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I attended The Gathering the first time in 1993, and it was actually more fun before there was a large network and a high speed internet connection, although I had a really good time in 1996 too.

The Gathering isn't meant to be so much a "gamer" party as it is supposed to be for the Demo Scene .

Good examples of what demos are are here if you have a win32 or DOS box around.

More parties like Mekka, Assembly, The Party and others exist.

The organizers of this event have to be simply amazing.

Yeah. They are amazing. The best part is: KANDU (translated Creative Active Norwegian Computer Youth, link) also hires out (sp?) networking and security equipment (walkies) to people who want to organize their own parties.

I live in Norway, and I've been attending TG since 1998, but it is sad to see that the scener/gamer (kinda like s/n) ratio is tipping more towards gaming for each year.
I am by no means an old-schooler when it comes to scening, but I've been following it since '92 and I think it's sad that the gamer ratio have increased. But I guess that's how it gets as it becomes more commercial.

Anyhow, for you US folks that aren't into the european demo scene, check out scene.org for news and great stuff to download. Especially check out the demos and Hybris/NEMESIS' great 3D contribution from The Party 2000. It's great (albeit a quite large 150 MB download).

the actual technology used by nasa to create the zoom is the old demo scene trick of a number of different scale images scaled down and then expanded to their full size - this can also be done to create a real time fractal zoomer without having to render each frame seperately - just render the frame at double the resolution and zoom in until you hit that frame, in which time you've rendered the next double-size fractal image.

i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.

The demoscene is not dead, just got a little crotchety as the kids all grew up. Check out scene.org for a starter.

I wrote trax and hung out in #trax as Ned Funky. hehe.

And go take a look at vip2 invtro. Trust me, you'll stop using past tense to talk about the demoscene.

Cheers!

And go take a look at vip2 invtro. Trust me, you'll stop using past tense to talk about the demoscene.

Cheers!

Recent productions in the demoscene european demoscene should definitively be an interesting multimedia movement to cover. Demos and the demoscene have been around since the early eighties, and the repertoire of quality productions for every platform you can dream of out there should make for interesting viewing.

For people who've never heard of the demoscene before, it's a movement dedicated to building real-time multimedia production, usually with small memory footprints, with the aim to astound and show off a demo groups coding, graphic and music composition skills. Demos and intros (the main type of production of the movement) vary in size between 6-7 Megs (for recent productions) and 64k, (sometimes even being as small as 4 kilobytes !!) and can be described as the computerized equivalent of a "live performance". The scene has it's roots in the old Commodore 64 game cracking groups. Those groups usually attempted to show off their coding skills by adding small animated musical clips to cracked videogames, often accompanied by colorfull self-complimenting scrolling text.

It has since evolved into a huge European movement. Over 20 huge gatherings called demoparties now take place in different countries troughout europe, where demo groups compete with each others for prizes and recognition. Those parties are often lavish affairs, and are similar to raves with a bit of psychedelic computer trade show thrown in. The bigger parties 24 hours a day for 5 to 6 days non-stop, and are attented by thousands of computer programmers, graphic artists and musicians.

Demos have, over the course of the last few years, seen tremendous improvements, and can usually be described as "mindblowing". (For a good example of this, go download the VIP2 "invtro", it will *redefine* the way you look at realtime 3d rendering.) You can learn more about this whole movement by visiting the following sites: You will find the cream of the crop in demoscene productions at demoo!, where reviews for the most influential demos and intros can be found. For those wishing to learn how to create demos, cfxweb.net is a great place to start, you will find there tons of source code examples for 3d and openGL realtime 3d rendering. error-404.com is the definitive source for music creation using trackers, the scene's favored format (remember .mod and .s3m files?) For scene news and group lists, chat, etc, see pouet.net and ojuice.net. And as a last reference, my site, naid.net, also concerns itself with the demoscene but also covers anything related to the use of new technologies in the arts.

