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More really good demoes are compiled at my maa.org article, 64K or less. http://www.maa.org/editorial/mathgames/mathgames_08_16_04.html The main demoscene sites are better though: http://www.scene.org/ and http://www.pouet.net/ . One of my own recent favorites is a 4K demo, synchroplastikum http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=20967

More really good demoes are compiled at my maa.org article, 64K or less. http://www.maa.org/editorial/mathgames/mathgames_08_16_04.html The main demoscene sites are better though: http://www.scene.org/ and http://www.pouet.net/ . One of my own recent favorites is a 4K demo, synchroplastikum http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=20967

Here's a demo of how to program for an entire sphere:
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=27000

If you don't want to download the program, here's a video link:
ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/kb/videos/Farbrausch%20-%20fr-054%20polar.avi

Code is organic by nature, because humans tend to evolve things in an organic way. As such, keeping code in good health requires a lot of attention, which costs money. Automatic refactoring tools may be evil for VCSes, but they are the most valuable tools we have to keep code in shape.

Code is also (usually) a collaborative exercise, bringing lots of different ideas and principles to the table. That is why software "Patterns" are so valuable, so that people can communicate about code in a structured and compatible way.

Code is something that no one has time for. Visual programming 4th generation languages and Functional Programming are ways to get the job done faster, easier and with less of a hassle, and more docs to read. Both are still way off the target goal, but in the last few years some nice tools have developed.

Code is bound to run on something, and that "something" is changing all the time. You can't check in and label your machine in your VCS, which means you have to try to make it run as good as one can within certain constraints. This is where the virtual machine has helped make a lot of progress.

Code will always be needed, though the format and logic behind it will keep changing and morphing. The battles between speed and memory, cost and ownership, data or function, abstraction or generalization, top-down or bottom-up, these battles will always exist. In the end, writing an executable program that does the job is just a very sophisticated search in a search-space that we still need to define better.

That said, check out Variform by kewlers for no apparent good reason, other than to look at code as an artform. Ps. There's tons more where that came from.

Cheers!

That should have been http://pouet.net/ not Lemon64. Oopsie daisy. And tee-hee.

I really don't see this as being a big deal. 1K is large for what this does, at least compared to what the demoscene guys are doing.

http://pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=32b&type%5B%5D=64b&type%5B%5D=128b&type%5B%5D=256b&type%5B%5D=512b&type%5B%5D=1k&order=&x=19&y=9&page=1&order=

may I silently weep ... 1MB/sec ... oh .. what a dream ... Try downloading and installing a Linux distribution with 50KB/s and you'll know what pain is. (Death, in this case, is if you're still on dial-up) Anyway, I agree with you on the principle. Too bad there aren't more progammers able to do THAT.

If it's not too late you might consider getting a bigger memory stick as I'm displeased with the inadequacy of my 2GB card. :)

I haven't checked into MOD players yet but I did find a very attractive MOD tracker called Nitrotracker. It's quite functional though it doesn't support effects yet. You'd do well to check out which has some (but not much) demoscene love for the DS. The "Flower Demo" is pretty attractive.

Future Crew's "Starport 2" BBS ad was the tightest, most cleverly-optimized, elegant piece of assembly code I've ever seen. The binary was even zero-byte-reduced to fit in exactly 1993 bytes, which was the year it was written. And it implemented a surprising amount of functionality in such a small binary.

See info at http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12217

Get one of those cheat cartridges with parallel ports (Game Shark, Action Replay, etc). They come cheap, $3-$10 on ebay at the moment. Reflash the EPROM and you're ready to inject your own code, or simply watch some demos.

Here's another source of recent (and less recent) prods for the ZX Spectrum. This one is more specifically oriented towards demoscene and technical feats.

(The link mentionned in the article seems to be slashdotted, btw.)

Speaking of old demos and computers, check out Desert Dream on a Commodore 64. Amazing port.

Indeed, the PC (IBM AT compatible blabla) demo scene has been *extremely* active for as long as there have been PCs. Check www.scene.org for details/demos.

However... there's no longer such a thing as 'The PC Demo Scene'; even those who claim there is are realizing it is rapidly degenerating. The reason for this is the extensive hardware acceleration of any type found in PCs these days. It used to be a challenge to stick a procedurally generated 3D scene with an 8-track MOD in a small exe and have it run fluidly on a 386 with a basic VGA card and a SoundBlaster. Nowadays one just takes the regular 3D scene along with an MP3 and feed it to the graphics card and through a simple decoder straight to audio.

