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The Assembly In Review
codetalker writes: "Assembly 2001 ended on August 6th and it seems that the demo scene hasn't died yet. Head on over to their ftp and download the latest marvels from Helsinki's massive annual programming and digital art/music competition.
Wired also has a couple articles on the subject here(1), here(2) and here(3)."
An excellent repost from an outstanding source.
The line that I most take exception to:
Europeans are driven by ideals, not greed.
America is driven by an ideal, much more so than Europe. That ideal is not greed. The quintessential American ideal is the value of the individual and the pursuit of individual excellence. Granted, this has been much muddied and softened by time and various PC and group efforts, but the fundamental culture is based on individual liberty and individual responsibility. What does this mean for business? Hard work and excellence are rewarded. Sloth and incompetence are punished. That is why America by far the most productive nation on earth. That is also why we work too many hours, have less job security and have too little free time. Everything comes with a price, even freedom. I'll leave it to you to decide if the price is too high.
Curious to know if you got this to work... I installed AIAB and setup lapsuus, but running the program in workbench brings up a black screen... I checked the requirements and Lapsuus needs a 68060 processor (and aga and 16mb mem)... WinUAE afaik only supports up to 68040. Were you able to get the demo to run? if so, how? and is aga (advanced graphics adapter?) handled by UAE as well?
4000 euros isn't that much (about $4000) - you can make more winning a local UT match.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Actually, it makes me wonder how Java can slow down a computer so much it's considered impressive when you can almost match the stuff they did back in 1993.
All right, I'm done trolling for now...
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I hope you are beginning to see why demo scene, as witnessed today, sucks. It's not demo anymore, it's money scene. A small business. It's only running because people want to cash the prizes from corporate-sponsored demo parties and their competitions.
This is simply NOT true. Allmost all of the sceners doesn't give a damn about the money. I'm beginning to think your NSHO should be a bit more humble, you are obviously out of touch with the scene.
I don't know, the Unreal demo (1993) has always been my favorite. I think it has more to do with the fact that it was the first demo that ever really blew me away.
:) Ahhhh.. boot disks.. DOS 5.0... memmaker... *sigh*
Funny enough.. at 700Mhz and 192M, I still had to make a boot disk to watch the demo
What's the point to of all what I'm saying? Well, Mature Furk is of course a simple anagram of Future Mark...
Major scene news site: ojuice
If you want to have a very good glimpse at what the scene is producing / as produced:
http://www.pouet.net
It's an everything2-type site..
For a music radio broadcasting solely scene music:
nectarine radio,
(Those three websites are very well integrated..)
and finally shameless plug on noerror. (scene music news)
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
I remember when I used to follow the demoscene back in 1992 or so. At the time it was becoming clear that there was a stifling lack of creativity. Some of the tech was nice, but there were endless, endless, painfully long shots of tunnels with plasma on the walls, and rotating geometric shapes. Earlier this year, when I was bored, I went and downloaded some of the most highly reccommended demos. Bleh. Except for using 3D hardware now, nothing has changed. It's like looking back on MAD magazine when you're 20 and realizing "Wow, was this magazine always this unfunny?"
:)
The technology side of demos has gotten much less impressive because every game already includes flashy 3D coding. only they're more impressive because of the _game_ side of things. Goofy rendering tricks just don't cut it any more. But there doesn't seem to be anything to demos other than techology--and techno music
I'm softwave, 22 years old, Belgian and involved in the demo scene since approx. 1992. I'd just like to say thanks to all you guys for still showing some interest in the demoscene. I've read quite a few replies on the original article which made me get a warm feeling inside. It feels so good to hear from people that they share the same interest. You made me shed a tear... **sob** Thanks :,-)
Oh boy, I loved Cubic. In fact, even when Windows 95 came out, I didnt feel like upgrading, and stayed in dos for the longest time, and had the computer in my room running Cubic playing mods the entire time. Someone port it to linux. It cant be that hard.
Jeff Knox
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
I've been participating in a demo that became #5 its class at MK2k-1. It was a PC-demo a friend of mine wrote with fpc and I made the sound on my Amiga. I has been real fun!
I can only recommend watching the c64 and Amiga demos too, with a fast box and a good emulator they should run in about realtime (although, the originals sound much better). When you really know what good coders can get out of such "old" machines, you really wonder why our GHz-GForce-512MB RAM boxes are so dog slow.
ModPlug IS better than WinAmp's standard MOD plug-in, but if you download a plug-in called OldSch00l (I believe) WinAMP does every bit as well as ModPlug, and better in some ways. Plus it removes the need to have two seperate players so you can have your favorite mods in your playlist with MP3s.