Tunak Tunak Tun

Hatt, Baby

• CFX Web
• Scene.org - especially the viewing tips section
• Assembly 2K

• CFX Web
• Scene.org - especially the viewing tips section
• Assembly 2K

It's originaly from the *bad* translated japanese videogame "Zero Wing" to sega genesis. Look here for a nice flash sequence from the game.

All your answers lie here.

assembly '2k
SE '2k
dream hack
Scene

There are more..
I only wish that NAID (Montreal, where I live) still existed.. ):

1st Law Of Networking: Loose ends are bad, termination is good.

Remember back in the days of Second Reality by Future Crew and groups like Orange et all. If you can find the source to a demo, you can witness some truely awe inspiring code. www.scene.org These people squeezed every last clock cycle out of those old 386's. Most people didn't think it was possible. I know I didn't back then.

Even on "baloe" (you know which one I mean), it drenches all CPU power. Try Leonidas and be afraid...very afraid..

Runs like a charm on this pIII :) Great site too, allthough some things didn`t work I think..

You should try this one, great design & great style: it`s the crouching tiger hidden dragon fan-site but be sure to have flash 4 installed, and a system not named Baloe :)

Naah, I don`t think Flash 4 is too bloated, it simply needs more power to run, and eventually, people will have this power and they won`t say it`s too bloated, because it delivers a nice extra touch to your webpage.. from a designers` perspective, I would even goso far as to say flashes capabilities are still rather poor. But then again, somewhere they had to decide where the plugg-in aspect remains important, and where standalone fast animation might be a better choice (through the use of accelerated video etc).. All in all, macromedia tools are heavily used these days because it gives webpages extra identity, makes them stand out, and frankly I think that evolution will only increase rather than decrease.. One can argue about the fact that supporting browsers do not allow plugg-in platforms to take full advantage of hardware and therefore, run through layers stacked on the browser`s canvas. I have no clue how these plugg-in`s work together with browsers but from the looks of it, I think they`re constrained by how the browser allows other clients to draw just about anything on the screen.. Most operations are fade-in fade-out, scaling, masking, moving, etc.. these are all rather easy things which still run slow on machines that definately can run them fast, given that they can take advantage of the raw hardware power in your machine. So I don`t think the plugg-in is to blame here.. but I don`t know for sure.

If you like to see what cool flash demo`s can look like, get a look at these things: ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/parties/2000/bizarre00/fla sh/

Here's some links for you interested:
Assembly demoparty
tAAt demogroup (the authors of LeGorso)
General demoscene news and stuff
Site dedicated to scenenews and game/demo development

Those should keep you guys busy for a while ;)
- Mik\tAAt

WARNING: Jar Jar Binks makes an appearance.

--

Why bother waiting for cubic? Granted it was a nice player, but Modplug is presently the module player that's turning out the best output, and has the most features, and it's player engine has already been ported as an XMMS plugin.

Of course, neither Modplug nor XMMS are particularly demostyle, but I don't think Linux is a particularly scene oriented system. All those things that make it a "modern, secure, robust" operating system just get in the way of old-fashioned bare-metal coding.

NE1 know of any 31337, scene based projects for Linux?

• 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
    
  
  

Quite frankly, this is the way I feel about it.

If you're interested in something more abstract and experimental, you may check the productions released this year at Assembly'2k, Spot by Exceed, the winner is for example a software rendered movie sharing some imagery with pixar movies, Art by haujobb is a 3d show in a dreamy museum, featuring unreal objects, (Lapsus/Maturefurk is sharing the same design) ...

Basically all the productions kicked ass. And this weekend just finished the LTP4 party, where we had a great fun seeing stuff like Antimoney/3state (a 1bpp, nicely designed windows 64k intro which works under Wine), Just a touch of funk/digital murder, a wonderfully keyframed music video, and lots of other lush stuff... (like Downtown / retro ac. and Purple / Orion)

• scene.org (epicentre)
• ojuice.net (news)
• demoo (demo selection)
• cde (demo reviews)
• pouet.net (demo database)

I'm not sure if this counts as recent, but Pascal used to be the language to use in the PC Demo Scene. Of course most of it was inline ASM...

