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A few commercial NES games, such as Super Mario Bros., have been disassembled and commented on RomHacking.net. And of course, homebrew games for NES often come with source code.

Maybe you'd prefer a binary version at 256 bytes?

http://256bytes.untergrund.net...

This is why the Amiga Demo Scene was so amazing.

(Other brands had good demo scenes as well. The Amiga just had the best graphics capability of anything you could purchase at that time.)

Between the sheer smoothness and beauty of XBMC, it's ability to launch NES, SNES, Sega and other emulators

Sure, you can buy a standard PC DVD-ROM drive to read your PS1 and PS2 discs as marcansoft pointed out, and you can buy a Retrode adapter to read your Super NES and Sega Genesis cartridges. But what do you use to dump your NES cartridges? Or do you just play homebrew NES games like Super Bat Puncher, Thwaite, and Zooming Secretary?

"Oh, and by the way, just a heads up: Kylix has been discontinued for quite a while now. The last version doesn't even work with the latest glibc version." - by icebraining (1313345) on Saturday January 16, @04:49PM (#30793396)

I've "heard tell" of that myself, but... I had also heard of a "work-around" that others use, & that's noted here:

http://crosskylix.untergrund.net/execshield.shtml

PERTINENT EXCEPT:

---

There are three different ways to fix this:

Change the protection flags of the created ELF file after compilation.
Fix this in the RTL (or provide a unit to include as first unit in the use clause) so that the memory block is marked for execution before anything else is happening.
Fix the compiler/linker to either emit the correct flags for the segment, or move the interface stub into a different segment. We'll have to wait for a Kylix update from Borland for that.

I'm providing two different solutions to the problem. The first solution is a unit that fixes the problem at runtime, during program initialization. The second one is a tool that allows you to patch the ELF header of an already compiled (and possibly deployed) application.
The runtime fix

Download my runtime fix (1.5KB, ZIP). In the ZIP file you'll find the execshieldfix.pas Unit. Copy this to somewhere in your Kylix unit search path. Now, include the execshieldfix Unit as very first Unit in your projects use clause. Like this:

program hello;

uses
    execshieldfix, SysUtils, Classes;

Remember, it needs to be the first unit so it is able to mark the memory segment as executable before the RTL/CLX initialization happens (which will crash without the fix).
The binary fix for already compiled applications

I have written a small command line tool that is able to add the missing execution flag to the sections affected. Using this you can fix your Kylix compiled executables. You may also pass this tool to your customers to fix already deployed Kylix applications.

The tool is called "patchelf". The archive includes both a Linux and a Windows version of the tool, so you can also do the patching on a Windows machine. Source also is included.

Usage:
patchelf [-q] filename

    -q Quiet mode (no output)

Download patchelf (160KB, Linux+Windows executables, Source)

---

(Does THAT still "hold true"? Not sure, I haven't used LINUX that much lately, or @ least in development purposes)

APK

P.S.=> I also *THINK* (iirc) there are yet MORE "work-arounds" but, that was a while ago & things DO change in this art & science unfortunately (Borland should NEVER have "dropped" LINUX support, or, that's what I heard from various sources online @ least - too bad, it's a GREAT tool!)... apk

So tell us, how'd they pull it off? Specifics, please.

Well, a full-fledged engine is obviously overkill for a 4K intro. Usually you code the specific effects you want to show directly into the intro, and generate on the fly all the data you can, so you don't store triangles or sound waves, but the parameters for some formula you have coded. And you do this in the most compressor-friendly way you can :D. In4K is a wiki with useful tips and discussions for 4K intro coders.

You can find lots of information at Iñigo Quilez's (the main coder of Elevated) home page, too.

His NVscene08 presentation "Rendering worlds with two triangles" is specially relevant here :)

I'm not a top intro coder, but I've made a few ones myself, so ask if you want more details ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
(what is it)

http://www.slengpung.com/
(Proof computers and liqour is a good idea)

http://www.pouet.net/
(Ok, maybe that one was not a good idea to post, its basicly the demoscenes 4chan)

PARTYYYYY
http://breakpoint.untergrund.net/
http://solskogen.demoscene.no/
http://www.demoparty.us/2009/

Fuck these guys.

They didn't hit just abandoned wikis. In fact, when they first started doing this back in January, they didn't leave any information about what they were doing, and they used proxy servers to hide where they came from.

Evidence, my wiki was hit and I had no clue what was going on.

Hey!! Wtf was that!?!?! :D

Don't shit where you live!

If only Essences coder did games =P

http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=189
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=437
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=386
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=428

Not that Amiga was ever any good for 3D graphics but whatever :D

Hey!! Wtf was that!?!?! :D

Don't shit where you live!

If only Essences coder did games =P

http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=189
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=437
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=386
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=428

Not that Amiga was ever any good for 3D graphics but whatever :D

Hey!! Wtf was that!?!?! :D

Don't shit where you live!

