What's this?

The demogroup "Cream" is part of a subculture called the Atari demoscene, where people spend time in front of their old computers doing absolutely amazing ...things nobody really needs, just for their own pleasure...and for their friends. This is how we, Abyss, A.-t- , ultra and Tao, do it.

Just Buggin'

In 1992, A.-t- and Tao participated in " Just Buggin' " by the ACF-Design-Team. The demo got positive feedback especially on the beautiful design of the colorful fullscreen main menu. The planned successor titled "Jacktro" never saw the light of day and so we we decided to make our own demo containing our collected graphics and songs, which should later be known as "Stmygm II". This demo was an attempt to present ourselves in a different artistic way.

Stmygm II

"Songs That Make You Go Mmhh II" was supposed to be released at christmas 1993. Unfortunately we weren't able to finish it in time as different things in life became more important to some of us. The result was a two year absence of Cream in the scene. Only A.-t- held our flag on several conventions, winning gfx competitions.

Mine Sweeper ST

A little flickering of our existance came up with the conversion of "Mine Sweeper ST", based on the little Microsoft-Windows-game.

Steps

On a dark december day in 1995, ultra gave Tao his old STE, which was found while clearing rooms for a move. Back at home old disks got back to light and all the old tunes were found. In a state of melancholy Tao started editing and compiling them into a little demo named "Steps", expecting it to be his final production for the ST. Somehow A.-t- managed to get the group together again for finishing the last bits on "Stmygm II". We released it together with "Steps" in early 1996. Surprised by the positive feedback of the fading ST scene, we went on doing ...things.

PlaySid

Inspired by the sidplayers on Amiga and PC, we thought about coding one for Falcon and STE. Surprised, that no one had done a SID emulator on STE before, we released "playsid v. 1.0" in september 1996. Version 2.0, faster and with better soundemulation, followed at the 'Siliconvention' in Bremen, eastern 1997.

...do things.

In january 1999 we released '... do things.', another gfx-music-compilation, containing masses of A.-t- graphics, SID-emulating Taosongs and the first demoscreens by ultra for Cream. This demo managed to polarise parts of our scene and started a discussion about A.-t-'s ways of creating gfx using PC tools besides pixeling or Tao using DMA based effects instead of punishing the YM2149. But generally it was our breakthrough as a respectable demo-crew thanks to ultra's impact.

Madness, Jam

While ultra was coding many stunners for our planned project called "heftig", Abyss and Tao started another music player to replay amiga formats like hippel-coso, huelsbeck's tfmx and some more. As a small demonstration, "madness" has been released in summer 1999. It contained some original songs by Jochen Hippel as well as two advanced demoscreens by ultra. The multiformat player, 'jam' followed in summer 2000, the Windows version with a YM2149 soundchip emulation in 2003...

Heftig...or not

The next years have been quiet except of some appearances by Tao in diskmagazines and ultra in some demo competitions for different platforms. ultra managed to code some stunning effects which did not make it into a cream demo. We were just not able to come together and finish it. So some of the effects made their appearance in demos for different platforms.

STresSTeST

In 2015, after a long period of silence we got together again. ultra had done some really exciting 3D effects and we got together at Abyss' place the old fashioned way and put them together into a production called "STresSTeST". We entered it to the STNICC 2015 demo competition, our first real Atari ST demo in about 15 years. It was an unexpected experience to feel the spirit again and come together as old friends with no pressure, just joy.

ultraBooST

Another 7 years of silence ended with a very special release at SillyVenture 2k22 Summer Edition. ultra spent about 3.5 years deveolping an extension board for the atari STE. Originally built to have an HDMI video output, the board became much more. ultra programmed the fpga and created extended video modes with layers and milions of colors. Watching the amazing effects that ultra created using this board we felt that the time felt right to come together again and design another demo with a.-t- designs and a Tao tune. The demo ranked 1st in the wild competition.

STay4Evr

A little experiment lighted a spark for the work on our latest production. Exploring PWM techniques on old Rob Hubbard songs quickly awakened our enthusiasm and resulted in a sophisticated SID emulation based on YM2149 chipsound with modern timer techniques. Songs were converted in no-time and packed into three themed demoscreens celebrating the early era of chipsound music. It was released in July 2024 at the Sommarhack Coding Convention.

What next?

Life goes on and we still enjoy democoding, as it is part of our lives and will ever be. We will release stuff when it is ready and if we think there is something worthwile to be shown. Just as we did with STay4Evr. The time was just right. We are pretty sure that there is more to come, when we are ready.