You should be able to search for it at WinAMP.com.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
http://www.google.com/search?q=boozembly
oh well, sceners usually can't stand being in that big ice hockey hall filled with 15 years old gamers, so typically meet in a small place outside the party hall where alcohol and other substances are (ab)used and come back to watch the compos if they are not too wasted to enter the party.
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
You know, I've been out of the scene for awhile now, but I recently discovered Nectarine. It's streaming demoscene music radio, so for all of you who need your oldschool fix (or who simply want to find out what we've been listening to all this time) check it out. it features a nice requesting system which is lightyears ahead of any other shoutcast station I've used.
-Darius (Rayn) / Outworld
The demo scene is much more important than people and Americans generally acknowledge. It is, truly, the last subculture where people code for the love of it. This explains the strength of the scene in Europe, and its nonexistence in America.
Actually, there are many people who are coding for the love of it here in the US and Canada. Just look at the modification seen for games.
Look at the mods for games such as Quake (and its breathen), Half-Life and Unreal. Some have gone commercial, much like Remedy Entertainment went commercial and produced Max Payne. From what I understand, a lot of the people at Remedy were from the european demo scene.
I didn't build ThreeWave Capture The Flag for Quake for money. I built it for the sheer joy of writing a fun game for people to play. Later on, it got me a job and changed my career for the better, but that was simply a perq. Even when I was employed I still continued making modifications to CTF and supporting it because it was FUN.
I imagine Gooseman didn't make Counterstrike for monetary gain either. I'm sure he did it because its fun to make and watch people enjoy. It's the same feeling demo coders get when they watch people get wowed by the demos they make.
So, you're wrong. There is a THRIVING community of coders and content developers who are doing it just for the fun of it here in the US and Canada. Just a slightly different focus between doing a standalone non-interactive demo or a modification of a game. People build them for exactly the same reasons.
/// Zoid.
For those of you still suffering on a modem connection, you can buy large collections of these demos (ostensibly legally, because they say they asked all demo writers' permissions first) from any reseller of old Walnut Creek stuff (am I right that Walnut Creek went down?). Look for Hornet Underground vols 1 and 2, which feature the best (and not so best) of Hornet.org.
I still have a shrine to Second Reality. My 486DX2, with 4mb, and a 1mb Cirrus Logic graphics card. Ahh, the old days....
We did an almost 80 hour television broadcast from Assembly for the second year running. Somehow posting it to Slashdot slipped my mind this year. On the other hand Soneras servers would have been hopelessly Slashdotted
Quite a few clips of our material are available for download at www.assemblytv.net and we'll try to get more posted in the next few weeks. Unfortunately there isn't as much material in English as one could hope for.
I was made next years editor-in-chief for demoscene related programs yesterday, so I'll try to get all our scene material done in English for next year if we manage to gather equipment and funding for a third full scale production.
If everything does go well, I'll really really try to post to Slashdot next time
Check out this demo, the only linux demo at assembly: (it came 5th)
mfx - dose2 (on pouet.net)
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Please elaborate about this 'Boozembly' you talk about...
That "fancy-smancy-socialist-touchy-feely exposure" is just the thing that allows the whole society in whole to keep up conversation using other values than BOTTOM LINE.
Besides, who says you (and your pals) need to live in California. Life is much cheaper just some few hundred KM from there. Maybe you would not have many of the things you enjoy now, but at least you would not starve. Maybe your current company would even allow you to work over internet.
P
FWIW, xmp claims to support hardware reverb and chorus on AWE cards under *nix, using OSS's /dev/sequencer.
I haven't yet tried that end of it. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to start collecting mods (and relatives) again, and I'm just too thrilled at the way they sound when played with xmp through a good external DAC to bother making an AWE32 work. Last time I heard most of this music, I was using an SB 1.5 on a slow 386SX. The difference is striking.
OTOH, the AWE32 cards do have an SP/DIF output straight from the Ensoniq DSP... =)
Kid-proof tablet..
After you've watched the original you should definitely see the C64 version of Second Reality (I'm not kidding) to help put things back into perspective. 1MHz/64kB should be enough for everyone. You can download it at ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/parties/1997/theparty97/c6 4/smash_secondreality_d64.zip and it should work on any good C64 emulator. At least Vice works just fine.
Um, somehow I can't see coding blitter routines in assembly while getting drunk as being very... um, practical. Hic... hic, we @ m$ always have a few jack d's before coding our security routines hic, never caused a problem :)
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You - ONLY HARDER!
Oldskool competitions at Assembly but participated and organized some competitions of their own (that includes Analogue Graphics Competition (a pencil and paper), Realtime Music Competition and a Demo Competition). Results are available at AltWiki (the Community section at altparty.org).
