Slashdot Mirror
Put The Demoscene In Your DVD Player
Jason Scott writes "With the recent story on slashdot about a big demo party, it might be good to let everyone know about the absolutely incredible Mind Candy DVD, where a very dedicated group of people from "the scene" have spent two years painstaking recovering demos from obscurity, finding the old 286 and 386 hardware, installing the needed (obsolete) cards, and capturing them perfectly in full digital glory. They also have information on what exactly the "scene" is, in case you've missed this incredibly creative use of computers from the past 20 years. This whole process cost them thousands of dollars and untold hours. Check it out, see what you missed... or never forgot."
You can go to Ami Demos for DivX versions. Hopefully, Mind Candy DVD will make a DVD version. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Bah, Google has no cash. Here's the text. Don't mod me up, I have plenty of karma.
what is the demoscene?
The computer demo scene consists of programmers, artists, musicians and enthusiasts who enjoy creating and/or being entertained by computer graphics-and-sound demonstration programs. These "demos", as they are called, are much like music videos for the computer and are often created by people in their late teens to early twenties. Many of them move on to careers in the computer/video game industry, or professional electronic art and music composition.
demoparties
Every so often, demo creators and fans alike get together for a few days, inside places ranging from school gymnasiums to sports arenas. They compete head-to-head with new demo, music, and art creations, exchange ideas, and most importantly, to have fun! These are some of the most popular hotspots for demosceners.
The Gathering (Norway, Easter weekend) - Held inside a hall built for Olympic speed skating in 1994, with a roof constructed out of a giant viking ship! The Gathering has a reputation of being the largest LAN party in Norway, but many veteran Norsk sceners who were there when it started a decade ago still come back.
Breakpoint (Germany, Easter weekend) - Held at a large abandoned military depot, this new party is a replacement for the legendary but now-defunct Mekka & Symposium party. It is expected to attract visitors from many countries with many computer platforms, even old 8-bit machines like the C64! The party will have a social atmosphere and will try to keep out pure gamers.
Scene Event (Denmark, July) - Formerly known as "Summer Encounter", this Danish party is more known for its outdoor activities (tent cities, bbq) than indoor.. a Woodstock for computer geeks, if you will! Of course, it still has all the usual demo competitions.
Assembly (Finland, early August) - One of the oldest demoparties will run its twelfth year in 2003, and some of the organizers have been there since the beginning. It's been known to attract some of the finest talent in the demoscene, and these days it attracts some of the finest company sponsors as well. Add seminars, live concerts and their own net-broadcasting TV station, and you have one of the most popular youth culture events in Finland today.
demoscene links
There's plenty of sites out there for demo addicts. For this volume, we'll focus on PC-oriented sites, though you'll be sure to find stuff on some other platforms as well. Demos - The Story So Far - New to the scene? This will be a good read, and there are some pics and screenshots to look at too.
Scene.org - The largest Internet file repository for demos. FTP is available too, naturally.
Orange Juice - This is a great site to find demosceners and parties on, and is always updated with the latest news.
Pouet - A fully user-maintained site, with a huge database of demos and reviews.
Two-Headed Squirrel - A very unique demo review site, interesting to read.
Monostep (This is a demo) - Want to quickly grab some of the best and latest demos? This site has some good suggestions.
Nectarine - Features streaming radio of demoscene "oldies" (computer MOD music and 8-bit compositions!) - a companion site to Orange Juice.
GFXZone - For those interested in "pixeled" demoscene art, this site provides countless hours of gallery viewing.
No Error - All the latest demoscene music news - trackers, sequencers, CD projects, and more.
SceneSpot - A new site with news and forums, and home to the Static Line textfile magazine.
Demoscene Outreach Group - A group of people aiming to get demos more public exposure, through venues like SIGGRAPH and E3.
