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I think you're looking at the wrong technology. Some of those linked sites to the hacked up MIDIs are cool and everything, but MIDIs have their limitations and they seem like a particularly clumsy technology to me.

What MIDIs these days do is work with a set of digital samples then apply fancy transformations to the PCM data to give you instruments with different pitches, frequencies, etc. My first big problem with this is that MIDI is pretty much stuck with a single set of samples for the instruments unless you use something like Creative's SoundFont where you can change the sound of every instrument in the set. The problem being is that now you can't distribute the original MIDI and expect a consistent listening experience from all of your users. You're forced to record the audio to an MP3 or something on your machine before distributing it.

Which leads me to my next point. Incase you were not aware, a new type of music has existed since the days of the Amiga that fixes the problems of the gimped MIDI standard. I'm talking about digital modules (MOD, S3M, IT, XM, 669, etc.) These modules work on the same priniciples as MIDI but they have some distinct advantages:

• Runs on the cheap hardware and low end systems. Just needs a sound card capable of.. Outputting sound..
• The digital samples used for the music are saved within the file itself. Sounds the same on everyone's system.
• Better quality than MIDIs if they're done right. Some formats (XM and IT especially) have some pretty slick advnaced features for instruments.
• The audio processing for most of these is fast enough to be run in real time alongside some other processor consuming task. (Doesn't really matter these days, however.)

My second largest problem with MIDI back in the day was that by comparison, the software MIDI emulators drained the computer of most of its resources.

So there you have it. I recommend diving into this world instead and stay clear of those icky MIDIs. Here are some resources if you don't know where to get started:

• MODPlug Central popluar player and tracker. And yes, you can use your MIDI keyboard to compose music with a lot of these trackers.
• Nectarine Shoutcast streams of a lot of these modules
• The Mod Archive Could forget the good old MOD Archive! A modern repository for this type of music.
• chiptune.com A great resource for Chiptunes! (really, really small modules.) And music in other formats (including Adlib music.)
• Aminet Has a lot of the older ("classic") modules that first appeared on the Amiga with the popular ProTracker
• Fasttracker 2 Just for completeness. The trakcer that introduced the XM file format. The same functionality is in ModPlug tracker.
• Impulse Tracker Included for completeness. Another excellent tracker like Fasttracker. Introduced the IT file format. The same functionality exists in ModPlug tracker.
• ScreamTracker Only including a link to information about it because of the nostaliga involved with it. It's lacking in the features that Fasttracker and Impluse Tracker have but it's really easy to use.
• The Hornet Archive Another nostaliga site. Music and programs from the Demoscene.

Also, if you're interested, there has been some development relatively recently with "Buzz trakcers"(?) I don't have as much knowledge with these but from what I saw with Jeskola Buzz, it's really very

Lets travel back, way back. There was the Adlib audio. Then Creative Labs introduced the 8bit, 11Khz Sound Blaster, then the Sound Blaster Pro which added stereo. Then there was the Sounds Blaster 16, Pro Audio Spectrum 16, and the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) back in 1991.

The GUS was way ahead of the others. It could mix up to 32 channels in hardware. It always played the sound back at 44Khz via interpolation (unless you had too many channels active at once). It had up to 1meg of on board sound memory so it could be totally independent of your CPU. The Demo scene loved it. It had faked 3d sound via QSound..

It never caught on :( Creative's control was too powerful. Even the GUS PnP which was based on the AMD Interwave sound chip failed. Eventually Gravis was bought and the exited the sound business.

Years later Aureal, attempted to bring good audio to the PC and break Creative's control with its Vortex sound card. They ran into money issues. Creative sued them. They won, but the lawsuit drained their money and they went bankrupt. Creative then bought the remains (patents) of the company.

But rumours are nVidia hired many of the out of work engineers, which developed the Sound Storm for the Xbox. Which then nVidia fortunately brought to the nForce. Which unfortunately won't be in future versions because nobody is willing to pay for it. Even if it is "free". Gamers are more interested in a "free" hardware firewall.

Looking back at how Gravis, AMD, Aureal, and others have failed despite having superior products makes me wounder how a company could successfully introduce better audio to gamers. Maybe if it helped you win at FPS games... Seeing nVidia leave the audio market is sad, but I've been sad about this many times before. I'm kind of numb to the pain of seeing a great new technology with high hopes of making things better fail due to lack of interest.