You can find some pictures from our AltZone at this url: http://www.belymt.org/pictures/altzone/
Yes, we are going to organize our own Alternative Party in Helsinki, Finland in the first weeks of 2002. When the date is set, it will be mentioned on http://www.altparty.org/. There have been a lot of visitors from abroad and we expect about 20 % of visitors to be foreigners this time, too.
Btw, I got RJ's autograph on my Amiga 500! :-D
2nd Reality was indeed like a wakeup call for the scene. Demos got better, some of them more content (away from pure effect coding to some content). It is kind of sad that too many kids are turning their talent to destroy things (read hacking), drawing satisfaction from this. I used to be in the cracking and demo scene for many, many years, unfortunately never winning a big competition, only scoring 3rd place at The Party in Denmark once. People should remember that it was the Demo Scene innovating many of the effects that people are oh so used to in Games these days. As mentioned before, you should have a look at www.scene.org or www.theparty.dk for some more info on the good ol days. Hope the scene will continue.
- Friday of The Coexistence (and TSI, The Damned and others)
http://equinox.planet-d.net/
also don't forget hornet.org - still loads of stuff there thats not yet on scene.org
cheers, spiny
torment.atari.org
Fry: heh, Yakov Smirnoff said it
Leela: No he didn't.
Dear Demo Fellows!
Some of you might remember the famous first Demo Maker by TRSI for the Amiga, enabling many people that did not have the skills and/or time to learn coding to make their own Demos on the Amiga. Some of you might also remember the PC Version of it. It was published by Data Becker in those famous 90s. The Author, Andreas Schwaab, died about 6 weeks ago after a long sickness. I hope that you have some good memories of him and his work. I will for sure miss a very good friend!
I'm just saying that there are places where you can have sufficiently high standards of living regardless of how many tons of stuff you own and buy.
Another example. I'm slightly neurotic person. If I lived in US, I would have to pay (or work) for a huge health insurance. Here I can be sure (at least for now) that whatever exotic disease I get caught up with, I can have the treatments I need. Even if I don't work 10h/day for a give all, take all tech firm.
P
Isn't it just a tad ironic that these people can do things with amigas and peecees that no sane person would ever require of them, but can't make a web page that validates
It seems to me that demo crews would be more interested in writing for Linux than they are. It just seems like the two cultures would mesh well, but apparently they haven't very much.
Why are most of the demos these days for Windows? Is it a cultural thing, or a technical thing? Are there multimedia limitations under Linux that are not addressed by SDL, etc?
Sigh. I used to run a BBS dedicated to Amiga demos. The stuff back then was some amazing shit. I've still never seen anything on a PC that impressed me as much. It would be cool if a free OS someday became the demo platform of choice.
I have to say I was very dissapointed of the demos at Assembly. You might wanna check out Future Crew's 2nd Reality from -93 Assembly. It run smoothly on my 386-33 and the 3d-city in the end of the demo was almost similar to the one in the best PC-demo at Asm'2001. And worst of all Amiga demo won the whole democombo (even PC-demos). What does this tell you? To me it says these kids who never saw operating systems before Windows(tm) don't know anything about optimizing code.
Has Windows(tm) made people so lazy they don't even want to try lower level coding? Is it so easy to write drawTextureFilledObject() via D3D interface that you don't wanna try to optimize the method? Is it the end of era of real coders?
"loading and decrunching..."
second reality... that was a different era...
no sig for you
Second Reality was the demo that for the first time allowed PC sceners to feel merely inferior to the Amiga sceners, rather than completely pathetic. I mean, if you want to talk about 1993, you should be talking about "Arte" by Sanity. Go on, you can even find a DivX of it at Amidemos. Arte on a 7Mhz Amiga 500 kicked the arse of Second Reality on your 486..
Still, opinions are funny.. some Amiga sceners liked "Jesus on E"..
If you want to see what Chaos/ex-Sanity and others have been impressing with recently, check out The Product, from The Party 2000.. win32 64k intro, the most impressive 64k of demo I've ever seen!
AIAB is ofcourse leechable from: http://aiab.emuunlim.com/
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
DIdn't know the emulator ran on Unix too. If it does, you don't have to dive into windows ofcourse.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Of course you only had to go 500m to Boozembly which would supply decent quantities of alcohol + sceners.
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Europeans are driven by ideals, not greed.
By this you mean to say all Americans are driven by greed?
I beg to differ. I don't consider myself particularly greedy, but I'm too busy at my job making money to pay bills that I don't have NEARLY as much time to code as I would love to.
I have a love for coding. I have a love for staying up for days at a time living off of Tea and Cigarettes, doing nothing but wearing the letters off of the keys in front of my computer. My bills have a love for being paid on time.
Unfortunately, my job lays outside of my interests and the two don't have much time to cross into each other. Add into that school, an attempt at a social life, and taking care of other needs, and it leaves little time to work on the mile-high stack of coding projects I would LOVE to dedicate weeks on end to.