From the Gravis UltraSound to the S3, every hardware development was greedily taken advantage of by showing new things that could be done on that hardware... but they've reached a saturation point several years back. If you want to pump the best results out of a graphics card now, you're not doing so in a demo.. you're doing so for profit on a major game engine.

What is left, then, is a limited form of a PC Demo Scene.. demos under 4k, 16k, 32k and 64k (existed before, but these are still challenging now even with all the hardware).. demos that must run on older hardware.. self-imposed restrictions like "no using pixel shaders", etc. But these are all highly artificial limits and no longer push the boundaries of what one can do on the hardware as is... it's pushing the boundaries of what one can do within those artificial limits.

To some that is the same spirit, to others it's nothing alike at all.

=====

To see what people are doing with PC demos nowadays, Farbrausch's debris is a nice one to check out. You don't need the hardware to run it, there's videos made of the things.
    http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244

Yep, I'm just back from breakpoint in bingen (close to frankfurt) germany (swede myself) last easter.

There was one demo for atari vcs, two for zx spectrum, one for atari xl/xe, one for the msx, one for ti-83 but also newer consoles as nintendo ds, gameboy advance, xbox 360 and psp etc... And in amiga there were 8 demos and 8 intros (6 64kb and 2 4k limits) and in the c64 there were 6 demos... check them out at http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=450&when=2007

But of course there are also pc competitions, and the one that stood out was debris

Demoparties are mainly a european happening, even tho there are visitors from all over the world. Especially to breakpoint and assembly.

The demoscene is a place for hobbyists that compete in different skills of using a computer, may it be coding, music, graphics or the combined (demo/wild etc). We do it all for the fun and the friendship. Please join us if it feels like your thing.

Yep, I'm just back from breakpoint in bingen (close to frankfurt) germany (swede myself) last easter.

There was one demo for atari vcs, two for zx spectrum, one for atari xl/xe, one for the msx, one for ti-83 but also newer consoles as nintendo ds, gameboy advance, xbox 360 and psp etc... And in amiga there were 8 demos and 8 intros (6 64kb and 2 4k limits) and in the c64 there were 6 demos... check them out at http://www.pouet.net/party.php?which=450&when=2007

But of course there are also pc competitions, and the one that stood out was debris

Demoparties are mainly a european happening, even tho there are visitors from all over the world. Especially to breakpoint and assembly.

The demoscene is a place for hobbyists that compete in different skills of using a computer, may it be coding, music, graphics or the combined (demo/wild etc). We do it all for the fun and the friendship. Please join us if it feels like your thing.

Chaos Engine and Superfrog are probably my favorite Amiga games. I've completed CE with all six characters, and done about three to four miscellaneous playthroughs. Superfrog is still my favorite platform game.

On a somewhat related note, when I noticed this post I was listening to music from the old Amiga demo 'Sequential' by Andromeda. I can't say I've seen too many demos in my lifetime, but Sequential is my favorite by far. The modern PC demos I've seen have been underwhelming and not very interesting.

Wasn't Wing Commander a PC game first? Regardless of the answer, I absolutely agree WRT Turrican, which is STILL the most-mentioned Amiga game. BTW you can get a 32kB knockoff of the first level of Turrican for windows (I believe it works on the latest wine as well.)

Vorticity by MFX has a 2D fluid sim: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=26507
47'111.0 by Faktory has a neat 3D flame/smoke fluid scene near the end, as well as a few other technical goodies: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=13048

Vorticity by MFX has a 2D fluid sim: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=26507
47'111.0 by Faktory has a neat 3D flame/smoke fluid scene near the end, as well as a few other technical goodies: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=13048

For more information, please visit http://pouet.net/topic.php?which=3627&com=25&which =3627&com=25&page=1&x=10&y=12 for the demoscene's take on this. Then leave a Cleveland steamer on the scene's chest.

The demoscene DOES still exist, even on Amiga, Atari ST and so on. Just see sites like Pouet and scene.org. The focus has obviously moved away a bit from pushing the hardware, instead creating very visually appealing productions.

In all these comments? Sheesh, and I thought you guys were nerds :)

Demos have been doing procedural textures for years... almost a necessity when you're trying to squeeze x number of minutes of... stuff into a 64k binary file. Take a look at fr-08: .the .product by farbrausch for a pretty stunning example of the amount of compression you can get when you need it. They've also got a proof-of-concept FPS that uses all procedural textures and fits into a 96k binary.