I have a feeling we'll be stuck using Intel's "Azalea" for a long long time. It's certainly not bad, but it has the CPU do the work instead of a coprocessor. What do you expect from Intel when they made a nice new DX9 graphics core, but didn't use hardware T&L? Gotta try to create a market for those faster CPUs somehow... Sure, it can output some Dolby signals if they are precomputed (i.e. DVDs), but it can't encode them if they are dynamic (i.e. games). Unless you have a really powerful CPU. Oh well, at least Intel High Definition Audio as it is officially known now beats AC'97.

Since version 2, Winamp has been notorious for playing MOD, XM, S3M, and related files inaccurately. It fudges up a lot of the effects, particularly portamento (note slide) and key-off commands. You all should be using ModPlug Player to play these formats! It ain't perfect but it's the best Windows player there is.

Why get this player? So that you can drink deeply from the cup of BBS\Internet history! Check out some MOD sites and dig some chippy goodness!

SHAMELESS PLUG -- Be sure to scope out my MODs as well!

Nuff respect to groups like ACiD and ICE for doing what they do with pride. While these two are arguably the biggest players in the ANSI and now "VGA" scene, they're certainly not the only ones still doing it and actively discussing it.

Be sure to check out telnet BBS's - same as the old POTS equivalent but with way more lines and generally better bandwidth (althogh displaying ANSI's is smoother via dialup). A list of active telnet BBS's can be found at The BBS Corner.

Before there was ANSI art there was ASCII. It's a little cheesy and rudamentary but it takes a lot of talent to represent visual art as typographic characters. IRC-ers will dig the ASCII block fonts. For some info on the history of PC art check out Textfiles.com Art.

Parallel to the art scene were the MOD (music module) and demo (megademo\intro\loader) scenes. These disciplines all began in the C64 days, most often seen accompanying cracked games with chippy SID tunes. Warez and demo began together as a sort of cyber-Pangea and though they have separated and flourished in their own way, they still occasionally accompany oneanother to this day. Thanks to products like Sk@le Tracker and ModPlug Tracker the MOD scene is still kicking.

While the popularity of ANSI has declined over the years, megademos are more popular than ever (particularly in Finland, Belgium, Germany, and thereabouts). Demo parties are bigger and badder than ever and are even covered on national television. For a very entertaining primer on the demo scene pick up a copy of the Mind Candy DVD Vol. 1. It's the best $16 you'll ever spend.

ANSI and demos seem to have shared a similar fate. ANSI, in all its blocky glory, is a testement to the speed and limitations of its time - the very definition of zeitgeist. As artists grew in number and in skill, more advanced techniques such as shading and emulating texture were implemented, but there's only so much that can be done with the medium. Demos, by definition, have much more freedom and were, in earlier times, a competition to code the newest, coolest, most efficient realtime effects. 3D video accelerators all but destroyed this pursuit and now the megademo has become more of a demonstration of design than coding. For all the demos you could ever hope to watch, check out The Hornet Archive.

And check out my MODs!

You've obviously never been to a live show where people use tracker music as a part of it. I've been to them. It's possible. For instance: Impulse Tracker allows you to press a button to continue down the tracks of a song, line by line, at your own pace; I've had friends use that as a way to mix in tracker music with more live instrumentation...

For those of you looking for a more "classic" collection of Tracker Music (when there was a more cohesive tracker scene, hq'd on IRC in the channel #trax, and when the demo scene was all Amiga and DOS-based and was truly creative), check out The Hornet Archive.

And I don't know about you guys, but tracker music has some of the MOST original music I've ever heard, much of it is so different from what I've heard elsewhere that unless the tracking scene really picks up and becomes more like it was 7-10 years ago, I doubt we'll ever get a chance to hear the variety of music like what was coming out of that scene again anytime soon. Just search for music by "Dizzy", for instance.

I only quickly skimmed through most of the comments but didn't find anything suggesting alternatives. I haven't the foggiest notion how many /.ers are former or present trackers, though I suspect that a fair majority of the "oldschool" trackers (myself included) have become involved with the Open Source community, even if fleetingly. MP3.com certainly wasn't the first to offer free "indie" music nor will they be the last. Anyone who remembers Hornet or Trax in Space should know this. Hell, I think I've seen a few tracking proggies listed on SourceForge (cheese tracker is one of them, I believe).