So, this leaves me to wonder: Are you trying to suggest that I would magically have more time to code if I moved to europe? After all, I apparently wouldn't need to work so much, since I'm not greedy.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I think I remember that scene. I meant making a new version of the whole thing :).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My fave was always a thing called (IIRC) "Juice". Was a bit later than second reality, maybe about 95? Anyway, it had a load of cool stuff (including a fantastic tunnel), AMAZING music (which was perfectly synced to the visuals), and the final couple of scenes blew your mind. The last shot has a 3d matrix of spinning tex mapped objects, stretching to infinity in all dimensions, like some "detector array" or somthing in star trek. Check it out if you can make it run, was a bit of a pain IIRC.
Oh and there was another one, forget the name, but it had "303" in the title somewhere. It was more of a live coded music video, very "raw" visuals, not a lot of 3d, but what was interesting is it advertised itself as being the first demo with full vocals in the music! Yes, in the middle of some demo party the music guy had sat there singing into his soundcard! Sounded pretty cool actually..
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
If I recall correctly, mad onion's 3dmark 2000 payed a large tribute to this demo with the final bit. I think it was called "Final Reality" a google search will find it. The music was the same and it had a large 3d sequence from the original. It's not the whole thing, but it's still good stuff.
All a coder really wants, are fast cars, fast women and fast algorithms.
While you're off bellyaching about how grand the EU is and how the US is a complete greed-oriented-and-idealistically-bankrupt-society -of-unsophisticated-boors-who-leave-no-room-for-th e-demo-scene-to-thrive, I feel the need to point you to my favorite demo scene musician, Andrew Sega, formerly known as Necros of the Five Musicians, and now the Alpha Conspiracy. I've been in love with mods ever since they were just mods, and it was only recently that I discovered that my long-favorite it-tracker Necros was an American. What can I say? His stuff is nearly always amazing, both in terms of composition and innovation. And the important aspect about this is that he isn't slavishly devoted to just one type of sound or tinny dance format as many (ahem) European trackers are.
Incidentally, the movements of free software, open source, and a great host of others things aren't all dominated by the FSF ("strident political organizations?"), and can hardly be dismissed as idealistically devoid. Besides... what side of the ocean does the fabled linux come from (hey, no fair saying "the internet!" ...that's not my point!)?
Also, kudos to Slashdot for even mentioning the demo scene! I'm confident that geeks everywhere will enjoy this unrecognized genre of music (sorry demo-only guys, but as the animations die, the music stays...). To get a good start on all this brouhaha, jump on over to the Mod Archive, and start sampling away!
If you read through the FAQ on slashdot you'll see that the FAQ clearly says that slashdot very much IS US centric. The staff is mostly American I believe, and US news is more interesting to Americans than the rest of the world.
Anyway it shouldn't be too hard to make new topic like 'Europe' or even mirror the site in Europe.
In case anyone missed this parody demo back in 1996. Search 14ndreal.zip on The Hornet Archive. Here's the info:
/demos/1996/0-9/14ndreal.zip (1455k)
:)
Sqrt(2) Reality by Future Screw
04 Dec 1996
ABD96:demo:15
Remember to have humor when you watch it since it is cheesy.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Right on!
Actually, I believe you actually *would* have more time over in europe. From what I understand Europeans do not work as long hours as americans do incl. overtime, etc, etc... Now back to your point though, yes, the other guy seems a bit silly to me, one can't generalize like that. I bet it's more due to a cultural diff rather than a money-based one... tada
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
I agree Second Reality was a very good demo but the best? No way. It's the best demo only for those of us who were new to demos back then and who had never owned other computer than PC. The truth has to be said... every idea for the effects were taken from older Amiga demos, the style of the demo were taken from Amiga demos and even the style of the so highly praised music was taken from the Amiga scene. Or perhaps, those were the only styles and effects existing at the time? Sigh. The only original routine was those Gouraud shaded trees at the 3D city scene that made me go WOW when I saw the demo at the party place. Otherwise, I was just a bit surprised somebody managed to do an Amiga demo on the PC but that was it. Nothing too special. A pretty good ordinary demo of it's time.
:-) Still a nice watch.
:-) From many places that is.
If you want to see some of the old Amiga demos then check Red Sector Megademo (1989) probably the best demo of the 80's. Voyage by Razor 1911 (1990) this demo has a fab soundtrack, better than Second Reality has, and some fab coding like multicolor texturemapping and fading textures, those so much used elements of today's demos. Enigma by Phenomena (1991) has sort of the same status on the Amiga that Second Reality has on PC. Some like Hardwired by Silents (1992?) a lot. World of Commodore (1992) and Arte (1993) by Sanity has the best code on Amiga 500. There's just so many excellent demos on the A500 and A1200/020... hundreds and hundreds. Demos by Virtual Dreams, Anarchy, Melon, Lemon, Spaceballs, Andromeda... a tear rolls out of my eye... oh what a time it was... go figure yourself.