Check out http://www.scene.org/ (and ftp.scene.org) for some really impressive minimalism. It's called 4kb intro's. 4096 bytes of pure assembly code producing excellent graphical effects and impressive music and sfx. Check it out.

Demoscene rules :)

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)

You really should see our #5 demo from Assembly '96.
It might work in win95 dos shell or it might not. It might work with emm386 or it might not. 8 bit graphics modes WON'T work.

And what do the tools have to do with the person? There are monumentally talented artists out there making music with synths, just like there are talented artists making non-synthesized music. No matter how anyone makes their music, the talented musicians who actually *understand* the dynamics of sound and music are in the minority. None of them appear on the charts, because they're interested in music, not marketing.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you on the Brittany Spearme thing. Most "mainstream" music today is crap. :)

If you think trackers have no talent, try Hunz or mellow-d (or heck, anyone in FM).

Using a tracker lets you concentrate on making the music... it's the closest thing to using a real instrument as far as I'm concerned.

I'm reminded of the phrase, "it's a poor worksman who blames his tools."

Coders have contests like this all the time, especially in Finland where they have 4k and I've even seen 256 byte competitions. They turn out some amazing stuff, but these competitions have been going on for a very long time, and I suspect the first of such competition in this new field will suck. Check out Scene.Org for these 4k demos.

If people want see tight code in action, I'd recommend a 4k PC intro called mesha. It really is excatly 4096 bytes, but is has something like two minutes of 3D graphics, textures and everything. I'm not a big follower of the demoscene, so there might be stuff that is better than this one, but this really blew me away when I saw it. It runs in DOS. The 10KB zip actually has two versions of the same program!

Why is having this 'software flexibility' important? I mean, most of the programmers I know just use the OS's memory management stuff. (and, if they really want to they can even do there own memory management). So it's not like the application programmers really lose any of there flexibility anyway. Its kind of like 3d hardware, some of the really crazy demoscene demos might not be possible with hardware acceleration, but anyone just using a standard API being rendered in hardware would notice an enormous improvement in speed.

But it seems like, unlike games and demos, most programmers are using "APIs" for there memory management. So I don't think switching to hardware would do anything but speed things up. It could also allow for system types that we haven't seen before, with much, much, more use of dynamic memory.

[ c h a d &nbsp o k e r e ]

I own a Matrox G400 Dual Head (32MB). A friend of mine has an Elsa Erazor III TNT2 (also 32MB) and here's what I have found:

The G400s OpenGL ICD seems to be way more beta than the TNT2s. The scene with the tubes in 3DMark2000 is bumpy on my P II 400 and fluent on his K6-2 366. The 'dozen' demo (available here) also has performance problems in the first scene (the one with the glows) which runs perfectly on his TNT2. But, as I said the G400 ICD is under development and still being worked on.

As for TV-Out, the one of the Erazor is more configurable (Elsa has always been very good with TV-Out) but the Matrox TV-Out is of a very good quality too. When it comes to outputting DVDs Matrox's DVD-Max feature really kicks ass and you get a full screen HQ image as if you were playing it on a 'real' DVD Player!

As far as drivers are considered, I do not see much difference. They both have the basic configuration options and are both under heavy development. (When I discovered the bug with the ground texture in 3DMark's helicopter scene I went to download the latest driver and, after installing it, saw that the problem was fixed.)

Apart from these little driver difference they compare pretty similarly in the benchmarks (can't really check that because my PC is slightly more powerful than my friends')

As for Q3, UT and so on, Matrox have developed a special TurboGL driver which only works for those games but is supposed to be faster. Unfortunately I couldn't test that one yet because my PC's mainboard has given up working recently.

All in all they're pretty similar. The G400 wins out on the features like Environtally Mapped Bump Mapping, (which you REALLY notice unlike Vibrant Color Quality2 ) the DVD TV-output, the Dual-Head feature (allows for TV-OUT, multi-screen usage etc) and a little in performance. (according to reviews I read)

On the other side the Erazor has slightly better Direct3D and OpenGL support.