Freax - Another ambitious demo scene chronicle project - a giant BOOK (yes, the printed kind)
funny munging
No. Many groundbreaking demos are weird. They have strange video modes, odd refresh rates, or require old hardware. To find ways to render these demos in a very professional looking manner, and then to convert it to DVD is difficult. Also, to convert the demos, with quirky framerates, to the DVD framerate without flickers or frame repeats or other mistimings required some work. The audio also needs to be synchronized with the video. Some demos might have needed to be edited for time contraints. Each demo had to be dealt with differently. I can easily imagine that they spent thousands of dollars on hardware, not to mention the money needed to actually manufacture these DVDs.
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
Well, considering most of these were written in pure assembly and expected certain timings based on 286/386 instructions, running them on todays machine s would be difficult. Not to mention since most of them were DOS based and had drivers for sound and video builtin, and used old video modes that new cards might not support. Yeah, i'd say it might be tough. I remember lots of the demos were written to use a GUS ( Gravis Ultra Sound ) card. I wouldnt have a clue as to where to find one of those today.
from http://www.mindcandydvd.com/demos
side one: transcendental vistas
Title / Group
Wonder / Sunflower
604 / AND, Sly, SynSUN
Kosmiset Avaruus Sienet / Haujobb
Further / Moppi Productions
Chrome / Damage
Volatile / Addict
Tesla / Sunflower
Broadband / T-Rex
Mikrostrange / Haujobb
Moral Hard Candy / Blasphemy
TE-2RB / TPOLM
Le Petit Prince / Kolor
Energia / Sunflower
Gerbera / Moppi Productions
Lapsus / Maturefurk
Enlight the Surreal / Noice
Experimental / Wipe
Live Evil / Mandula
The Nonstop Ibiza Experience / Orange
Codename Chinadoll / Katastro.fi
Art / Haujobb
Kasparov / Elitegroup
Total Time (h:m:s) - 1:42:05
side two: kickin' it oldschool
Title / Group
Second Reality / Future Crew
Megademo / The Space Pigs
Cronologia / Cascada
Unreal / Future Crew
Amnesia / Renaissance
Panic / Future Crew
Crystal Dream 2 / Triton
Show / Majic 12
Verses / Electromotive Force
Dope / Complex
X14 / Orange
Stars: Wonders of the World / Nooon
Reve / Pulse
Paimen / COMA
Inside / CNCD
Megablast / Orange
303 / Acme
Saint / Halcyon & Da Jormas
Square / Pulse
Riprap / Exceed
Total Time (h:m:s) - 2:05:19
nostrils
*obviously* you have *never* gone near trying this. Most of the demos used some pretty intense low level trickery when talking to sounds cards and video cards.... There is *no* chance of emulating most of it. A lot of it won't even run on a pentium Dos box because the dos OS has changed too much (and it hasn't changed much), if you don't have a genuine sound blaster 16 or earlier, and a GUS, and an ad lib card, you won't get all the demos to run.
Sorry, forgot a couple.
Did they get permission to sell these movies of demos?
Yes, they did. That's why a couple are not on there. Some people didn't give permission. Most groups were very excited to be a part of this project, obviously.
Movies of demos suck, I want the originals.
Besides having copies on the Mind Candy site of all the demos, all of the demos exist in one way or another at scene.org. But be warned, a lot of the older ones won't work on your 2.5Ghz Windows XP box; that's why it was so difficult to get their hands on JUST the right hardware to get these demos in the first place. As time goes on, it will be more and more difficult, but now we have something to refer to. And man, is it tasty.
Second Reality / Future Crew
Megademo / The Space Pigs
Cronologia / Cascada
Unreal / Future Crew
Amnesia / Renaissance
Panic / Future Crew
Sheeesh....people gotta learn to read before they go off, y'know?
Anyone can walk on water....think WINTERTIME.
Finally, here's some URLs for ordering the DVD:
Maz-Sound
Fusecon
and they have a Forum on the Fusecon site to post messages about them.
