

The Demoscene -- an Overview - jgv
http://rhizome.org/editorial/3516

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timcederman
In the 90s the demoscene was really quite exciting. Second Reality was
groundbreaking and opened my eyes to what was possible on our pokey old 486s
(plus it was awesome to show off to your friends). Going to demo events and
realising there were plenty of fellow hackers in Australia doing cool stuff,
and having a chance to hack along with them was also a lot of fun. Good times.

~~~
kristiandupont
I remember the feeling I had when Unreal came out.

I was hacking the VGA registers to optimize my bitblt to the maximum, all in
assembler, and I felt I knew pretty well what was going on inside my computer.
Then I ran this demo and it did stuff that I _knew_ wasn't possible with my
hardware. Quite mind blowing..

~~~
gokhan
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxGtPAhkEQU>

~~~
ctkrohn
Great link. I love the part at 4:30 where it says "Apparently this is
possible."

~~~
jcl
The story behind this is that there was an article in Scientific American in
the early nineties featuring Clifford Pickover's procedural computer graphic
images of "alien life forms". These consisted mainly of a series of spheres
along a path: <http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/high.jpg>

In the article, he said that these graphics were generated on special
hardware, and that such images would be "impossible" on commodity PCs.
Naturally, this chafed several people in the demoscene -- who set out to prove
him wrong, in real-time.

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elblanco
Growing up in the scene in the U.S. was quite hard. I was lucky to grow up on
the East Coast where most of the little U.S. parties were in the 90s. Drove
all the way up for NAID 95.

Good times.

It's been great to see the demoscene roar back to life these last few
years....some amazing stuff to watch on <http://www.demoscene.tv/>

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bitwize
Tl;dr: European teens and 20-somethings who sprinkle 68000 opcodes on their
Müsli each morning create elaborate real-time visual hacks and general
awesomeness -- now, thanks to the demise of the Amiga and the rise of (not-so)
DirectX, considered something of a lost art.

Sad, really. Nothing else -- not even the game projects I work on and don't
quite finish -- comes real close to the raw visceral fun of programming, the
reason why I got so deeply involved with these infernal machines in the first
place.

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thunk
"The demoscene" can also refer to the largely overlapping subculture of
tracker [1] musicians. There're a few well known electronic artists still
using trackers today, like Venetian Snares [2], Bogdan Raczynski, and enduser.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software)>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjAwxG3q3Yo>

~~~
anatta
Who could forget FastTracker 2! I was about 13 or 14 when I discovered it.
There is something intoxicating about composing with the computer in that way.
Granted, there was and are a ton of corny .mod files out there but I feel like
mod tracking is where I fell in love with the aesthetics of editors and code.

Thanks so much for bringing this to attention! :)

~~~
nitrogen
FT2 and Impulse Tracker were amazing pieces of DOS software. Impulse Tracker
somehow eventually supported DirectSound audio output when running in a
Windows 98 DOS box, IIRC. IT did all of its graphics in pure text mode by
reprogramming the VGA card's font table.

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camperman
I used to help organise the (very small) demo scene in South Africa many years
ago and it was so much fun. I recently watched some old classic favourites of
mine and dang if the bug didn't bite me again. So now I'm working on my real
instrument synthesizer that must fit into 16k. Pure asm, fourier transforms,
impossible tricks - this is coding at it's most fun.

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jcw
There's something really beautiful about demos and the demoscene. I'm glad
they're being preserved and seen as an art form, was afraid that they'd be
forgotten.

~~~
elblanco
The scene is remarkably strong today. It kinda died off in the late 90s but
has really seen a strong resurgence I think. There's some amazing new stuff
coming out these days.

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johnl87
The problem is that everyone doing demoscene stuff got jobs and is getting
paid for it now. Look at crysis, etc. No one cares about programming dick
waving contests anymore, it's all about who can get a job at Microsoft. If it
doesn't benefit your resume, no one cares for it. I personally became a
computer science major because I wanted to write demos. After about four years
is when I really started to get it as far as graphics goes and even though now
I have an idea how effects are done, I feel like there's still so much to
learn to keep up with what guys in these demo groups like farbrausch and
fairlight do. The learning curve for doing this kind of stuff is pretty high.
Not only do you have to know programming, but some kind of library like
DirectX or OpenGL, shader languages and all the linear algebra behind the
effects.

~~~
fforw
I got my first paid programming job without having studied, without any
references but a video tape of one my old Amiga demos.

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nitrogen
I was very pleased to find recently that the Kosmic/KFMF music archives
started working again, after a number of years of being down. I was
considering writing some software to brute force fix the CR/LF translation
issues in the web.archive.org copy of the .zip files before I saw the return
of the original archives.

I still get nostalgic when I think about Future Crew's music and demos, too. I
believe Skaven of Future Crew put up a big archive of FC music a while ago,
though Purple Motion was my favorite FC musician. Second Reality running on a
486 absolutely blew me away -- alpha blending, 3D, realtime mixed music,
60fps.

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sp332
Block Party is the longest-running demoparty in North America, ever. It's been
running four years. Kinda sad. You can see what the North American demoscene
is like: archived live video from BlockParty 2010 part 1
<http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6264966> part 2
<http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6267675>

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wullon
Some recent PC demoscene stuff: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON4N0yGz4n8>

~~~
corysama
Farbrausch's "debris." shows just how much you can pack into 200k (including
the audio, btw).
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqu_IpkOYBg&fmt=22](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqu_IpkOYBg&fmt=22)

For the webby crowd: "Masagin" features animated, recursive SVGs with
antialiasing and motion blur at high rez and high frame rate.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbQhgEJuExY&fmt=22](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbQhgEJuExY&fmt=22)

Or, you could download both demos from <http://pouet.net/> and run them on
your own PC.

~~~
z303
Two more by Farbrausch

the.popular.demo <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBpo5GHcmsE>

and Candytron (64K) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svGk_pF67gc>

For some newer releases

blunderbuss by Fairlight <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezltebzdgjI>

is very different is style but still very cool and two post about the particle
system behind the demo
<http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/blunderbuss/>
[http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-m...](http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-
modern-particle-system/)

Elevated by Rgba & TBC <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE>

is a great example of what people can do in 4K, and they even have a
presentation about the technical details
[http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009...](http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009.htm)

and

State of the Art by Spaceballs <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kuYfTCGLg> is
a highpoint of the amiga scene

(edited to add, which I should have clicked on the link to see it had already
been embedded)

------
jgv
further reading ---> <http://rhizome.org/editorial/tag.php?tag=demoscene>

