** 2 Maggie pages / 1760 words **

Siliconvention 97

Leon, Tat, Arnel and Flinny visited the Siliconvention, truly a golden coding party for Atari users held in Bremen, Germany. Leon O'Reilly reports...

It was a Tuesday when I left my home in Wales, some three days before the party was due to begin. At midday I boarded the train to London and headed for Victoria Coach Station.

I arrived at Victoria in plenty of time, and met Tat shortly afterwards. We chatted about his forthcoming demo "Sonoluminesenz" and he was worried he didn't have enough effects to cover the five or so minutes of music. Our coach eventually turned up and we shuffled on board. I managed to get a fair amount of sleep on the coach as we travelled across the Netherlands, Belgium and on into Germany.

Agent T of Cream and Jet of Avena were waiting diligently for us at Hamburg's coach station and since neither of them had a car so we had to negotiate the Hamburg underground system. We eventually arrived at Agent T's place where we bought each other up to date about the Falcon scene. The big news was he had tracked down Mad Max (Jochen Hippel is one of the hottest ST musicians in the scene and a living legend) to a small village in Germany and had invited him to the Siliconvention. Agent T had also recently interviewed Centek, the company behind the exciting "Phoenix" project and showed me an article about it in ST Computer.

We saw a preview of "Sonolumineszenz", and even in its uncompleted state I was staggered. I was confident it would win the demo competition - even though I hadn't seen the other entries! Tat and I did a bit of coding before catching some much needed sleep!

Around lunch time Thursday I resurfaced and did some work on my "God-boy" Gameboy emulator while Tat continued working up his demo. Agent T busied himself constructing some logos for it and showed me the stunning graphics he intended to enter into the pixel competitions - he's in a class of his own on the Falcon at present. Later, Arne of Avena turned up.

We stopped briefly at the Symposium party place, at Hittfeld, near Hamburg, where last year's Symposium '96 party was held, to drop Jet of Avena off with his gear. The venue looked a bit grim, just one massive hall -these tend to be a bit soulless and lacking in atmosphere and I was very pleased we were off to the Siliconvention instead.

We arrived at the Siliconvention venue, the Burgerhaus in Bremen, at about one in the morning and the place was deserted so we headed over to Mr Coke's where we got some sleep.

At a more civilised hour we headed back to the Burgerhaus and found some members of the Dead Hackers Society sitting in a corner along with some other Swedish people, and two Polish guys sitting in the bar who turned out to be Grey of Shadows and Winio.

Grey told me the Shadows demo was complete, very impressive and would win the demo competition! - but he wasn't showing it off until then.

** IT.GIF **
** Caption **
The IT demo, by Shadows (Poland)
** end **

An extra hall was opened up which gave us some much needed more space and it was soon filled with crews coding on the Commodore 64 and other machines.

There was a Pacman arcade at reception and a prize was promised for the person who got the highest score on this machine. There was also a "multimedia information point" - designed by Mr Coke, based around his Falcon.

We found a room with enough space for both myself and Tat to set up and work on - the monitors were provided by the organisers, which was a big help.

Mod of TSCC introduced himself we had a long chat about the Atari scene. He showed me around the Undercover shell, although I still prefer the Maggie one! It's great to see an alternative diskmag like theirs, long may it continue. Soon afterwards fellow TSCC member MC Lazer and Flinny (Nick Flintham) and Arnel (Neil Jones-Rodway) appeared.

** SONO3.GIF **
** SONO4.GIF **
** Caption **
Sonolumineszenz - the clear winner!
** end **

The first day we were plagued by power cuts which took ages to sort out and badly affected the real-time article which was running on a Mega ST running Tempus. In the Dutch room, Pieter van der Meer, author of Neurobotix, was coding a 4k intro for one of the competitions, but spent more time working on his new Falcon game - a promising looking Elite style game. I also met Com7 here and it looked like he'd brought along his entire music studio!

** TSCC1.GIF here **
** TSCC2.GIF here **

TSCC and Escape were in the next room, TSCC working frantically on their 96ktro and Escape working on "Sili-Con-Carne". Also present were Therapy, some ex-Spirits guy and, in the corner, Juri from New-Line making tunes as usual.

