Ok, I'm no Atari scene expert ( nor an Amiga or any other scene to be honest
), but to me it appears on the Atari the cracked games were more important than the cracktro in front of it. What you've seen remade here lately are cracktros from groups who mainly made pack disks. Automation (later D-Bug), Medway Boys, Pompey Pirates for example were and still are well-known UK based groups. Automation alone released 512 (!) pack disks. And these disks mostly had a scroller and a pic with some more or less interesting effects regarding the scroller (different sine types) or the way the pic was shown. It was cool to pack 7 Zak McKracken disks onto 2 disks, single filing whatever them. No need for a fancy cracktro then, you know.
Click
here for a great collection of screenshots from these pack disks.
But even single releases sometimes only had a static text stating who cracked it. For example I can't think of any cracktro featuring glenz cubes or dot balls. Such stuff exists in demos on the Atari (there are some pretty brilliant ones), but not in cracktros.
Then there are of course some more elaborate cracktros, which are (especially for me, since I never coded on the ST) hard to remake. An example is an MCA one (
Click), where the text is encrypted and the font is software rendered. Without the knowledge of 68k assembler you are pretty screwed to rip anything from it. Jace is damn good at such things, I'm not. In general you can say, there are some really cool cracktros on the ST, even if it's way less than on the Amiga, but a lot of them
I'm simply not able to remake since I don't know how it was done originally. Take some text writers for example, it's easier to remake them if you understand the disassembled source than trying to mimic them just by looking at them. Leave alone to guess the distortion of a scroller or the curves of some sprites...
Anyway, a good place to check out is
dhs.nu, there you'll find a nice video database showing Atari cracktros and demos. And you're definitely gonna find some vectors, plasma etc. there too.
To summarize it, it seems Atari guys just weren't such show-offs when it came to cracktros!