If you wanna see as good demos as this Second Reality on the 1Mhz 64k 16-restricted-use-color synth-sound COMMODORE 64 then be sure to get the three winning demos from MekkaSymposium 2001 and the Deus Ex Machina demo by Crest from The Party 2000. And don't miss Second Reality for C64 by Smash. Very nice replicate. Those blow your socks out if you know anything about the hardware and demo coding. Probably you don't know much but I don't blame you not being a freak
Use WinUAE and CCS64 or WinVICE or something. Where to get these and those demos I leave as a small quest for you to solve out
I suppose that was all. Breath in.
Actually, in Sweden there has been a radioshow for over a year that plays scene, game and console-music.
:)
The radioshow is called Syntax Error, named after the old good c64 error message
Check out the Syntax Error webpage (only in Swedish), all the broadcasted shows can also be downloaded here in mp3 format.
Hehehe.... ALL YOUR... what was that again?
I'm glad to see the demo scene finally mentioned in an article on Slashdot. I was starting to think that Slashdot was only interested in covering topics of interest USian readers.
If you read through the FAQ on slashdot you'll see that the FAQ clearly says that slashdot very much IS US centric. The staff is mostly American I believe, and US news is more interesting to Americans than the rest of the world.
It is in the third paragraph however where you get just a little bit too generalizing:
Coders in the US are too focused on monetary rewards or political posturing.
And later:
Europeans are driven by ideals, not greed.
I am a european (Dutch) who lives in California. I have met a lot of highly skilled individuals out here, people that I like to hang out with not only for their technical skills, but because they're often rather pleasant people to hang out with. Before you start talking about 'greed', you must realize that life here is:
- More expensive. California is one of those ridiculously expensive places to live.
- More competitive.
It's not so much 'greed' that prevails as it is 'survival'. Maybe a wolf is a greedy animal... I don't know. It survives though. When companies are given the power to work their employees over 10 hours a day and not pay them extra because they are exempt from Labor Law (sometimes I believe all of California is exempt) that does tend to shape the attitude. When everybody does it, you'd be strange and unwanted when you don't do it.Mind you, I have worked on both sides of the fence, so I know what I'm talking about. In Europe it's not unusual that people spend lots of time on hobbies. They have more free time. Their hobbies CAN and often DO trickle through in their work. To employees this is a good thing. To employers not always. Here in the US when you spend a bit too much time slacking, it can cost you your job IMMEDIATELY since everybody here in the high tech business gets hired 'at will'. This makes people more carefull, sometimes appearing more obsessed, or, as you wish, more 'greedy'.
So as you see, there are some good reasons why things are the way you perceive them to be. Your labelling is somewhat inaccurate though in my opinion.
Now, I do think that the USA has a lot to learn from some European countries. Wellbeing will beat Wellfare down the line. Really, feeling 'happy' with the little things you have counts much more than not feeling so 'happy' with your yuppy SUV because your supervisor has a bigger one. And happy people work better. And if you have a lot of unhappy people, they produce crap like Microsoft Windows.
What you fail to mention is that Europe can also learn a LOT from the USA. And then I'm not talking about DMCA crap or corrupted buyable governments; Those exist everywhere, also in Europe, whether they get bought by the maffia in Italy or by corporations in the USA (or by tulip growers in the Netherlands). Don't forget there is a reason many things fly over from the USA and set foot in Europe. This is because some of the things as they are done here plain simple WORK better. A survival of the fittest attitude tends to make companies lean and mean and competitive with others. And no matter what fancy-smancy-socialist-touchy-feely exposure some companies in Europe may have, their bottom line is to make money, and do it better than anybody else in your business. American companies are more agressive, so they beat European companies often. However, IMHO not often on quality. This, to them, does not matter. Think about the bottom line.
Sorry for my little rant :)
I remember that demos were the reason I started coding and the reason I still code is cause I litteraly get a buzz out of it. There is nothing more satisfying than having your own creation spinning and pulsing on the screen in realtime, pushing your hardware to the limit and knowing that the 3d object on your screen is something inifitely more substantial and real than a database. It's instant gratification, and when others see it and marvel, it is something to be proud of. I can't imagine getting excited about some sort of finance package, but I vividly remember that the first time I got output from my raytracer it was 5 am after a long night coding and I was shouting w00t! for about an hour, jumping up and down and bouncing off of walls. Man I wish I still had as much time as I did back then.
All a coder really wants, are fast cars, fast women and fast algorithms.