If only Essences coder did games =P

http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=189
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=437
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=386
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=428

Not that Amiga was ever any good for 3D graphics but whatever :D

Hey!! Wtf was that!?!?! :D

Don't shit where you live!

If only Essences coder did games =P

http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=189
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=437
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=386
http://ada.untergrund.net/showdemo.php?demoid=428

Not that Amiga was ever any good for 3D graphics but whatever :D

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

There's actually a lot you can do with 640K:

http://www.textmodegames.com/download/index.html

64K
4K
96K Game Compo

And who could forget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

  Of course, these are talking about disk space, and not memory. But still pretty cool.

It's been tried:

Breakpoint 07 Speech Coding Funcompo

These people got skills. Compete.

It was certainly one damn impressive game technically. The visual style was pretty much unique (a trait that I recall from several other French games as well; at least Captain Blood, the not-really-sequel Flashback that I nonetheless liked more and Passengers of the Wind), and even the gameplay felt different than your average arcade adventure.

I always wondered if the makers of the State of the Art demo had been influenced by the game. (Well, it was not the first game ever to use rotoscoped graphics, but still...)

Hi everyone, this beeing my 1st slashdot posting, i regret already haven to be somewaht arrogant. 90% of the so far postes comments are bullshit, and you guys have absoulutely no idea what you are talking about. anyway, to the technical aspects: a) it seems doubtful to me that microsfoft would do stuff like lyering opengl underneath d3d, wich would undoubtedly let the whole CAD merket fall into the hands of Linux/unix. b) 50% performance would be _nice_, but when you have worked with OpenGL and d3d and know about the issiues it looks like this: in d3d lots of stuff is _not_ excatly specified, for example when you upload a floating point value to a pixelshader, you cannot be certain in what representation it will be treated there, and just reading it back can change the preccision. In OpenGL it is strictly specified. texture coordinates is another "mystery" in d3d, why do you think you can set optins like "use center of pixel" or "use upper left" in the drivers? exactly: not clearly specified. opengl extensions are somewhat more hardware specific thus not compatible on all cards, guranted. but implementing them or some other issiues mentioned before, imitationg the strict behaviour from openGL sometimes a software-implementation will be the only way, in that case you can all do the math. imagine: a 400 mhz 3d card with with 16 pixelpipelines working at max capacity( and they can do stuf like exp in one cycle) vs. a 3ghz cpu( hyperthreaded or dualcored or not) needing for an exp ~150 cycles. ( + bus trafic, of cause :) the exact calyulation remais as task for the reader. as said, 50% would be a very lucky guess. /abductee p.s. in case sombody cares, some screenshoots from my current project ( opengl ): http://abductee.untergrund.net/stuff/ p.p.s: btw, i keep quiet about stuff i have no clue on, maybe others could too,,, would certainly reise the quality if the posts...

Yes, indeed. Don't bother going to The Gathering if you're looking for a demoparty. Go to events like Breakpoint instead. Breakpoint is the biggest demoscene only party around, so no gamers. There are lots of other, smaller, demoparties, too, if you don't like a crowd. Check out the party list on Orange Juice for more info.

Our (Farbrausch) demos are all Windows+DirectX, but there are a few other ones for the Mac. Just have a look at

http://mac.scene.org/

.. and you'll find some demos. MacOS isn't too well liked in the demoscene yet, tho this seems to change - we had a Mac Demo competition at this year's Breakpoint party with a stunning three entries (which is three more than at all other parties I've ever been to) :)

kb^fr

This easter TBL released Silkcut on Breakpoint and won the Amiga demo competition. It would have won even if the PC and Amiga competitions were mixed.

The divx version is available for download here.

you speak of the scene as if it was past tense ... i think you'll find that you are wrong!!

the scene is still going quite strong! :D

• Yes, we are the same guys who are responsible for FR-08: .the .product and all the follow-ups (which you can find at our home page, http://www.farb-rausch.de).
• We don't use any hidden texture/sound or game generators in Windows. .kkrieger requires DirectX 9, but only to gain access to the graphics and sound hardware. OpenGL and whatever audio API would also work, we just chose to use DirectX. Maybe we will even release a Linux version in the future (which should be about the same size using X and ALSA), but as all this is done in our spare time and none of us has a linux desktop PC, it's rather improbable. So, the only thing where we "cheated" and used ressources from Windows are the Arial and Times New Roman fonts which we use as base material for our fonts (heavily processed tho). This and all Windows DLLs that are essential for running. We don't even use any external libc.
• All content, that is: the textures, the models, the map and part of the animations is generated procedurally. The basic concept is a modular graphics synthesizer which only stores the steps needed to opbain a certain image or mesh with their parameters. On www.theproduct.de you'll find a short explanation. .kkrieger uses the very same concepts, only in a really evolved and refined way.
• Also the sound is created procedurally by a virtual-analog software synthesizer processing heavily compressed MIDI data. It runs in real-time (for the music) as well as as pre-processing step (for the sound effects). Actual sound output is done via simplest DirectSound programming.
• The graphics engine is made for Doom3-style graphics, that means full Phong lighting model with various light sources and normal mapping everywhere, and of course stencil based shadows. It requires a PS1.3 level graphics card such as a GeForce4Ti or a Radeon8500 or better, though it's only fun on at least a Radeon 9600 or a GeforceFX 5700, we know.
• We also know about the insane hardware and memory requirements and all the bugs as well as the mostly missing gameplay, but we worked on it (partly) for about two years and we definitely wanted to get it out at the Breakpoint party on Easter. This meant lots of things we had to cut, this meant lots of thigs we didn't test, and we know this beta is far from perfect. But expect a final version in a few months (we'll definitely take some rest now) which will be about 128k and not only feature less bugs, hangs and fsckups but only vastly more content and hopefully an improved engine capable of real vs/ps2.0 support for more speed and quality. Oh, and gameplay. And monsters that actually DIE instead of just being turned off :)