The room at the end of this corridor was filled with Playstations and other consoles for everyone to use - no Atari 2600's though! The Swedes were alive and kicking next door, the Dead Hackers Society, No Crew and some other Scandinavian types had made this their headquarters - definitely the loudest and wackiest room!

The second door on the right housed TNB coding their ST demo and RDT working on Running and the final room on the top floor held Lazer, Inter, Absence and some noisy Mac owners. Out in the corridor sat Tat, Agent T and myself and we were later joined by Fried of Avena and provided a second home for Flinny and Arnel.

Grey of Shadows was worrying about the "Pandemonium" demo which he was supposed to have received by email so he kept popping down to the local internet cafe to see if it had arrived. Flinny and Arnel also passed plenty of time there - where would the IRC #atari channel be without them?

Mad Max turned up in the evening sporting a new haircut and a number of new pieces of ST music - keep your eyes peeled for these. We were mightily impressing when Winio set up his upgraded Atari XL and showed us some of the best XL demos and we all stayed awake into the early hours and suffered from lack of sleep!

The demo competitions were held in a large hall downstairs. There were two screens with two viewing areas. I didn't get to see all of the competitions and was particularly annoyed I missed the 4k competition while coding. There was also a "fake demo" competition - no doubt inspired by the Senior Dads efforts at previous conventions. The advent of the 96k competition was greeted with some relief - at last some new Atari demos!

It was great to see TNB releasing an ST intro - we haven't seen many ST demos lately. It was a corker with lots of nice effects but TSCC's demo was the most impressive of the bunch.

The only entries in the main demo competition were on the Falcon, - a total of five! It's great to see the scene kicking back into action:
** BL **
* Therapy were very unfortunate because a vital file wasn't included on the final disk.
* Polish new-boys Pandemonium unveiled their debut Falcon release "Ignis".
* "Sili-Con-Carne" was Escape's play on words and also their rather splendid demos the demo featured lots of original effects and brilliant music.
* Shadows have been promising great things for a while and finally delivered with their entry "It" which featured brilliant bump mapping, including 3D bump mapping although this was a bit slow because they didn't use the DSP and was clearly a contender.
* Jaws hit the floor when "Sonolumineszenz" opened with an environment mapped fish started swimming across the screen and looked set to win by a landslide of Tony Blair proportion!
** end BL **

At around 2am we headed downstairs to watch Tommy of Avena's live music set. He was performing with a friend and as the two of them hunched over the keyboards and 303s they struck me as the Germanic equivalent of the Chemical Brothers.

Monday morning was votes time using a GFA program developed by Mr. Coke and used at Symposium '96. There was surprise as TNB won the 96ktro competition, not only beating entries from other platforms but also the favourites TSCC - who had gutted written all over their faces! They brightened up a bit when they won the 4ktro with their stunning bump mapping effect which even runs on a standard ST.

There could only be one winner in the main demo competition and  "Sonolumineszenz" duly won it by the proverbial country mile with "It" by Shadows the runner up. Tat picked up his prize - a spanking new Nintendo 64 and beamed like Burnley had just won the FA Cup! Agent T picked up a Playstation as a prize for his rendered picture.

I got chatting with Martina of Lazer who revealed she was keen to do another Falcon demo when she had time. Lost Blubb had done well since its release back in 1995 with several showings on MTV and other cable and satellite channels.

The last day was soon over and people started to pack up and head off home to their respective countries. It was generally agreed it had been a great party - certainly on a par with the classic Fried Bits parties and miles better than the rather dull Symposium '96 event last year.

We took the autobahn back to Hamburg and back at Agent T's we had a well earned sleep. The next day we tried out the PSX and the demo cd. We spoke to Thyroxin and Jet of Avena who had helped to organise the Symposium PC and Amiga party held the same weekend and said they wish they had attended the Siliconvention instead.

The Atari scene is characterised by friendly people who genuinely love their machines and have a real interest in what everyone else is doing. Parties like Siliconvention really emphasise the difference between the Atari scene and other platforms.

The Siliconvention exceeded my best expectations, it was big enough to make it worthwhile with lots of fantastic releases, yet managed to remain intimate, friendly and best of all great fun. It was really brilliant to see so many people still actively involved in the Atari scene - even some we'd given up on months ago. There was a sense of the Atari scene being reborn with new sense of direction and new energy. We went Around The World and Siliconvention '97 definitely had Da Funk.