They've even released a tool for procedural generation publicly.

Given the benefits of procedural generation in terms of space, I wish more games would look into using them... especially online MMORGS or other situations where bandwidth is an issue. It's probably faster and more efficient on a decent CPU/GPU to create procedural textures than it is to download a bzipped version thereof. (Nudge: Can someone at Cyan Worlds please hire these guys as interns?)

What I wanted to write further is that, in spite of the insistence of some Slashbots that coding is an artform, people who code for aesthetic reasons are a minority. Most of the time people just want to get their work done and cash their paycheck.

AREXX on the Amiga was similar to the OLE system in Windows. Cross-application scripting was awesome back then with practically every application software title having an AREXX port using a simple property/method system, and it's taken a long time for the PC and Mac to catch up to the level of automation the Amiga enjoyed. Even the hardware was easy to work with using AREXX. The NTSC video features + the video toaster and a lot of other cool hardware add-ons made it a fun platform to build on. It was easy to get the full schematics to the systems and hack on anything you wanted.. fun fun fun.

It's also something to note - that in 2006 the demo-group The Black Lotus won the Assembly 2006 demo competition with a demo coded on the Amiga AGA chipset platform - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=25778

I really wonder though, how the secirity model for something like Workbench 2.0 would hold up if it were attacked as much as PCs are on today's internet.

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9461 Try it out.

Link please ;)

Yup, and Heaven seven is even good looking :)

Oh hey, only now I notice.. they've been at it since (at least) 2000.

F.A.N. released a real-time raytraced demo at breakpoint back in 2003. It does no more than 10 fps on my lowly 1GHz P3, but I'm sure it runs quite smooth on a nice modern CPU (though I don't think it's multithreaded).

This is a lot of work but also a lot of fun! I did it for a real-time demo project with a few friend. We used Christmas fairy lights and 5 mini-VHS camcorders. You can see the result at the very end of our Childbone demo.

Nowadays, using webcams will save you a lot of troubles, and you can find lots of very useful codes on the Internet (such as Intel's OpenCV, however majors issues that you still have to solve would be calibrating camera positions and reliably tracking crossing markers in images. In my system I had to do an editor to manually reassign markers when incorrectly detected or labeled, which can be a very tedious task...

I would recommend Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 webcams, as they are USB 2.0, can do 640x480 at 30 fps, and most importantly use the somewhat recent generic USB Video Class spec, for which a driver for linux is available. I have a few of those and the image quality is quite good :)

Good luck!

Yes I mean, even Microsoft is offering XNA for free (they even offer the sourcecode for a major game as example, MechCommander 2 that is, go figure) which hopefully will allow some homebrew.(And yes it needs Windows+Visual Studio hehe)
Rumours say it will be costing $US100 later on. (Individuals should be getting this for free...)
So for Sony why not following the move ?
It would be nice to try out some stuff from people like gaming and demoscene.
Wonder if it would be possible to output some impressive 4KB stuff like this intro on a PS3. Prolly not.
They should find a solution to allow homebrew but still being able to protect game companies.
The PSP example is quite amazing, hundreds of homebrew applications/games/whatsoever and Sony keep protecting it on each update instead thinking about a method as above.
TBH I think PS3 will be a flop, late release, high-priced, let's wait and see.

Holy smoke, that game is impressive!

I instantly booted into Windows to check it out. I've seen all their previous demos, most are in the "small demo" cathegory, and are among the more impressive pieces of coding I've ever seen. I've seen a lot of demos, by the way.

The game has got almost 10 minutes of gameplay through changing environments, five different guns, four or five different enemies with distinct models, nice dynamiv lighting, the lot.

It ran perfectly well on my W2k/3000+ AMD64/1GB/GF6800GS, very smooth too. It seems I was lucky, judging from the other replies. I had to clean out some disk space for it, though :)

I believe these are the guys from farbrausch, check out their previous work here.
Here is their current website, with some farbrausch demos thrown in as well.

By the way, if you like miniscule demos, you've got to check this out, too. 256 bytes, source code available.

OK, going to bed now.

Holy smoke, that game is impressive!

I instantly booted into Windows to check it out. I've seen all their previous demos, most are in the "small demo" cathegory, and are among the more impressive pieces of coding I've ever seen. I've seen a lot of demos, by the way.

