Meet The CareBears

Background

No - not those ones! This page refers to the Swedish Atari ST demo programming group. The CareBears (TCB) wrote intros and demos and broke a few records along the way. Later they released games under the Thalion software label.

Due to a lack of webspace I do not have the ST disk images on the web site but they can be found on other web sites. As far as I know no single web site has them all. If you need a particular one then I can send it by email.

In 2001 I rewrote The Grodan and The Kvack Kvack Demo screen using DirectX on the PC. I mailed Nic, he saw the demo and I got a nice reply. This page summarises their work.

History

The Exceptions (TEX) were a German programming group formed in 1985. They were the undisputed heroes of the ST because they discovered how to remove the lower border in The BIG Demo. In The Amiga Demo they removed the right border. More importantly Mad Max (Jochen Hippel) was a member of TEX and he composed over 80% of the demo music on the ST for virtually all groups. They were the first ST demo group to become commercial games programmers and they didn't make mega demos after The Union Demo in 1989. Their games Wings Of Death and Lethal Xcess were classics, as were their contributions to ST News disk magazine.

The Lost Boys (TLB) were British and they also made fantastic demos but continued for longer than TEX and TCB. Their Oh Crickey What a Scorcher demo is in my opinion better than The Cuddly Demo. They made games with TEX but also continued to make demos until 1992.

TEX, TCB, TLB, Delta Force, Overlanders and Replicants were known as The Union and The Union Demo in 1989 was a collaborative work mainly attributed to TEX. It is a land mark in ST demo programming.

The rest of this page concentrates solely on TCB. They broke ST programming records such as sprites on screen, fullscreen programming, hardware (sync) scrolling and sound tracker players using a minimum CPU time. They had a very scientific approach to programming, using clock cycle counting to perfect hardware scrolling. They were the FIRST to do these things on the ST, making them heroes.

Who

Nic (Niclas Thisell)

Famous for: Programming,
Major work: Enchanted Lands,
Great demo: Grodan and The Kvack Kvack (So Watt).

Current status: See below.

Jas (Andreas Suurkuusk)

Famous for: Programming,
Major work: Enchanted Lands,
Great demo: Flashback.

Current status: See below.

A.N. Cool (Anders Nilsson)

Famous for: Programming, graphics, music,
Major work: TCB Tracker,
Great demo: Tech-Tron.

Current status: Network Consultant with Net Insight.

Tanis (Niklas Malmqvist)

Famous for: Graphics,
Major work: Enchanted Lands,
Great demo: SoWatt.

Current status: Unknown.

Niclas Thisell and Andreas Suurkuusk both studied computer science at KTH.

Nowadays they run a small company called SciTech Software AB (no, not Display-Doctor-SciTech). They were pretty busy doing thermocalorimetric software for a while, a little webmastering and Java and ActiveX components. Recently Andreas Suurkuusk found leaks in the Microsoft .NET framework.


Games

Enchanted Lands,
DragonFlight,
Seven Gates of Jambala.

Tanis also produced art-work for Eclipse software and Thalion and graphics for the game Lethal Xcess.


Mega demos

Flashback (1992)

The last screen from one of the best groups on the ST. Nice 3D intro and soundtrack.

SoWatt (1990)

Another great demo from TCB with the help of the most famous Swedish groups. It contains a lot of fullscreens so it is better on a real ST or the SainT emulator.

The Grodan and The Kvack Kvack and Tech-Tron screens are amazing!

New Year Demo 2 (1989\1990)

6 screen demo by TCB, Sync and Omega. TCB screen has very big sprites!

Cuddly (1989)

Here it is, one of the most famous ST megademo ever made. It contains all the brilliant effects that will be used by demos: Fullscreens, soundtracker, sync scrolling... I have a version patched for the STE by Leonard.

Whattaheck (1989)

As usual, an excellent demo by the Swedish groups. This demo is NOT STE compatible so choose the TOS version carefully.

New Year Demo (1989)

3 screen little demo. Great graphics. This demo is NOT STE compatible so choose the TOS version carefully.

Junk Demo (1988)

Nice little sample demo with animation, sprites and scrollers.

Acid Burn 2 (1988)

Sample demo with scrolling and sprites.

A.N. Cool's Demos

It is debatable if A.N. Cool enhanced their image. M-Demo 3 and 4 were excellent but some of these other ones are questionable. TCB Tracker started out nice but didn't deliver in the end. Wizzcat's implementation of ProTracker beat TCB Tracker on every respect and it was a portable format.

"I have everything really - a 4Mb STE with a 30Mb hard drive, colour monitor and external drive."

Picture from ST Format, Issue 16, November 1990.

M-Demo 4 (1991)

The last M demo from TCB. Still stunning and including 2 little games: TRON and PONG. 2 disks.

M-Demo 3 (1991)

This is part 3 of A.N. Cool M-Demo series. It's quite weird with lousy sounds but it is original. Heavy metal rules. Bonus: music from screen 1 and screen 2.

Mickey Mouse Demo (1989)

STE Only. 1Mb. Hardware scrolling. 4096 colours.

Amiga Joke (1989?)

M-Demo 1 (1989)

This is the first tiny M-Demo. 'M' stands for -Music- and M-Demo 1,2,3 and 4 were not mega demos.

Samantha Slideshow (1989)

Sample demo with digitised graphics of Samantha Fox!

ZZ Top (1989?)

Breakfast Club (1988)

Reasonable sample demo in the days of 8 bit samples and 720k disks!

Bad (1988?)

Doctor In The House (1988)

Sample demo.

Other demos

Persistence Of Vision (POV) make excellent demo compilations. Some of their small demo screens can be found on their disks.

POV098, TCB Replicants intro, 1991
POV097, A.N. Cool demo 1, 1991
POV096, A.N. Cool new intro, 1991
POV066, TCB Tracker Demo 1 1990, 1991

POV050, TCB Tracker Demo 2, 1990
POV037, Cracked games intro, 1990
POV036, Amiga joke demo, 1990
POV025, A.N Cool STE demo, 1990
POV023, TCB Tracker Demo, 1990

ST Magazine 5 intro, 1990


Links

The CareBears' Home Page
A.N. Cool
The Art of Niklas Malmqvist

ST News International Christmas Coding Conference
Dead Hackers Society
Demo List
Lethal Xcess
PaCidemo
L.A.P.D.

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