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The Alternative Party 2003

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the well-as-long-as-there-are-llamas dept.

mkoskimi writes "The fourth consecutive Alternative Party is arranged this weekend (Friday to Sunday) in Helsinki, Finland. As before, we expect up to 300 people joining this round-the-clock event, bringing along all kinds of weird machines (previous times have seen a Magnavox Odyssey, a M6800 Evaluation Kit II and the Vectrex). It's not yet another retro computer show though; there will be Competitions, artists and our guest of honour, Jeff Minter! There be llamas here..."

5 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Demo Scene by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My favorite was when a C64 demo-group "ported" the PC demo "second reality" by future crew to the commodore C64. That was amazing!

    I think it's downloadable at www.scene.org under C64, think it was in 1995-1998 somewhere. Of cause you also need a good C64 emulator like CCS64.

  2. Demo Scene DVD by Duds · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, I'm not connected with these guys.

    But this is just such an obviously cool product I had to flag it. A load of guys have done a 4 hour plus DVD-Video of Demos running on the machines that ran them best. Everything from 1990-2001, including (of course) 2nd reality.

    I got it on release day and it's superb, even with easter eggs and original music from demo artists for the menu.

    http://www.mindcandydvd.com

  3. Invitation competition and previous Altparty stuff by jjl · · Score: 5, Informative

    Entries for the invitation competition are already available, featuring intros/videos, music/posters/flyers/pictures, text files and even a feast recipe invitation!

    The intros have wide variety of entries, some working on Win32, some made with Perl, a 4k intro, invitation for GBA and Vic-20 and more.

    Some stuff from Alternative Party III held in January 2002 is also archived and available.

    Here is a pouet-link to one demo from the party, "Partaitiö" by tAAt (Platform: 386SX, works in Win2k box with VDMsound). (tAAt ry is also helping in organizing the party this year)
    Check out also pictures from the overhead projector compo called "Valoköysiviljelijä".

    --
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  4. For corporate use by Dexter77 · · Score: 5, Interesting


    The company I work for ordered a demo from one of the demogroups. It was displayed on a wide screen plasma-tv with hifi speakers at popular trade show. It was like a magnet for the customers. Most of the customers had never seen anything like it before and they stood there for minutes just staring and blinking their eyes.

    The demo cost only few hundred euros because it was made by teenagers. But the quality was way above anything what we would've got from a design office for thousands of euros. I sincerely recommend everyone in a management position to use the skills of these democoders.

  5. Re:Demo Scene by Goth+Biker+Babe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It was attempting to code demos which use the hardware to it's limit (mainly on the BBC Micro) which laid the grounds for my future career in embedded software.

    Demo coding (and game programming) produced a generation of software engineers who know how to keep memory usage to a minimum and eek as much power as they can out of the hardware. To solve solutions or produce effects they had to be inspirational and use hardware in ways the designers had never envisaged. One example being using hardware timers, the screen sync interrupt a nd low level coding to flip pallets during the screen draw and so get more colours than are supported normally.

    I worry that the new generation have had it too easy and that these skills will be lost.