This is a nice little taster for future productions by those musically inclined Germans, the demo makers currently known as Cream.

It is a very simple production, a music demo featuring tunes from the (in)famous chip music composer of old style ST scene megademos and Thalion games, Mad Max aka Jochen Hippel. There is a difference from what you might expect from a Mad Max music demo. The jangly earache/ glorious untarnished YM symphonies are entirely absent. In their place are new and improved tunes, written for the Amiga in a proprietary seven channel (!) part chipsynth, part sample replay format.

These are cover versions of several well-known ST tunes for well-known games such as Leavin' Teramis and The Chambers of Shaolin produced by the famous ex-demo sceners software house Thalion.

The melodies are tantalisingly familiar to those people with ears battered by the YM2149 soundchip squawk from the ST. They are completely transformed by the enhanced Amiga replay system however, and in action, sound quite a lot like a "luxury" version of a Commodore 64 SID chip tune.

It isn't a completely effect-free production either, as there is a very cool take-off of the stylised Thalion logo introduction which front-ended all their games. Like the music, this has been updated, so no more bitmaps. This time it's done as a bunch of spinning 3D texture-mapped objects, on an ST!

You might all be very interested to know this is a precursor to a new music player being prepared by Cream, which will be able to play nearly all proprietary Amiga music formats. This is to be accomplished by a wholesale emulation of the Amiga Paula soundchip!

There is even a Falcon friendly reset demo.

Ratings

CiH - Sept '99 (Maggie #28)

Hmm... instead of finishing their planned eil-demo, Cream release once again a new music demo... sniff, sniff.

Well, but let's take a closer look at the demo (musicdisk?!). The demo comes in good Cream tradition as a MSA plus an executable program that allows you to start the demo directly without putting the MSA on a disk if you got at least 2 megs of ram. But real ST people only got 1 MB - so I used my Magic Shadow Archiver and created the bootdisk.

In my opinion, the best music in the demo just appears after the boot - it's the loader music! The synth drums sound - incredible! Beside that smashing piece of YM, some graphics tells - loading -. The intro - you all or maybe most of you know the good old Thalion intro as seen on "Wings of Death", "The Seven Gates of Jambala"... Cream have made a sequel of it now displaying the Thalion-triangles as 3D objects with textures on their surfaces. Of course it's texture mapping and not phong mapping as stated in another disk magazine...

The musical part in the intro is a remix of the original Thalion intro music, now it's SID-voiced, but I think the original one by Hippel sounds a bit better. Hitting space and I will hear again the great loader music while the diskdrive loads the main.

Hell, how we have missed that - using function keys to select music! By pressing the F1 to F8 keys, you get some of Hippel's music in the original Amiga TFMX format. The sound quality is also quite good on a normal ST. The music ranges from the "Lethal Xcess" intro tune to the "The Seven Gates of Jambala" intro. Just see for yourself what the other six tunes are.

In part of the screen a scroller moves from the right to the left and above a picture showing a motive of the actual song is displayed. All songs are held in memory, so there's no long delay when selecting another music.

Did you remember that ST Connexion also made a TFMX player a bunch of years ago? So far the nostalgic part...

After hitting the space bar for an hour and nothing happened, I tried the reset button... Wow! A decent reset-demo! Three textures showing some type of lenseflares attract each other, like blobs the names of the Cream members are faded in, lightened by the blobs, starting wobbling - it looks quite nice. Not to forget the audial part - it's a YM version of one of the songs featured in "Do things..." - sounds nearly as good as the loader music.

Well, that's all about the "demo" - again too short, only two effects are shown, but what do you expect from a music demo?

Ratings

Conclusion

If you don't count the two effects (intro + reset) - this demo is only something for music demo collectors. But overall it's a good piece of work although I would be more happier to know that Cream is working on their demo. I heard rumors that they have stopped their ST demo project - that would be really sad! Please, please... do things!

defjam (Aftercover #1)

Normally you need to create a bootdisk out of the MSA file, but as already known, the CREAM guys are trying to shorten your own work by helping you a bit out. Since their good old first try from 1996, "SONGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMM 2", you don't really need MSA, because the program is able to create the demo disk by itself and furthermore, if you have enough RAM (at least 2 MB), you can run the demo straight from disk/ harddisk. That's the first plus point for the demo, even if it hasn't really started at the moment ;-).