The game has got almost 10 minutes of gameplay through changing environments, five different guns, four or five different enemies with distinct models, nice dynamiv lighting, the lot.

It ran perfectly well on my W2k/3000+ AMD64/1GB/GF6800GS, very smooth too. It seems I was lucky, judging from the other replies. I had to clean out some disk space for it, though :)

I believe these are the guys from farbrausch, check out their previous work here.
Here is their current website, with some farbrausch demos thrown in as well.

By the way, if you like miniscule demos, you've got to check this out, too. 256 bytes, source code available.

OK, going to bed now.

Procedural synthesis has been around for quite awhile in the demoscene. These demos are computer programs that have been specifically engineeered to impress in both sound and graphics quality?

Check out FR-08, circa 2000, by Farbrausch...this demo goes on for nearly 15 minutes at 1024x768 graphics that certainly blew away anything of that time, and its 64KB.....64KB!!
Download Here[pouet.net]

Also, see FR-025, circa 2003, this "popular" demo absolutely blew my mind when I first watched it.
Download Here[pouet.net]

Heaven Seven, circa 1999, the demo completed by Exceed, is a journey threw time with beautiful textures and graphics. This is also a 64KB demo, so beautiful...
Download Here[pouet.net]

The demoscene is alive and well, publishing the most beautiful and interesting works of art in modern days. Even the largest demos (~50MB), blow away HL2 and any other 4GB+ game. Check these out at http://www.pouet.net

Procedural synthesis has been around for quite awhile in the demoscene. These demos are computer programs that have been specifically engineeered to impress in both sound and graphics quality?

Check out FR-08, circa 2000, by Farbrausch...this demo goes on for nearly 15 minutes at 1024x768 graphics that certainly blew away anything of that time, and its 64KB.....64KB!!
Download Here[pouet.net]

Also, see FR-025, circa 2003, this "popular" demo absolutely blew my mind when I first watched it.
Download Here[pouet.net]

Heaven Seven, circa 1999, the demo completed by Exceed, is a journey threw time with beautiful textures and graphics. This is also a 64KB demo, so beautiful...
Download Here[pouet.net]

The demoscene is alive and well, publishing the most beautiful and interesting works of art in modern days. Even the largest demos (~50MB), blow away HL2 and any other 4GB+ game. Check these out at http://www.pouet.net

Procedural synthesis has been around for quite awhile in the demoscene. These demos are computer programs that have been specifically engineeered to impress in both sound and graphics quality?

Check out FR-08, circa 2000, by Farbrausch...this demo goes on for nearly 15 minutes at 1024x768 graphics that certainly blew away anything of that time, and its 64KB.....64KB!!
Download Here[pouet.net]

Also, see FR-025, circa 2003, this "popular" demo absolutely blew my mind when I first watched it.
Download Here[pouet.net]

Heaven Seven, circa 1999, the demo completed by Exceed, is a journey threw time with beautiful textures and graphics. This is also a 64KB demo, so beautiful...
Download Here[pouet.net]

The demoscene is alive and well, publishing the most beautiful and interesting works of art in modern days. Even the largest demos (~50MB), blow away HL2 and any other 4GB+ game. Check these out at http://www.pouet.net

Procedural synthesis has been around for quite awhile in the demoscene. These demos are computer programs that have been specifically engineeered to impress in both sound and graphics quality?

Check out FR-08, circa 2000, by Farbrausch...this demo goes on for nearly 15 minutes at 1024x768 graphics that certainly blew away anything of that time, and its 64KB.....64KB!!
Download Here[pouet.net]

Also, see FR-025, circa 2003, this "popular" demo absolutely blew my mind when I first watched it.
Download Here[pouet.net]

Heaven Seven, circa 1999, the demo completed by Exceed, is a journey threw time with beautiful textures and graphics. This is also a 64KB demo, so beautiful...
Download Here[pouet.net]

The demoscene is alive and well, publishing the most beautiful and interesting works of art in modern days. Even the largest demos (~50MB), blow away HL2 and any other 4GB+ game. Check these out at http://www.pouet.net

Ah, you mean like fr-08: .the .product by farbrausch http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221

An awesome 3D demo in only 64K
or Krieger: http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger
A demo game in 96k that pisses all over Quake 2/3 in graphics terms, has real time lighting, shadows, bump maps, everything!

You can download (from various mirrors), read comments, read information, vote (need an account), comment (need an account), etc. from Pout.net.

