ExoticA:About
ExoticA is a wiki based site covering Amiga and C64 retro gaming interests including music, box scans, demo scene information and software.
One of the main features of the site is a music collection called UnExoticA which contains music from Amiga games and scene demos, presented in the original formats. We also have some useful search interfaces to other popular music collections such as the High Voltage SID Collection which is a large C64 music archive as well as a front end to Modland which contains over 360,000 music modules in a variety of formats. Other areas of the site include a gallery of the game box artwork from Bob Wakelin, an area showing comparisons between computer game conversions (from arcade to home as well as others - see Lost In Translation), a collection of pages covering groups in the Amiga and C64 demo scene (see the Scenery page), and other items.
As a wiki site, the contents are freely editable by visitors (such as yourself). The system works in the same way as Wikipedia, although the layout and design is slightly different. In addition, we do require people to register to edit pages, but signing up is quick and easy. If you don't have an account then please register, and start editing!
Most of the textual contents of the site is available under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For more information about the contents and the license see the Copyrights page.
Site History
It was back in October 1997, when BuZz decided to start ExoticA. He had a big interest in the synth music used in some Amiga games, and in the more exotic music tracking software which could produce sounds similar to that of the Commodore 64. As he was already building up a large collection, he thought it would be a good idea to build a web site where it could be downloaded and shared. There was already a web site online called the "Amiga Exotic Music Page" (or similar), which had a good selection of tunes, but BuZz wanted to expand on this further.
Later on the site expanded with other historical items related to the Amiga computer. People mailed in contributions for the site, and areas like a Game Box Scan section were created, as well as a new project to make a accurate collection of tunes from Amiga Games.
The site was developed from 1997 until 2006 in hand coded html, which was certainly a laborious process. Maintenance became more and more difficult at the archive grew, and it was decided to move to a new platform. As contributions to the site had been such an important aspect in the development of ExoticA, a wiki seemed like a good platform to move to. It would enable the visitors to contribute directly, and would allow us to create a free, open historical archive of Amiga music, scans, game information and the other interesting things on the site.
You can read the news updates for the site going back to 1997. The old site is still online at http://old.exotica.org.uk and some of the music sections at the time of writing are still waiting to be migrated to this wiki.
Hosting
Please see the Hosting page for more information.
Contacting Main Server Admin
The main server admin is buzz [at] exotica.org.uk.