As far as I am concerned, I am a proud owner of a G400 and the latest moves Matrox made towards Linux only confirm me in my choice and I will continue to support them by buying their products in the future.

Phew, guess I wrote a little too much but I'm too lazy to start reviewing all that now.

Greetings

The CNN article missed the point. If people go to mp3.com to sell CD's, they're stupid in the first place. It's never going to happen. What's the point of (traditional) record companies? Making the CD's? Organising the live shows? Rubbish. anyone with a $900 PC and a $300 CD-R can burn their own CDs. There are plenty of gigs to be had just by asking - I should know. My old band got booked by the US Air Force for £350, and we were just a bunch of 17 year old kids at the time. Selling CD's to your friends is easy. The hard part is selling them to strangers. And this requires PROMOTION... RADIO PLAY... POSTERS... MTV... MAGAZINE ARTICLES... which is where the big money comes in.

Let me offer an analogy. If I burn my own CD's and make my own inlay, go down to my local Tower Records, and set up a small stall filled with my CD's, how many people who come to Tower Records are going to buy it? Answer: none, because no one has heard my stuff, or even heard of my stuff. What I'm saying, you're in a 'traditional' music vending environment, but you're stil not selling you're stuff, because the problem is the same. That fact it is online has essentially nothing to do with it. If people havent heard of you, they arent going to pay money for your tunes, online or offline.

mp3.com and similar sites are great for several things:

- going global, and
- hopefully getting a bit of a following to your free tunes
- getting somewhere to host all those big mp3s for free (isntead of setting up your own site) :)

They're no good for selling CDs. Sorry, they're just not. I love discovering music from 'unknown' online artists, I download stacks of the stuff from places like mono211, noisemusic, theralite, tokyo dawn and many more (all of those links are highly recommended, incidentally), but I only went there because they're free. No matter how much the text at mp3.com says "this band is cool", I'm not going to shell out money for it, just as I dont buy 'real' artists' CDs just because the newspaper says "this band is cool".

the music scene rules:

there's no greetings order

• ageema blues & blacksista http http2
• blacktron http
• brothomStates http
• five musicians http
• kosmic http
• level-d http
• maniacs of noise http
• milk http
• mono211/monotonik. http
• mo'playaz http
• n.o.i.s.e http
• Tokyo Dawn Records http
• sunlikamelo-d http
• theralite http
• vibrants http
• ...

don't forget the very good individuals, they are too many too list... check ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/

get active...

the music scene rules:

there's no greetings order

• ageema blues & blacksista http http2
• blacktron http
• brothomStates http
• five musicians http
• kosmic http
• level-d http
• maniacs of noise http
• milk http
• mono211/monotonik. http
• mo'playaz http
• n.o.i.s.e http
• Tokyo Dawn Records http
• sunlikamelo-d http
• theralite http
• vibrants http
• ...

don't forget the very good individuals, they are too many too list... check ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/

get active...

the music scene rules:

there's no greetings order

• ageema blues & blacksista http http2
• blacktron http
• brothomStates http
• five musicians http
• kosmic http
• level-d http
• maniacs of noise http
• milk http
• mono211/monotonik. http
• mo'playaz http
• n.o.i.s.e http
• Tokyo Dawn Records http
• sunlikamelo-d http
• theralite http
• vibrants http
• ...

don't forget the very good individuals, they are too many too list... check ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/

get active...

the music scene rules:

there's no greetings order

• ageema blues & blacksista http http2
• blacktron http
• brothomStates http
• five musicians http
• kosmic http
• level-d http
• maniacs of noise http
• milk http
• mono211/monotonik. http
• mo'playaz http
• n.o.i.s.e http
• Tokyo Dawn Records http
• sunlikamelo-d http
• theralite http
• vibrants http
• ...

don't forget the very good individuals, they are too many too list... check ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/

get active...