Trust slashdot to kill a website hosting a 96k file.

try here and here or for a complete list here

Farb-Rausch do some nice demos... worth checking out.

The demo scene guys have been doing this for ages.

these guys are actually a part of the demoscene. They have done quite a lot of spectacular demos and intros. They can be found here. This was a release from the 96k game competition of this years breakpoint demoparty held last weekend in Bingen, Germany.

What Radman said.. the third pressing is being manufactured as we speak. What timing! It should be back in our (Fusecon's) hands within a couple of weeks. Other vendors may take a little longer. So sign up on that Reservation List and you'll get an email when it's ready. We'll try to make some discs available at The Gathering and Breakpoint as well. -phx

the article mentions that this party is one of the biggest (or THe biggest) ever to take place in North America.

You must remember, however, that these parties have been going on in Europe on an incredibly larger scale for over ten years.

To them, 1,000 people is nothing, and they do so much more at their parties (Demo Competitions, music compos, and even some good ol' fashioned C64 compos. In fact, gaming (and warez trading) is outright banned in some of the parties. You've gotta have respect for these people who see the parties as a chance for social interaction, learning new stuff, meeting new people, and writing kick-ass code. I just don't get why we (americans) just like to shoot stuff - how unimaginative! Probably has something to to with the present administration....

what? demo parties are dead?

I went to The Gathering every year from 93 till 00 (except 95), and it just got more and more crap. That is, from the perspective of someone who is more interested in the creative aspect.

• From year to year the following increases:
• Younger and younger participants.
• More and more gamers.
• The focus IS on the network, network games and "bringing empty harddrives". Oh, and meet the cute girl you talked to on #teenchat
• "Look, my dad bought me bigger soundsystem than you got from your dad. Now, hear. Everyone hear."
• Ticket prices. Food prices.
• Nazi security guards. "Does it smell beer here? Please come with me."
• Sponsors trying to adapt the compos to fit the "market" more.

It might be me that got old and grumpy, but in the end it seemed like ~95 percent of the people didn't even realize that there were demo compos going on, they just turned their stereos louder.

The Gathering is a LAN party, even though they throw in a striptease, a DJ or a "Microsoft talks about their exciting new technology" conference in the middle of it. DO NOT GO THERE IF YOU COME FOR THE DEMO SCENE.

If you want creativity, check out Breakpoint, a party held in Germany from the 19th till the 21st of April. Yep, this weekend. I'm going, and I am from Norway.

Usually the majority of demo sceners (the people who come there to participate in the art competitions) spend most of their time outside the party hall, boozing around open fire with other likeminded folks that they can only meet at parties.

When the Finnish equivalent party, Assembly (it is also one of the oldest demoparties along with The Gathering) is held, there is a shadow party called Boozembly going on in the nearby woods and you can find all the demo scene legends out there when there are no competitions running.

I hope that the quality of releases at TG will be OK, but I'm afraid that the majority of people will go to Breakpoint instead which is a strictly demo scene oriented party.

1500 drunk guys all trying to impress each other with real-time computer generated art. It might not be heaven but it's far from Hell.

Oh well, back to coding my demo for BP..

AltParty is not always the most popular of the demoparties - usually there is Mekka, but this year they have cancelled it. Speaking from the perspective of an 8-bit GameBoy scener, I can only hope that this doesn't have a negative impact on the scene - luckily there's Breakpoint this year. 8-bits still rock!

--j
P.S. if any of you langaymers are trying to get into Breakpoint, good luck. we DON'T allow gamers in, you'll be deemed 'non-creative' and possible ejected.

RIP Mekka. We will miss you. Apparently the organizers had some disputes they couldn't resolve. However, if you missed Dreamhack, Breakpoint looks like it's going to be the party to go to, with many of the organizers from mekka and other demoparties. (Note: FPS people need not apply - no gaming allowed, no warez allowed. sorry.) Hope to see you there!

--joshua