Because I ran the demo on my Falcon, I just smashed F1 to check out the demo without too much dj work... and while TAO's kewl buzzing music still runs in the background and the first menu was passed, a new one appears, funny made and camouflaged as "Lamer Identification", where you can switch the internal speaker on or off... I don't need that fucking queeker either and so the show starts...

A nice black loading screen appears and after that the known blue background of the old THALION intros and... that's originality in my eyes, CREAM's version of that intro, and as flashback to the ACF intro for "JUST BUGGIN'" as well, appears on the screen, with a remix of the sound, made by TAO, of course with kewl noises and stuff. There are no rainddrops or something running downwards the blue background... nope, the parts of the Thalion logo appeared as texture mapped vectors on the screen, overlayed by a small CREAM logo...

Uhhh... again the CREAMies matched it to kick several butts... after that the loading screen appears and with the first noises of the future sound composer version of the "Wings of Death" melody, the demo reveals itself as new music demo at all. But this time we can listen to the great Amiga versions of several game tunes that exist on ST as well, but without any doubt, the Amiga versions sound more powerful in my eyes... er... ears. Especially the drums and so on came out much clearer and sometimes the tunes sound like a strange mix of chip noises and chip modules as well. Cool stuff...

The demo offers the game tunes of "Chambers of Shaolin", "The Seven Gates of Jambala", "Leavin' Teramis" (Oh man, what I have played that game!), "Rings of Medusa", "A Prehistoric Tale" (Kewl platformer... still like the dinos), "The Last Ninja", "Enchanted Land" and last but not least "Lethal Xcess" (joystick-killa!). To every tune a coarse pixeled screenshot is presented in the back as well. Unfortunately the menu screen only features a scroller and nothing else, giving the usual information and craptalk.

Ok... after I listened to the songs again and again it was time to quit... no spacebar... no escape... just reset... and there the last kick came! As it seems, the CREAMies are the last people who still cultivate the tradition of making reset demos on Atari today. Meanwhile another great TAO tune is played in the background and some nice sun blobs are making their rounds on the screen together with the credits, that appear static and distorted again and again... End... another reset took me back to the desk, to write the...

Final words...

What can I say... at one hand it's a music demo, presenting future composer soundtracks on the ST. But those soundtracks are bound onto the ST as well, coz' they belong to several ST games as well. At the other hand this demo is a pure mixup of old feelings and new effex. For that, the point to remember some old productions of Thalion and ACF as well as giving some newschool effex to the scene accompanied with the latest noises possible on the ST, this demo is one of the most original ones I saw in the last time. For those parts, intro and reset screen, it is just great in effex and music, the mainpart isn't as blasting for me... sorry, but still nicely done. With those little coding killers this demo is going to make me mad in waiting for "HEFTIG" after all...

moondog/ .tSCc. (UCM #21)

En attendant leur prochaine démo, Cream nous fait patienter avec cette compilation de musiques provenant du Future Composer, l'équivalent sur Amiga de l'YM (mais en bien mieux). Mad Max n'a pas fait que des musiques sur ST, ses oeuvres sur Amiga révèlent son talent. Pour les machines possédant plus de 2 MO de RAM, il est inutile de créer un bootdisk puisque le fichier MSA est directement chargé et décompressé en mémoire.

L'intro est un hommage envers celles de Thalion: Même fond d'écran, même thème musical (revisité à la sauce SID). 4 objets en 3D texturée tournent autour d'un axe immobile sur un logo "Cream". Les musiques sont assez peu nombreuses (8, je crois), mais elles représentent la richesse des musiques soundchips Amiga: Les fans reconnaîtront facilement les thèmes musicaux de "Lethal Xcess", "Chambers of Shaolin" ou "Enchanted Land" et seront comblés de joie! Le reset screen, qui est aussi présent sur Falcon, propose du bumpmapping sur le texte des crédits, le tout se déformant joyeusement au gré d'une jolie musique SID-voice.

The Beast (Toxic Mag #18)