Browse / Demoscene: FTA & the French Scene
Nucleus (FTA)
| Year | 1989 |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Free Tools Association |
| Developers | Olivier Goguel, Olivier Bailly-Maitre and the FTA |
| RAM Requirement | 512K |
| Control | None (sit back) |
| Other Requirements | Original disk is floppy-only (the very first release was ROM 01 only; the AppleFest version runs on ROM 03). The ProDOS 8 rebuild in the Demoscene P8 collection runs from any ProDOS device, including CoGS. |
| System 6 Compatible | No (boots its own loader) |
| Hard Drive Installable | P8 rebuild only |
| Release Status | Freeware |
Verified bootable floppy image. Runs from the emulator's built-in 3.5" drive (this one reads the disk directly, so it will not run from a hard drive or CoGS volume), or download the disk image (0.8 MB).
About
"La Demo Ki Tue", August 1989. Nucleus is the demo that put the Free Tools Association on the map, a group of students from Dijon and Aix-les-Bains who went on to write the IIGS demos everyone remembers. It opened as a parametric sprite animation (the Arkanoid sprites are borrowed) and grew into a full 3D wireframe show with sampled music, running at a speed people did not think a 2.8 MHz 65816 could manage.
FTA's own account says the first version spread from Dijon to Cupertino in under two weeks, where Apple's Green Software Engineering team reviewed it. A low-level drive bug made it incompatible with the upcoming ROM 03 board, so Apple sent the group a prototype ROM 03 motherboard through its Swiss office to get it fixed in time for AppleFest San Francisco, where Jean-Louis Gassee used it in his talk. The ROM 03 compatible "SmartBoot v3.0 Special AppleFest Version" is the one most people have.
The original is a track-loading floppy. It will not run from a hard drive, a CFFA or a CoGS volume. In 2020 Olivier Goguel rebuilt it as nucleus-p8, a normal ProDOS 8 system file (NUCLEUS.SYSTEM) that runs from any ProDOS device, with the caveat that it is not meant to be launched from GS/OS. That build is the one in our Demoscene P8 collection. Boot in browser below runs the original floppy image in the emulator's 3.5" drive.
Downloads
- Nucleus disk image (freetoolsassociation.com) ↗
- nucleus-p8, ProDOS 8 rebuild by Olivier Goguel (GitHub) ↗
- Asimov mirror (fta/nucleus.zip) ↗
- Pouet entry ↗
Boot
Screenshots
