Atari ST demos on 2 disks supporting drive B

[fiveofive]

As I just took my SF314 drive from the basement and do some tests with it, I wonder if there is some knowledge on which ST two disk demos are actually supporting a drive B. I remember that there were a few - not necessarily those one would expect to, and also the other way around. Any hints?

Disk drive B: is supported in:
- Ventura Demo by Overlanders

is not supported:
- Punish your Machine by Delta Force
- Pete Megademo by Ripped off
- Snork Demo by Futur Minds
- Froggies over the fence (calls drive B but does not load from it)
- Traou'n Int Ket Bet Graet Ben Breman by Adrenaline
- Thunderdome by Checkpoint
-

I am vaguely remembering that also Phaleon demo and Braindamage had such support, but its long ago. Maybe there are certain "sub-scenes" with more support for it then others, e.g. French scene.

Cheers!

[fiveofive]

Updated the list a bit. Seems there are only few demos supporting drive B. Maybe it was more common for games. Also, using drive B may make you miss the "change disk" screens

[dma]

I'd say you rarely (if not never) have to go back to disk one in demos, do to their program and data structure.
Handling two drives is then a more worthy addition for programs loading from both drives at any time.

[fiveofive]

Right, it's not that 2 disk drives are absolutely necessary. but I remember that swapping disks in Megademos and games was kind of annoying at times and I hoped for a more relaxed show with 2 disk drives. But maybe it boils down to my way of demo menu - user interaction (e.g. choose screens randomly or repeatively, not in given order).

[dma]

Ah yes true that big megademos can require many disks changes when browsing.

And yes again, i was referring to games as programs loading from both drives.
Adventure games were especially mad on this.
Also Street Fighter II, but as anyone playing this hideous game port could probably be categorized as masochist, insane disk swapping couldn't do any more harm to his/her condition i guess.

[fiveofive]

Very nice that we share the same memory on Street Fighter 2. I remember how I loved to play the SNES version at friends place and consequently bought it for my ST. What a surprise to see this conversion, in a not so positive way and changing disks several times for each opponent just added to this Today, I see it more as a cult release worth playing just for its badness (the original is still in my shelf). Luckily, ECG released a much more sophisticated 3 disks version later on.

[dma]

It was my brother who had bought our copy of Street Fighter 2 on ST. I should ask him if he enjoyed playing it.

My memories of an ST(e) title willing to bring arcade fighting gameplay on ST was Ultimate Arena, a home-made Mortal Kombat clone for STe.
It wasn't too bad compared to Mortal Kombat on Megadrive, much more advanced than many ST fighting games and fun to play, even with its one button joystick gameplay.
And, as ST Format review on the page i linked states, it also featured "too much loading and unpacking" (but was HD installable).

[guythp]

The ST was generally a machine that could cope with one disk drive (unlike the amiga ). From what I remember most two-disk megademos specified in the main menu which disk the demo was on. If I'm honest I only had a second floppy drive for a short while and while I don't recall which demos used it, one thing I did notice was a there were a few demos that used the disk drive's light to flash in time with the chip tune, but I'm afraid I can't remember which demo(s) it was.

If it helps I think the european megademo (again, by OVR) used the second drive. Possibly the NTM demo by zuul too? That's off the top of my head though, with about 30 years of memory loss gradually destroyed by an unhealthy lifestyle.

[thomas3]

Yeah, pretty certain that the European Demos supports drive B.

Plus it has my favourite reset demo ever

[frost]

REBiRTH by Cybernetics requires 2 floppies if run on a 1MB machine.