For linux demos, another site to check out is:

http://linux.scene.org

There's some 4K demos there, some quite nice.

seems like the demoscene just invaded slashdot ;)

I will just give you links you should follow if you want to see impressive quick, small 3d rendering code:

• (4k) mesha/picard (great 4k)
• gcube (4k) intro with cool solids interaction effects.
• Bring it Back (64k) intro with very good sound/graphics synchro
• discloned (64k) party version. if it doesn't work, try the final version which is 700k (bigger because of all the sound drivers I guess)
• ... many more on scene.org

  I have more links on my page, see the DemosSelection link.

seems like the demoscene just invaded slashdot ;)

I will just give you links you should follow if you want to see impressive quick, small 3d rendering code:

• (4k) mesha/picard (great 4k)
• gcube (4k) intro with cool solids interaction effects.
• Bring it Back (64k) intro with very good sound/graphics synchro
• discloned (64k) party version. if it doesn't work, try the final version which is 700k (bigger because of all the sound drivers I guess)
• ... many more on scene.org

  I have more links on my page, see the DemosSelection link.

seems like the demoscene just invaded slashdot ;)

I will just give you links you should follow if you want to see impressive quick, small 3d rendering code:

• (4k) mesha/picard (great 4k)
• gcube (4k) intro with cool solids interaction effects.
• Bring it Back (64k) intro with very good sound/graphics synchro
• discloned (64k) party version. if it doesn't work, try the final version which is 700k (bigger because of all the sound drivers I guess)
• ... many more on scene.org

  I have more links on my page, see the DemosSelection link.

seems like the demoscene just invaded slashdot ;)

I will just give you links you should follow if you want to see impressive quick, small 3d rendering code:

• (4k) mesha/picard (great 4k)
• gcube (4k) intro with cool solids interaction effects.
• Bring it Back (64k) intro with very good sound/graphics synchro
• discloned (64k) party version. if it doesn't work, try the final version which is 700k (bigger because of all the sound drivers I guess)
• ... many more on scene.org

  I have more links on my page, see the DemosSelection link.

seems like the demoscene just invaded slashdot ;)

I will just give you links you should follow if you want to see impressive quick, small 3d rendering code:

• (4k) mesha/picard (great 4k)
• gcube (4k) intro with cool solids interaction effects.
• Bring it Back (64k) intro with very good sound/graphics synchro
• discloned (64k) party version. if it doesn't work, try the final version which is 700k (bigger because of all the sound drivers I guess)
• ... many more on scene.org

  I have more links on my page, see the DemosSelection link.

I'll stick with my $600 stereo setup, with a 100watt 5.1 Dolby digital receiver, thank you :). Sure, the sound card puts in some line noise but it's not *that* bad. Your USB speakers are probably just better speakers.

Another problem is with USB speakers is that you can't do really high quality mixing for sounds, so if your listening to sound from a game that uses multiple sounds mixed together, they will get muddled by CPU mixing (sound cards have special hardware to mix sounds) if your just listening to MP3s it should be OK though.

btw, you ears *can* hear digital waves, IE 1bit samples. this is the way a lot of old PC demos used to output sound through the PC speaker. (you mentioned this in another post)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

4k of amazing gfx dos code . less is better .

cool demos

well I don't know about the rest of the stuff, (I think they already have multiple desktops though).
if you want to see somthing cool on your box, check out scene.org a site dedicated to the Europian demo scene. The stuff is amazing, I've seen demos that have blown my mind, and this was on my p200MMX... in *dos* mode (no fancy 3d accell running). look at some of the 4k .com files from the takedown99 party (.com files are dos apps with a 64k memory limit) Amazing stuff with less data then this post!

there is an active Linux demo sceen as well, and products can be found at linux.scene.org.

another good site for demos is hornet.org, but they stoped updating the page last year :(

anyway, run this stuff on your computer, the good stuff will blow you away :)
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

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

While I may seem cold hearted .. I find it very, very lame for KFMF to be begging for money/bandwith whatnot. For far too long Maelcum has flogged the hell out of the tracking scene trying to make a buck off it. No one should be worrying about this. The music's not going anywhere. Many people own CD's and the songs are all over the internet. KFMF is not the pinnacle of "free music". The people that truly deserve assistance are the independent musicians making music because they want people to enjoy it. The music will live on.