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The product is really good, but its not really useable for game programming, as a demo/game coder, i can attest to the tricks used in these demos to get the size down, that limits what you can do drastically.
They are almost always use asm, which means limited to no portability which is a big concern for modern games, its rare you get a game thats written only to one platform.
The objects and textures are mathematically generated, the renders often can only do a certain kind of render, theres no AI, no collision, no real PVS to hand 1000+s of poly scenes. Most games size comes from all the graphics and sound fx, especially fi there are cut scenes and large visibility sets. Compatibility issues are very common with small demos, they often take advantage of certain kinds of hardware features.
The packers are often designed specifically for the data included in the demo, and the coders can spend weeks and weeks shaving bytes off there and there.
Though the current games I work on all tend to be 64K or less.
Incidently most demos are written by game coders, or at least were, nearly all the games coders i know were originally demo coders, especially in europe, its a great way to get into the industry, we often go over to assembly and such events to find people to hire.
Demos are cool, and they show off amazing stuff, you could make the amiga do some amazing tricks with texture mapping demos and so on, and i've often ehard, well such and such demo can do a texture mapping effect, why can't the games be fully textured, simple reason is that the demo can generally only do 1 or 2 of them, and only in that way, like copperbars for instance or the swirly plasma demos, theres generally no clipping, no orientation problems, since the demo coder will ensure that can never happpen, that its say fixed in position or orietatation, that the objects never interpentrate so no zbuffers or subdivision is required, or even a sort, no multiple texture sizes, or sometimes even the ability to change the size of the triangle.
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