so I can still pinpoint his code from mine even if it’s from a disassembled exe. 🙂
All in between
Anyway, we went to some parties in Sweden (Icing, SCC, ECC, Compushere…) and contributed with a few intros and demos here and there. It didnt became any success of greater order, but we had really fun during development. We also made a small animation demo for Icing 1996 that I coded, we borrowed a bunch of Windows-machines for some 3D-rendering. The release never became so good that I wanted, but the production was kind of ambitious, we “recruited” some friends for 3D-modelling etc.
I left Giants a couple of years later. The pressure became greater and greater to code more advanced stuff (both from the organizers and maybe from myself) and it affected my motivation. I didn’t consider myself “good enough” either, as the demos these days became more and more advanced (but not necessarily more fun to watch). Me and Wizard are still meeting up more or less regulary (it’s a pity we live 3.5 h away by train from eachother now) and talk about and remember the “good old times”.
Spot/Up-Rough was also a member in Giants for a while, today we work at the same place which is kind of funny. I had lots of fun back in the golden Amiga-days,
but I can’t say I spend that much time with my Amiga-setup today (through WinUAE sadly), I got a family and kids now so my sparetime is a bit more limited.
Sometimes I think about some kind of small scene-comeback, we’ll see what happens.
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