I think you'll find that a greater proportion of 4k demos work these days, than so-called megademos, because megademos load up huge sound and graphics systems...whereas 4ks just poke the same old addresses ...
Some of us run operating systems with actual memory protection. (ie. Anything with an NT kernel)
Won't let rogue processes randomly poke around the address space anymore ;)
The only win32 OS I run right now is W2k, and I couldn't get aaannny of the 4K demos to run. I got a coupla of the 64k demos to run, and all of the "megademos". (Except the ones that I couldn't extract - who the @#%$@#% uses LHA these days?!?)
... Okay, I give up - what does file:///c:/con/con do?
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
Dude, I still have my GUS. Too bad I no longer have an ISA slot to stick it in :(
I agree with you, FC kicked the most ass overall. But I still remember the demo from Into the Shadows. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, ItS was a game written by a group called Triton. Man, it rocked! Imagine a 3rd person action/rpg with 3D characters, non-orthogonal walls and lightning. The characters casted MOVING SHADOWS on the wall. Yeah, big deal, you might say... but try to do this at a decent frame rate on a 486/80Mhz. In software. To put in into perspective, at that time, Doom was the ultimate 3D engine on the market.
Unfortunately, the game was never released. Guess they stumbled when it came to business...
I hoped they would release the source code. I still haven' figured it out how they did it...
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
Ah, your wrong! The SB 1.5,2.0 SBpro all had an 8 bit DA. The SB pro had '16 bit' sound from the fm synth. The SB16 was the first sound blaster with card with 2 channels of 16 bit DA.
I don't think many 64k's today are written using much assembler. I won the TG2001 64k compo with this and it is written in 100% C++. Assembler is now usually used for tight innerloops in polyfillers and stuff like that, but with OpenGL/Direct3D you obviously don't need that anymore.
Why would you boot to Windows to run the Unix Amiga Emulator?
After the rush and warm feelings you got inside by re-facing this screen of joy from the old days, go to the harddrive you assigned the lapsuus dir to (f.e. dh3:) and run the demo. Enjoy :)
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Ya, Fairlight releases game iso's in the warez scene. Pretty much the #1 Game ISO releaser in the warez scene. I know many Fairlight people. Although im sure they are different people than are in the demo division.
Jeff Knox
> who the @#%$@#% uses LHA these days?!?
:)
Amiga users. Demos in LHA archives are mostly Amiga binaries, so you couldn't run it anyways...
> what does file:///c:/con/con do
That was an old exploit for IE 4 (maybe 5.0?) that caused Windows to lock up completely. Kinda funny to put on your webpage and hide it with a little bit of on mouseover Javascript
Methinks I know not of what you speak. I have a bucket of 4k demos (of which my favourite is Animate! by... ok, so I forgot, and I don't want to boot M$ just now...) and it runs perfectly on my 333mhz 98 box (ok, not cutting edge, but a little above the 486 DOS machine the demo expected).
:-)
I think you'll find that a greater proportion of 4k demos work these days, than so-called megademos, because megademos load up huge sound and graphics systems which are very kludgey, whereas 4ks just poke the same old addresses that have been around since the dawn of time.
If that was what you were referring to...
who the @#%$@#% uses LHA these days?
The LHA file is actually an Amiga demo. It won first place. I wonder if it would work in an Amiga emulator. I also wonder why they combined the PC and Amiga compos. They used to be separate.
>>There's no alcohol and few girls.
>Oh, I see why..
You do know the price of alcohol in Finland right? They go all the way to FL 300 (that's flightlevel, not Finland$).
nosig today
Another whining lamer who probably can't do anything creative himself. Why don't you write your own demo so we can see what you'd like to see from us who do the stuff? We would very much like to see it. Honestly! Hint, we do it for fun and a little competition. It's also nice to make progress on something. Why you even bother watching demos when you don't like them in the first place? Every scener knows demos are based on the same principles - the pixel, the line, the polygon. These can be generated in a few different methods - by drawing, by raytracing, by creating a 3D world or object and so on. That's why demos don't differ that much from one to another. It's only natural but you don't seem to understand it. You want a freak show from outerspace. You give that to us, please. I don't get people like you who have nothing else to say but complain. I wonder what you're doing here. Been there since mid 80's, don't reply.
Players? Players? There's TRACKERS!! Modplug tracker is probably the best Windows old-school type tracker (although some people still swear by Impulse tracker. Also out there is a new school tracker called Buzz - at www.buzzmachines.com. It combines a tracker interface with a wide variety of software synths and effects that can be connected in a modular fashion. Oh, and it's free! To find out what music software is being offered online that's of use to trackers or computer musicians www.maz-sound.com is what I check out to keep up on it. This site also offers a 2 cd set called "Mazzive Injection - tracked work '2k" - it sells for around 35 bucks and has nearly 1100 tracked songs and the software to listen to them. It's well worth the money - my copy's right on my computer desk as I write. Some of this music is equal to the electronic music being released commercially - and some isn't. All the songs are in the original source code format so you can not only hear them, but see how they did it.
