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reflection on the scene and demos

 
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justa_dude
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PostPosted: Wed May 28, 2014 8:54 am    Post subject: reflection on the scene and demos Reply with quote

Hi guys,

Some recent talk about replacing mods with mp3s in trainers caused me to reminisce about the "old days." I doubt that any of the demos that inspired me back when I was in college would even run on modern computers, but I found that many of the classics have made it to YouTube.

Paper was always one of my favorites. I must've watched it 1,000 times, even though it made me feel inept every time I watched it in the same way a guitar player might feel while listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn or a philosophy major while reading Gödel. Video compression is, unfortunately, not very friendly to the paper effects so they kind of look like artifacts here, in turn making it difficult to appreciate just how state-of-the-art this was for the time (1996, I believe, when most PC games ran at 320*200 VGA or possibly 640*480 SVGA). The whole program was only 64KB, which is generally smaller than the size of a naive "Hello, World!" program made with today's compilers.

Do you guys have any favorites from the era?
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edit:
some modern 64k demos that are equally amazing to me... remember, 64k is smaller than a lot of forum avatars and sigs. Amazing.

Mercury's The Timeless (2014) - Jesus, the city stuff is like the scene from Inception. Astonishing.
Fairlight's Panic Room (2008)
Approximate's Gaia Machina (2012)

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Burningmace
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 7:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The demo scene is still live and kicking. Revision Demoparty in Germany is always a good laugh. People are still producing for every platform from Z80 to 64-bit Win8.1

The thing with the demo scene is that it's always been about creativity. It doesn't matter whether you're programming your demo onto an FPGA using VHDL, or just writing it in Java. The trick is to do something that pushes the boundaries of the platform. A friend of mine wrote a really simple 3D rainbow-colour text-spinning demo on Windows, which doesn't really sound that impressive, until I point out that he did it all in mIRC script (yes, the IRC client).

I agree that switching to MP3 feels a bit modern (and it seems weird, since a lot of demos are about minimum file size, which MOD works great for) but at the end of the day it's about doing something new and weird, and those demos might well be doing something clever with the graphics, requiring all the CPU time for it, leaving little remaining for tracker synthesis.

If anything, I'd say the demo scene has become richer. All that old hardware like the C64, A500, TI84, GameBoy Colour, etc. is still around, but now we've got powerful PCs, a wide range of operating systems, new hardware toys (Arduino, BeagleBone, etc.), and kit that used to cost thousands (e.g. FPGA dev kits) now costing less than the price of a meal at a restaurant.

As far as demos go, I don't really have a favourite that stands out, but BRD - Teleport Pro is one of the best bits of scene music I've ever heard. I found an old 16-bit keygen with the original .xm embedded in it, and my eyes just lit up.

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justa_dude
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 11:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Burningmace wrote:
The demo scene is still live and kicking. Revision Demoparty in Germany is always a good laugh.

Yeah, I'd probably make an effort to go (would be a good cheap vacation) if it weren't for the strict no gaming rule and the fact that it's always on Easter weekend. It's fair to argue that there would be no scene without gaming, but whatever.

Burningmace wrote:
I agree that switching to MP3 feels a bit modern (and it seems weird, since a lot of demos are about minimum file size, which MOD works great for) but at the end of the day it's about doing something new and weird, and those demos might well be doing something clever with the graphics, requiring all the CPU time for it, leaving little remaining for tracker synthesis.

I don't understand this notion. MP3 is actually an older format than some mod formats, like XM, (although the first encoders weren't really public until 1994 or so). And I remember that doing my first encode (a seven minute Dream Theater song) on a state of the art first-generation Pentium in that year took about two days of nonstop grinding. Playback worked, but you had to tiptoe around the machine to avoid interruption - even moving the mouse was enough to cause stuttering. Meanwhile, MODs could playback smoothly on anything with a sound card. Granted, the encoding and playback software has improved dramatically since then, but mp3 remains many magnitudes more complex than MOD playback even on systems without hardware wavetable.

Burningmace wrote:
As far as demos go, I don't really have a favourite that stands out, but BRD - Teleport Pro is one of the best bits of scene music I've ever heard. I found an old 16-bit keygen with the original .xm embedded in it, and my eyes just lit up.

Hah, that's pretty decent. Thanks for sharing. My hands-down favorite is Guitar Slinger by Jogeir Liljedahl (Noiseless) [youtube]. I still have the original mod, and it sounds even better.

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atom0s
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 6:46 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

http://www.pouet.net/ is still around and holds thousands of demos and such.
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justa_dude
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 01, 2014 8:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

atom0s wrote:
http://www.pouet.net/ is still around and holds thousands of demos and such.


Awesome resource. Thanks for posting. Scene.org used to be pretty good, too. You have any favorites, Wiccan?

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atom0s
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 02, 2014 12:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

justa_dude wrote:
atom0s wrote:
http://www.pouet.net/ is still around and holds thousands of demos and such.


Awesome resource. Thanks for posting. Scene.org used to be pretty good, too. You have any favorites, Wiccan?


Pretty much anything from the original scene teams for stuff. Most of their stuff was OpenGL based and was much more interesting than some of the basic nfo scrolling demos. I can't remember names off hand since its been a fairly long time since I opened a demo though.

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Burningmace
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 02, 2014 2:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Actually I changed my mind. this is my favourite demo ever. C64 demo release here.
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