Commodore Amiga Platform
Now, let’s set the scene …
Pigs in Space is a recurring sketch from The Muppet Show featuring the exploits of Captain Link Hogthrob, First Mate Piggy, and Dr. Julius Strangepork leading a crew of pigs aboard the Swinetrek. The sketch, in concept, is essentially a parody of Star Trek, Lost in Space and other space operas of the 1960s and 70s
Important: There won’t be any images (other than the image above of the real Pigs in Space – not a group photo), video nor music in this article, as I don’t have any of this in my archives
Why PIS
We chose the group name: Pigs in Space because of the abbreviation PIS – as ‘pee‘ (in Danish) – and when you are a kid, this is really funny! When you get older – not so much!
An alternative group name was at one point “Huh!” – like “What?” – When you get a question, you don’t understand or don’t know the answer to and therefor need time to make up something. “Huh!” was suggested by Jens W, and he did a detailed explanation on why this was a great group name – but even though we never went with that name.
No! Who are PIS really?
Well, Pigs in Space (PIS) was/is an Amiga group, consisting of:
- Lars T (Coder)
- Peter A (GFX/Music/Coder)
- Thomas C (GFX/Music)
- Jens W (Supplier/Weird stuff/Text)
- Lars M (Everything else) (Former member)
I don’t remember if we had and used any handles for this demo.
We were always planning new games and advanced demos, but these things take time to develop, so in order for the community “to get to know us”, we would create a very low-tech demo, just to get our name “out there” and then everybody would talk about us!?!
Generator demo
If I remember correctly, our demo consisted of a 3 layer sideway star field a flying logo and a scroller at the bottom. There may also have been some bouncing copper tubes in the background. I never was all that satisfied with our first demo, but I knew that this was only the beginning … D’oh!
The title of the demo and the music track was both taken from the musical act: Moskwa TV and their track: Generator 7/8. The music was created in SoundTracker using only the standard sample disc (ST-01). At this point we had several custom sample discs, but we didn’t want to “hand out” any free samples to other musicians, so we went with the default SoundTracker sounds. We didn’t use our own player (Editor) as this wasn’t ready at the time – or maybe not even in the design phase at this point.
The font for the scroller was 32px x 32px, dark blue letters with a 2px gold edge. The scroller could go front and back and at several speeds. I think it also could stop at the center of the screen. As we did the font our self, we added a number of custom icons to express our feeling towards certain people (Sorry about this Lars M).
The text for the scroller contained the usual stuff: how we created the demo, facts about the music and a few credits. There was also a note from Jens W, with a comment for the upcoming demo where he would supply the majority of the text. For that demo he had already done 35Mb of clean pure text for the scroller.
I remember that every time we found some new feature to put into the demo and it started to “flicker”, Lars T just removed a few stars. I think we started with around 200 stars in the 3 layers but ended up with closer to 80+.
FinalE!
As there are no proof on the existence of Pigs in Space, our mission to dominate the world failed HARD!
Source of inspiration and material: Real life & My head