Free open source music is great.
For Amiga music, I'd recommend DeliPlayer, which plays tons of old Amiga formats (190 according to the home page) very accurately. Newer PC formats (such as Impulse Tracker) are best handled by the ModPlug player.
It would be nice if someone could take the 1993 demo and make it a newer version. Higher resolution, works in the newer versions of Windows, compatible with today's sound cards, resampled music, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yeah, well, at least Americans don't have their noses in the air. Hey... wait a second... a "spork" user ID? This is an obvious troll. I bet you're from the Bronx. Nice troll though.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That is how exactly I felt with Second Reality demo when I first got my 486 DX2/66. However, I didn't get a GUS sound card though. I had a SB 16 ISA card. It still sounded great. I even showed this demo to a few geeks and friends at my university. Most of them loved it. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Hey! I dunno about you, but the soundblaster pro in my 486/33 had 16-bit playback buddy, and don't you forget it! :-D
Woohoo! 16-bit playback, 8-bit recording! rockin!
Life's a buffer; you can only get out of it what you put into it! C:-)
In my opinion, ModPlug Player sounds better than any of the other players for MOD, S3M, XM, IT, etc. I have a small collection of my favorite tunes on my personal Web site. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
go here
hehe would you believe that deep down in my heart I'm fiercely opposed to capitalism in the extreme? I think it shows through in my original post, but you may have missed it. Anyway, I agree.
Besides, who says you (and your pals) need to live in California. Life is much cheaper just some few hundred KM from there. Maybe you would not have many of the things you enjoy now, but at least you would not starve. Maybe your current company would even allow you to work over internet.
Well, since you speak KM, I'll assume you're European or something like it. This also shows from what you say. Ever been to California? I wish you luck living a few 100 kilometres outside of Los Angeles, hehe. There's dessert. Or is it desert? Anyway you know what I mean. Seriously, that's in many cases not an option. And although in Holland I would love to live a long way away from the cities, here.... well.... hmmm... I'm not sure if I should remark on average intelligence.. ehr... well, ever seen Jerry Springer? if so, you may know what I mean.
And the 'allow to work over the internet'... that's a nice illusion. I'm sure one day it will work, when the whole damn generation of old management that needs to see your body to know if you're working is dead.
There's no alcohol and few girls.
Oh, I see why...
Um, somehow I can't see coding blitter routines in assembly while getting drunk as being very... um, practical.
Back in the day, it *WAS* all assembly. That was the only way you could get any amount of speed out of the hardware in use at the time (486/33 or less!!!).
Well, the winner demo was for Amiga.
Q: Can anyone attend boozembly, or do only sceners qualify?
Right, and the people who went to Assembly are all the sceners in the world, eh? There are a couple of other continents out there, and not everyone can make it.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Skaven's music still absolutely rocks.
I still look at the "chaos clouds" sequence in 2ndreal written by wildfire (or maybe it was psi) and I still have no idea how he coded that. You figure out how they did all the other scenes, but that one sequence is still a mystery. It looks so smooth and chaotic and complex. I suspect that he is using 3 different plasma fields drawn separately on neighboring pixels in such a high resolution that your eye blends them together. That still doesn't explain how he draws each field though. It doesn't look like your usual Perlian noise, and it certainly isn't as ugly as a typical recursive "plasma" function, so how does he do it!??
That's the beauty of demos. If you've ever tried any graphics programming before, then you appreciate how tricky it is, and you ask yourself "How did he DO that?!!".
Tragically I can no longer hear the music for the demo because SB emulation doesn't seem to work under DOS for my Vortex2 chip - probably some conflict with my i815E chipset mobo. If anyone has suggestions on how to get that working again, I'd be really grateful to hear it.
-OzJuggler
Life's a buffer; you can only get out of it what you put into it! C:-)
As the title says, I recommend that any C64 fan watch +H2K by Plush. One of the best C64 demos I've seen.
FC Closer
#include "troll.h"
#define COUPLE 3
readArticle();
/* funny, I thought "couple" was two */
Follow me
> Packed into an ice-rink in downtown Helsinki, thousands of youthful programmers from all over the world [snip]
I quess Wired tries to make things sound cooler that they actually are. The fact is that 'the programmers' were a minority among those 5000 people. Most people went to Asm2k1 to play games and to download stuff from the internet and those people didn't have essential programming skills. There were probably only 500 programmers on that party.
As 5,000 kids gathering in Finland on Thursday will attest, the European demo scene is alive and kicking.
Only 5,000? That's a little small for a convention...
