NewTek Demo Reel 2

Here is the extremely rare Demo Reel 2 from NewTek that was hard to get running on actual Amiga hardware and rather tricky to get to run though on an emulator. This was shown at trade shows and at the NewTek TV Museum.
This demo is from around 7-29-88.
Here is some references to this from an 1988 Amazing Computing:
"AmiEXPO California ’88 The Amiga Event by Stephen Kemp and Stephen Pietrowicz Even before the show opened, you could feel the excitement in the air. We arrived at the Westin Bonaventure hotel, in Los Angeles, about two o’clock in tire morning. By the time we finished checking into our room, we had already seen several exhibitors and organizers roaming the lobby and halls, waiting for cite show to begin. When AmiEXPO opened at noon on Friday, the eager people waiting in die long lines outside die exhibition hall began to pour in through the doors.
The first stop for most people was die NewTek booth. They were greeted by Laura Longfellow, the ‘‘face’’ that you see in many of their demos, including "Maxine” Headroom. Demonstrations of their main products, Digi-View and DigiPaint, were held in the booth, as well as, the new NewTek Demo Reel II, This "reel” is as impressive (if not more) than their first and included a number of sequences from popular sci-fi shows like "Star Wars”, "Star Trek", and “Aliens”. NewTek was also discussing their newest product, the Video Toaster, which is a real time, full color digitizing, video effects, genlock system. Most Impressive!"

[@SeverityOne]

So it's official: the internet's cat obsession started on the Amiga.

[@AmigaCrazed]

I actually had the privilege of seeing it running real time, on a vanilla A500. It was sometime around the late 80s, at the Chicago Amiga Expo. I remember that it was running off a single floppy disk - the A500 was sitting on a table with nothing connected except for the monitor & power. Oh, and the floppy drive was taped shut with packing tape, to prevent people from walking off with the diskette :)

[@ALurkingGrue]

This demo was over 9megs and wouldn't fit on a floppy so I expect they were doing what they called a "Smoke and Mirrors" demo and had a hidden hard drive. Then again not sure where they would have hidden it. Or it was a cut down version.

[@AmigaCrazed]

If it was a "smoke & mirrors" show, then they rigged it very well. I remember the floppy drive light coming on when it was time to load the different parts of the demo. However, I suppose they could have popped the floppy drive out & mounted an internal hard drives. I have one of those A500 internet IDE hard drive add-ons myself.

[@tjlazer71]

John G. I think what they had was an internal 3.5 inch hard drive mounted in the floppy drive bay!

[@ALurkingGrue]

They may have had a boot floppy but it did have a hard drive. It was likely the machine I copied this from and it did have a hard drive, but yes they probably did play it up at the time as was the tradition. I believe the hard drive was mounted on the controller card but my memory isn't what it used to be and it was over 20 years ago. This demo does not fit on a floppy.

[@chirchir8126]

@@AmigaCrazed or they used the 9MB RAM as Amiga Ramdisk, copying the contents of 9 floppies into the ramdisk beforehand, and then starting the demo for the last floppy disk.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

Glad to see this! Such a brilliant way to show off their capabilities. If only Digi-FX had come out, that would've been the KZbin Poop before that was a thing.

[@ALurkingGrue]

The other aspect to that is the DigiView pro for recording live video and that product research lead into the Toaster. At the time DigiView was a slow scan digitizer and couldn't record video clips. Still that demo took 9 megs of ram to run which was crazy then so it may have been a bit too ahead of it's time.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

ALurkingGrue I bet. Imagine how much it would've take to soup up your Amiga for that.

[@PATTHECATMCD]

The video digitizers back then were kind of primitive. You could do this stuff from a video tape, but you could not do it in real time with a basic Newtek digitizer. You had to pause the tape - capture a frame, which took a while - advance the tape one frame - capture a frame - etc.

[@PATTHECATMCD]

And you needed to capture the separate red, green and blue levels. One frame each. Recombine them. Then arrange it. Then compress it so a custom player could play it. Playback hardware was about $500 - just the memory expansion needed to run playback of this one demo.

[@ChristopherSobieniak]

***** I'm sure, still I'm sure it was still rather something to even get done.

[@thepirategamerboy12]

I assume it needs so much RAM because it loads all the assets into RAM on startup, rather than streaming from the disk. All the files for this demo take up about 9mb, after all. I wonder why they didn't just do the later.

[@tjlazer71]

can't get it to work on my Amiga 2000 with 9MB. KS 1.3, 1MB Chip and 8MB Fast.

[@ALurkingGrue]

You can see why NewTek never put this out to the public. It is really damn touchy and they never put in the work to make it work past the few setup demo stations they had. It's been around 23 years since I had this running on real hardware. Is it running a stock 68000? This thing does not like accelerators.

[@tjlazer71]

ALurkingGrue yes stock 68000 A2000 NTSC. Even tried booting to shell to run it. Didn't help. I think it might need 2 MB of chip memory

[@PATTHECATMCD]

Please Amigafan, could you release the data? Or give some cryptic clue to searchers who might have been questing for it, for decades? It is a missing chapter of the Amiga archive, withdrawn by Newtek, who survived their patron, Commodore. A shame I think.

[@ALurkingGrue]

I can make it available. Do you have a way of being contacted outside of youtube? Could work this out with private message on youtube.

[@PATTHECATMCD]

Oh, if you posted it to English Amiga Board, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested. Busiest Amiga chat site. They have an upload section too. :)

[@doskungen]

Would it be possible for you to make the whole NewTekDemo setup available? I would love to be able to install this on my actual Amiga and not have to deal with floppy disks... Also posted on your other Newtek demo reel 1 video in the comments but saw this just now....

[@ALurkingGrue]

I posted a hard drive file of the files over here: eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=85599

[@doskungen]

Thank you SO much ALurkingGrue! Read the whole thread on EAB and it seems you replaced the original HDF you shared with a newly made one, but I am sad to report that this one does not work, when I mount it in WinUAE I only get "Not a DOS disk in unit 0" .....