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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)."
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 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...
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
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
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.
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may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
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.
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)
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may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
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!
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!
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.
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.
Of course you only had to go 500m to Boozembly which would supply decent quantities of alcohol + sceners.
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may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
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).
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).
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 :)
Now *that* is cool!
:-)*
...and now the hard part: finding those albums on this side of the pond
Anybody know of a source?
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?
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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 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
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.