So here's my question: Are there any fairly decent archives still available or has the RIAA successfully vanquished them from the 'Net? It's been a long time since I've delved into the Tracking Scene, so short of modarchive, I can't think of any decent sites...

Or... here's an idea that maybe some Slashdotter (or Slashdotters) could run with. Why not create a sort of OpenMusic directory where songs fall under a derivative of the GPL -- maybe an MPL, Music Public Licence -- for music? I would imagine that, if the artist desired of course, these songs could be freely modified (remixed) and redistributed in a fashion synonymous to how OSS typically lives. I'm not sure how well it'd work but the experiment itself would be interesting.

--

There's other kinds of musics out there.

The original and the soundtrack: download away

Here it is in divx, in case you've thrown away your old computer: misc_fc-2ndreality-divx.avi

I dunno--I think I trust their abilities as programmers. If I recall correctly, it's the same core team that coded Second Reality and made us all crap our collective pants, back in The Day.

Instead of sipping from the cup of lukewarm techno that is most modern electronica, I'd suggest diving into the 16-bit wonderland that was and is the MODscene.

Back before there were MP3s or computers fast enough to play them, there were MODs -- 4 channel music files that began on the Amiga, and contained their own samples. MODs encouraged experimentation in electronic music on a level never seen before -- you could download a MOD, load it up in your tracker, and start coding a new song using the samples already there.

MODs branched out from their 4 channel beginnings into multiple channels and a variety of new extensions like .S3M, .XM, *.ULT, *.IT., and the more powerful the tracking software became, the more people were drawn to the scene. It was the online equivalent of jazz clubs in the '30s. I think it's one of the great secret stories of the web.

Then RealAudio hit. And after that, MP3. Online music aficionados began to follow a different path, and MODs, like BBS culture, slowly died. The MOD culture is still around, eclipsed but not forgotten. I'd suggest starting with The Kosmic Free Music Foundation, arguably the most prolific and influencial modgroup of that era. You could also check out the Hornet archive or the Modarchive. Either Winamp or XMMS should play them.

_________________________
Check your karma. It's changed.

Lest we forget Triton and Future Crew and the rest of the demo scene? If you have
you better remind yoruself.

The 4k demo contests have always been the pinacle (IMO) of art as not only did you have a visual experience but the wonderment of how much was packed into a 4k executable. It was art in design and programming.

And all done with typical PC hardware. No fancy render farms. Hell, FC's Second Reality ran on a 386!

And now look torwards all the work being done with Flash, especially with respect to animation. But I think the author of this post means to focus on realistic animation.

Someone mentioned elite, etc. Yes, there was 3D graphics before there were dedicated processors on PCI/AGP cards for this purpose. Going by this ethos, shouldn't we also be celebrating the modularization of the sound support and serial line comms support functions of the modern PCs? Why is the birthday of the 3D card celebrated, and not the ISA/PCI/USB modem, or sound card? Or perhaps Mac users should celebrate the day the monitor was split off the case.

Any processor intensive application will spawn modular add-ons to take some of the burden off the CPU. So long as the task itself, of course, is generic enough to have a sufficiently large market. Basic economics.

By saying there was no proper 3D graphics before the advent of the accelerators, you are doing a great injustice to the demo scene as it was back then. Remember the 256 byte competitions? The 1 kb and 4 kb competitions? Now here were people who knew how to milk code for every iota of juice that was there. The (almost) forgotten art of Code Optimisation.

Heck, there was 3D graphics on my old Commodore 128; I still have Elite. What do you call the original Battlezone? The only difference was, there wasn't any specialised add-on card to do this task on the market back then.

I don't mean to disrespect current makers, researchers, coders, and gamers. I just think there's got to be many more significant birthdays to commemorate.

How about a feature on the demo scene on slashdot? The younger crowd will appreciate the demos, and we'll get these funny comments from the war-torn 386 vets about how they used to make their own transistors out of sand...

i know it's no longer updated, but still loads of good stuff there,

spiny / torment
torment.atari.org

In case anyone missed this parody demo back in 1996. Search 14ndreal.zip on The Hornet Archive. Here's the info:

Sqrt(2) Reality by Future Screw
04 Dec 1996 /demos/1996/0-9/14ndreal.zip (1455k)
ABD96:demo:15

Remember to have humor when you watch it since it is cheesy. :)

For the PC platform. If you still haven't seen it, then go to Hornet.org and search Second Reality to download the two demo files (don't need the S3M music files). Obviously, you will want to use MS-DOS boot and configure your EMM386 for EMS (if I remember correctly).