I've had this DVD for a couple weeks now and it hasn't left the player once.
ftp://ftp.scenespot.org/static_line/issues/sl-042. txt
Welcome Slashdot readers! We are currently under WAY HEAVY LOAD, which should not be a surprise :-)
The regular website is disabled until we can cope with the load.
Until then, you can get more information about MindCandy from Maz Sound.
For ordering, check Fusecon's MindCandy ordering page.
If you'd like to see the trailers, a mirror of selected MindCandy content has been provided by Jason Scott.
(You may know Jason as the curator of textfiles.com and the BBS documentary project, so check them out.)
We wanted to do this for a couple of reasons, but the two main ones were archival and convenience. PC demos ran at different rates on different hardware, and some demos didn't run 100% properly on ANY hardware except the coder's machine (and maybe the compo machine). So we went through the trouble of "getting them all right" once and for all. In fact, some demos were captured up to 9 different ways/combinations and the results were edited together, so the demo could be seen probably as the author intended and not how it actually ran on any one box. A few demos were even interpolated across the time domain using motion vectors (I computed motion vectors for each logical grouping of pixels and synthesized frames based on their motion), so some scenes actually run at the full 60Hz when they never did on the PC. The best example of this is Second Reality's end spaceship vector flyby scene -- the original runs at 35 FPS no matter how fast a machine you run it on, but on the DVD it "runs" at 60Hz. Run the two side-by-side and you can tell the difference.
Also, I disagree with seeing them on DVD -- they were impressive running on your Amiga, why wouldn't a video of them running on your Amiga be less impressive? It's still the same Amiga that's generating the video...
BTW, right now it is looking very good that Volume 2 will be Amiga.
There is currently no emulator, including MESS or bochs, or VMWare, that 100% emulates VGA at the scanline level. Try to get a demo running under an emulator and you will rarely have success.
"correctly get the output signal for the X14 demo"
:-) This was very hard work as almost every method we tried (VGA TV output, scan converters, etc.) "interpreted" the 320x400 mode and the output was unusable. I eventually found a super-cheap scan converter that allowed me to turn off all filtering, and then I did some post-processing of my own to make it presentable.
Thank god someone noticed
Many people behind the game Max Payne are ex demo coders. For example most of the graphics are made by Skaven.. more known as music artist for Future Crew.
Some of you know 3D-mark? That company is also put up by demo coders. These guyz still make demos under alias "Mature Furk" (Future Mark now know as MadOnion)
next DVD is an Amiga DVD.. such is the word
There are tons of used computer stores where they sell everything from 8086 and up, as well as many obsolete parts that nobody can ever use!
I'm sure these guys would have gone to a used computer store before bidding their life savings away on ebay for a relic from the past!
Actually, Atom / Sorcerers was on the list for a while, as that is my favorite Sorcerers production. Maybe a future volume...
Merely plugging an Amiga into a capture card is not the solution because they only have composite out, which is EVIL. Only the CD32 had native S-video output, but the CD32 can only be modded to an A1200. I am currently discussing with people to make mods to a converter for proper S-video output of any Amiga, so if we go in that direction you can be sure it will be of the highest quality.
.AVIs which looked heavenly converted to MPEG-2. Unfortunately, there have been many many people writing me telling me that no emulator runs the majority of demos properly. I find that hard to believe, but they're the hardcore Amigans, not me... So yes, we will be capturing from a live A500 (and A1200, and A4000, and PPC... ugh)
I wanted to use WinUAE, and a while back I rendered some sample
Actually, you have touched on the Great Demo Debate, which is what people have been arguing about for about a decade: What is the art of the demoscene? The code, or the design?
I am still astonished that people don't realize it is the *combination* of the two that is the artform.
You have to understand that these demos used timing tricks to do things like, say, displaying more than 256 colors in a 256-color mode. There are no emulators that work at the raster level in their VGA emulation, so demos don't look right on them.
As for a TV, these oldskool demos were mostly 320x200 or 320x240, so yes, your TV is fine for seeing them perfectly.
Ferraris, LOL! We're still trying to break even ;-)