// Amiga Scroller
A sine scroller in the style of the old Amiga demos. Chrome letters riding a wave across copper bars, with a mirrored reflection underneath. Type your own message and tune the wobble.
I owe everything to my Commodore Amiga 500 and the Amiga demo scene. The excitement of seeing the Red Sector Megademo for the first time still drives my creativity. The ethos of pushing hardware to the limits carried into my design work, as it did music as soon as I found OctaMED on an Amiga Format cover disk.
Also: it's a prototype for Tick, whose long, thin screen is exactly the shape of a demo scroller.
Message
Capitals, digits and ! " ' ( ) + , - . : ; = ? only. Anything else scrolls past as a space.
Using this
It starts on the 640 by 172 strip of my Tick clock, at its real resolution, so the letters are the size they'd be on the clock. Turn Tick screen off for 320 by 200, the Amiga's low-resolution NTSC screen. Either way it's scaled up with hard pixel edges. The text is cut into one-pixel columns and each column rides its own point on the sine wave, which is what gives the letters that rubbery bend. The copper bars are named after the Amiga's copper chip, which changed the background colour line by line as the screen was drawn.
Font: 32X32-FD, a 32 by 32 chrome-and-fire bitmap font from ianhan's BitmapFonts, a collection pulled from demoscene archives. The original author isn't recorded. If it's yours, get in touch and I'll credit you.
That's the whole font: a sprite sheet. Every character sits in one image, on a fixed grid, 10 across and 6 down, each square 32 by 32 pixels. They're in ASCII order, starting with a space in the top left, so the code finds a letter by its number, works out its row and column, and copies that square onto the screen. The black gaps are characters the font doesn't have. Games and demos worked this way because one picture loads faster and takes less memory than dozens of small ones, and the same trick is still used for icons on websites today.
To do
- A font picker, with more fonts from the collection.
- A chiptune or MOD player, because a demo without music is only half a demo.
- Port it to Tick as a new pattern, in full colour on its 640 by 172 screen.
- A shareable link that carries your message and settings.
Changelog
2026-10-01
- Added a video of the Red Sector Megademo at the end.
- Added the font's sprite sheet under "Using this", with a short explanation of what a sprite sheet is.
- Now starts on the Tick screen. Turn Tick screen off for the Amiga's 320 by 200.
- Added a Font size fader, from 1x to 3x in half steps. Whole steps keep every pixel square; the half steps are a touch uneven. The wave height limit shrinks as the letters grow, so they stay on screen.
- Added a Tick screen switch: the scroller at Tick's 640 by 172, with the wave and copper bars fitted to the shorter screen.
- Initial release: sine scroller with the 32X32-FD font, copper bars, a mirrored reflection and a starfield. Message, speed, wave height, wave length and wobble speed controls, pause and fullscreen. Starts paused for people who've asked for reduced motion.
The Red Sector Megademo
Where it all started for me.
I'd love to tell you more. Let's work together.