In my opinion and others, this is still the best PC demo of all. Even the music was awesome at its time. I ran it on my 486DX2/66 and dang it was cool :). You can easily find a better quality MP3 of the song.

Remember The Hornet Archive? It was a place where module music makers (remember those formats?) could post their music online. There was no profit made for the musicians, but it was a chance to be widely heard for free. Users of the Hornet Archive could either get the music online, or purchase CD-ROMs full of the songs, all without the registration mumbo-jumbo that too many modern sites have.

The closest thing I can think of to the Hornet Archive is Trax in Space. They also are a source of module music. Unfortunately, they have also gone the way of MP3.com and require registration.

We need a site that simply lets users upload and download their music, with a quick check done to make sure the works are original. It's as simple as that.

I would petition ibiblio or a similar site with lots of mirrors to do the task, but such a system with MP3s requires lots of bandwidth. I wish the Internet was back to the good old days again where everyone didn't want to know everything about you.

• www.scene.org - sort of a ground central for the demoscene today, the way I guess the Hornet archive used to be, though I didn't even know what a demo was when hornet was in business.
• Orange Juice, the self-proclaimed "demoscene information center, though I've never found anything useful there. Mostly pertanent to Europe, I think.
• The famous hornet archive, which shut down in 1998 but still seems to host something of an archive.
• A few budding Linux demo sites:
  
  • optimum.sourceforge.net
  • linux.scene.org
    
  
  

• www.scene.org - sort of a ground central for the demoscene today, the way I guess the Hornet archive used to be, though I didn't even know what a demo was when hornet was in business.
• Orange Juice, the self-proclaimed "demoscene information center, though I've never found anything useful there. Mostly pertanent to Europe, I think.
• The famous hornet archive, which shut down in 1998 but still seems to host something of an archive.
• A few budding Linux demo sites:
  
  • optimum.sourceforge.net
  • linux.scene.org
    
  
  

yep. many of the posts expressing som kind of annoyance over this topic got voted down. even though the syntax might be offensive, the general message is that dedicated sites do a much better job at explaining graphics than slashdot ever will. But obviously someone looooooved the bad explanation of this technique.

a link to the nvidia site got rated 4 because it was 'informative'. I say """""please""""". ofcourse it is informative, but people interrested in EMBM are likely to know about this technique long BEFORE they enter their slashdot accounts. Nvidia is the number one gfx hardware firm in the world. If you don`t visit Nvidia.

I don`t mean to claim I can say which article can or cannot be slashdotted, but the fakephong version of this technique popped up around 1995 for the first time in a DOS demo called Juice, which you can download here . So don`t tell me this tech is big news, because it isn`t. The only difference is the tech is now in hardware. Some BitBoys themselves made demo`s in 1989-1993, they knew where to get the juice.

now, let the monkeys rate this rant offtopic, kill my karma, yeah. suckers.

If anyone here found those 5k websites interesting (and I'm sure you did) you should check out some of the stuff that was done in the demosceen with 4k (and smaller) Intros. I've seen bump aping done in 256bytes before. I wish there was some good references for links, but check out the old Hornet.org and scene.org for more info. Sadly the sites don't have good layouts for finding stuff :(. Most of the intros are MS-DOS programs, that should run on win9x machines and under DOS-EMU in Linux (I think)

My favourite bite-sized (haha) challenge would have to be the "chip tune" competitions. The idea was simple - create a ".mod" (.s3m, .it, etc..) song under 4k, including samples, pattern lists, etc..
Perhaps even more amazing, from a technical standpoint, were the 4k "demo" competitions. Apparently, these are still reasonably popular. The idea here is to create a graphically pleasing demo in 4k or less (go asm!).
The 64k limit was (is) a popular barrier for graphical demos too, with an absolutly incredible amount of power crammed into each and every byte.
For fun, check out the following URLs:

The Hornet Archive - While no longer "active", there are still a lot of resources available. Search for "64k" (while you still can!).
Future Crew's "Second Reality" - One of the definitive demos of all time.
Distance'99 - a recent competition covering many types of demos. Both amiga and PC 4k and 64k bundles of joy are available. :)

.------------ - - -
| big bad mr. frosty
`------------ - - -

XMMS is not just an mp3 player. With the aid of the mikmod libraries, it is
also a mod file player(that's the music kind of mod file, as in the stuff at the hornet archive). Given the
right plugin, it is also a viable alternative to many hallucinogens :)

Ha ha ha, silly people.