There's no alcohol and few girls.
Oh, I see why...
Dancin Santa
The scene has exploded so large that you just don't see the edges anymore. It's no longer a small group where everyone knows everyone else's name; the attendance at Assembly is a perfect example.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Okay /. front page just changed as did the article I replied to
Wth is going on? And now stuff is fixed and IM SCARED
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
If you like those eye-candy demos, you can download from this repository at: www.scene.org Browse their archive!
They have all sort of demo collections from various groups and various fests. Cool! Gigs of download. Don't forget to check out the Java demos too. It will make you wonder how can they make such a cool (and very fast) demo like that in Java.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Lnxscene for Linux demos. I am not sure if any of these demos are from Assembly.
...
Calodox Demology Exchange for user reviews. You can submit your own reviews. This is for PC demos (Windows and DOS).
Amidemos for Amiga Demos in AVI video format since most of don't have the classic Amiga computers and emulators don'twork well. Check out 05.08.2001: Assembly 2001 winner demo Lapsuus now online
scene.org -- I believe these are for all systems beside PC and Amiga.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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).
:). You can easily find a better quality MP3 of the song.
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
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
PC Demo Fan Club. A bit outdated if you click on the old pages link at the bottom. However, it still has some good reviews from old PC demos.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The demo scene is much more important than people and Americans generally acknowledge. It is, truly, the last subculture where people code for the love of it. This explains the strength of the scene in Europe, and its nonexistence in America.
The culture in the US leaves no room for movements like the demo scene to evolve and thrive. Coders in the US are too focused on monetary rewards or political posturing. This is unfortunate. America really needs to pay attention to the Europeans here, and learn from them.
Europeans are driven by ideals, not greed. At the same time, they are sophisticated enought not to allow their valuable coding skills to be coopted by strident political organizations like the FSF.
Unfortunately, America is exporting it's culture to Europe at an alarming rate. Soon, Europe may even beging to enforce American software patents. Under these circumstances, the demo scene is in a precarious postition. For example, I can forsee a day when all the skilled European coders will have been bought up by American corporations. Even worse, once software patents go into effect in the EU, it's only a matter of time before the scene is forced underground by lawsuits from American game companies. I really hope the EU doesn't let this happen, but it may be too late.
KTS:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Utensil.
There is no contradiction.
You know, squeezing code down to fit a 4k intro requirement sort of loses its point when the only way to see it is by downloading an 11MB DiVX..
Sigh..it makes you miss the old days, doesn't it?
I got into the demo scene, like many others, after seeing Second Reality from Future Crew. I immediately went out and bought a GUS. I still have it, I recently plugged it into an Alpha but it doesn't seem to work...
Imagine my delight when I look under MP3-musiikki and find this. I downloaded it and I'm really impressed. They haven't done a big demo since Second Reality (a couple of mini-demos only) but I am totally happy that Purple Motion is still at it.
I'm going to have to try some of those demos at work tomorrow where I have access to a Windows box. If only they were all SDL like iXalance, which I found about a month ago...
Module music in the "scene" carries samples of the instruments along with the file. Yet Discover magazine thought an MIT researcher's work in the field was so novel that he was a finalist in their 1997 Discover Awards (see "Bringing Music to the Web"). A project (whos name escapes me) combines audio data with the music to play it, and calls it a new format.
Anyway, there are plenty of players out there if you want to listen in. For MS Windows users, there's Winamp, although I personally prefer Modplug over Winamp, hoping that my favorite player of all time, Cubic, will be worked on again and make a comeback.
Linux users have their choice of a variety of players. XMMS has a plugin available with the engine from modplug. Several others also exist as well.
A whole lot of the competition is mp3s and images. A couple of the demos are also in video format, so you won't be left out completely.
All a coder really wants, are fast cars, fast women and fast algorithms.
assembly refers to a gathering of people, not the language. Most of the regular demos are c/c++ with bits of assembler for optimization, the 4k and 64k compos are almost all 100% pure hand written assembly. There's also java and a couple other languages. Maybe there ought to be a perl compo, I code for windoze, so I don't really know.
All a coder really wants, are fast cars, fast women and fast algorithms.
Wired also has a couple articles on the subject here(1), here(2) and here(3)."
Pardon me for being nit-picky, but Wired News (owned by Lycos) is very different from Wired (the magazine owned by Conde-Nast).
What! NOOOOO! After ALL these YEARS ! ! WHY!??
Haha. Is it any wonder?
Coding pretty (ugly) pictures in ANSI terminal escape sequences has obviously gone way past "hardcore" and right into "insane".
-OzJuggler
Life's a buffer; you can only get out of it what you put into it! C:-)
Anyone know where I could download this? I mean the actual demo not the mpg, so I could run it on my Communicator..