Thanks, but that's just a Little Graphics Demo.

A pretty nice Little Graphics Demo to be sure, in fact it won first place at a Little Graphics Demo competition in 2002.

But it's hardly a benchmarking suite, and since it hasn't been maintained since 2002 (it is a one-off for a compo after all), it can hardly be expected to test OpenGL 2.0 extensions.

I guess an fps count in Nexquiz is one way of doing it...

Also, here. Very popular in demos scene.

Try pouet.net or other "demoscene" websites. The Demo Scene guys still do a fair amount of stuff in low level languages, especially for the 64k (or smaller) competitions. Some of the stuff they do is quite amazing, for its technical merits as well as the artistic aspect.

With some Excel(R) scripting, you can create sophisticated applications that really boost your productivity.

Here are some programs I use daily:

• Pacelman
• Excellence(TM) (sorry to wh.+ my own product -- but hey, it's open source!)

A buddy of mine and I decided that the ringtones we really really really wanted were the music from isi and Final isi. This is no mean feat, however: our phones (Sanyo SCP-8100s) only play midi and some crappy .wav format, and the latter is clearly unacceptable (both because it's limited in length to 30 seconds and because... well... it's just not cool enough!).

So what did we do? Jim modified DOSBOX's OPL3 emulation code to dump out the opcodes being sent to the FM channels and handed over the output to me.

From there, it was a matter of parsing the various channel setup data into some semblance of notes, deciding which combination of general MIDI patches best emulated the sound of the FM synthesizer given the patchset on my phone, and writing a whole bunch of code.

In the end, we did it: isi.mid and fisi.mid are the full soundtracks to isi and Final isi, respectively. In addition, I made a couple other versions of the Final isi soundtrack to skip to various parts of it that are more interesting and/or make better ringers than starting at the beginning: fisi2.mid, fisi3.mid.

These ringers pretty much rule the roost.

-rsw

A buddy of mine and I decided that the ringtones we really really really wanted were the music from isi and Final isi. This is no mean feat, however: our phones (Sanyo SCP-8100s) only play midi and some crappy .wav format, and the latter is clearly unacceptable (both because it's limited in length to 30 seconds and because... well... it's just not cool enough!).

So what did we do? Jim modified DOSBOX's OPL3 emulation code to dump out the opcodes being sent to the FM channels and handed over the output to me.

From there, it was a matter of parsing the various channel setup data into some semblance of notes, deciding which combination of general MIDI patches best emulated the sound of the FM synthesizer given the patchset on my phone, and writing a whole bunch of code.

In the end, we did it: isi.mid and fisi.mid are the full soundtracks to isi and Final isi, respectively. In addition, I made a couple other versions of the Final isi soundtrack to skip to various parts of it that are more interesting and/or make better ringers than starting at the beginning: fisi2.mid, fisi3.mid.

These ringers pretty much rule the roost.

-rsw

Demo coders were using video ram for non-video back in 1992.

IIRC, they used video memory for the audio because regular memory wasn't fast enough, and then they used soundcard RAM for the video... or something like that; it's been a while.

Cedega? wine should have much better d3x9 support in the next week or so.

I've almost finished off swapchains today, and I'm about to write a plugable render manager so that you can choose between performance, compatibility or memory usage and your not stuck with PBuffers when you ATI card support render to texture.

Current issues are:

The Shader code still needs to be migrated from d3d8 and shader 2.0 code needs writing. (WineD3D will creates nice stubs so that apps will still run)

An issue with the vertex pipeline crashing or not working under some circumstances.

Slight performance issues (though not that much worse than Cedega), the plugable render managers should sort that out.

A minor? issue with wrapping coords.

And Queries don't return real data yet, but that's kinda accademic.

Many of the demos I've been running work find under wine, but won't run under cedega.

Oh, and you get the source code with wine so it shouldn't be too hard to fix any problems you have...

Whenever I see articles like this, it bothers me a tiny bit since the demoscene has existed for over a decade earlier than machinima has, and the artform is much more interesting and sophisticated. Yet demos get hardly any recognition from mainstream media because they don't appeal to the common denominator (probably because the art of the demoscene is so nebulous and abstract). Where is the coverage of the stunningly beautiful engines and music of the demoscene?

Then again, coverage of the scene would probably drive it further underground and/or stifle its creativity. Okay, forget I said anything.

Yeah. Rad man is teh oldskool legend and saviour of the scene. See here for details.