X runs great on a 386. I ran it on my PS/2 that I got for free dumpster-diving. Standard 8154/a graphics adapter, it has a blitter, so no problem.
It was a 306/33 with 4 mb ram, and an 80 mb hdd. Sure, it was now what would be considered an "Ancient" linux; Debian Bo it was, libc5 based. But it booted in 45 seconds, logged in in 10, and Gimp 0.? started in less than a minute.

Kernel compiles were about six hours; start one at night and wake up to completion.

486/50's and above with 8MB ram and a decent 2d-accelerator (anything by s3, they make great 2d accellerators) usually have full support and work great. Linux works better than Windows does on slow boxes... not that it should be delegated to one.

Linux also runs great on my K6-2 450 with 128mb's of ram and a TNT2 with GLX support.

Don't go sayin' that 386's are slow... try "2ndreality" by the Future Crew to understand that they aren't (look at hornet.org for lots of PC demos.)




--
Talon Karrde

V2 is an elegant operating system. It provides some nice software interrupts, and becuase of its small size, could be great for embedded systems. Besides, as far as I know, you can program in C on it. It shouldn't be too hard to port over GCC, and from there many apps can be built...

It could also be an excellent boot-disk OS for demos. Demos, you know, those wicked multimedia presentations coded in ASM? Check out hornet.org for some great examples.

ASM has its place... and anybody who has looked at ASM code in a debugger and C compiled code in a debugger knows that human-written machine language is far simpler and faster.

Merry Christmas, yall!

Anyone remember the Second Reality demo for the PC in 1993? Amazing, right? Well, the only thing that could possibly top that would be...

Second Reality for the C64 in 1997! I was amazed, the sound was very good (and the video somewhat limited for obvious reasons :) and it ran fine on vice, with a little tweaking. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

http://www.hornet.org

There isn't much need to say more. You want fast code? You have to listen to music that has some tempo too it. Anything less than 160 bpm is too slow to code too.

It looks like simple voxels to me -- a rendering trick that's been around for almost a decade. For those of you who are amazed at what can be done with 74k, take a look at this little program from 1994.

The author of the original Mars terrain demo has made an explanation of the algorithm used here.

I'd like to see a version of this under Linux.

Do not waste your time or your money with the 'Kosmic Free Music Foundation.' Since the KLF became the KFMF, their goal has been to make money, plain and simple; this is despite their deceptive name. Accordingly, the quality of this organization has dropped steadily, since the people with the talent worth talking about have all quietly left. Kosmic's ranks have grown by leaps and bounds, but with substandard artists producing substandard music. Let me head the flames off at the pass here; I am not saying that these people should not have their music heard. I am saying that there is better stuff out there.

Where out there? Many places. The biggest module collection in the world,the Hornet Archive, is one of them. Where HA now? In the midst of a slow shutdown process that will leave us all lacking. Although much of the music on the Hornet Archive was also substandard, a little involvement and a little support would have engendered a new rating system, in the works at the time of the Archive's demise, into reenergizing the contributors and the staff, thus keeping the Archive alive and healthy.

The Hornet Archive never begged for support of any kind. They never cried for money or for bandwidth or even for kind letters. So they didn't get them.

Maelcum, on the other hand, who has done nothing for anybody except take and take, begs for yet more and more.

Hornet and Kosmic aren't the only places to get music on the web.

Scene.org (which is down at the moment) poses to take the place of the Hornet Archive, and more. Scene.org needs and deserves your support.

Of course, this is the web. Not everybody releases into a conglomerate such as these. Some other groups of interest are Analogue Music, Noise, Process Five, Five Musicians, and many more.

For those who care to contribute, Impulse Tracker is arguably the most popular module creation program in use to date. (Note that it is a DOS program which will -not- work under DOSEmu.)

Kevin Hutter
Team Tropicana