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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."
Do you have any idea what it takes to connect a 286 to something capable of recording high quality digital video? I would guess at least one box and one dongle, both of which no one has made in 10 years.
...And it's really good! The quality is great, all demos appear real good on the TV, they've done a great job of converting them.
The choice of demos is good. On the 1st side, the theme is "old era" demos running under DOS (from early Future Crew stuff to more recent like Pulse or Orange). And on the 2nd side, there is the "new" era demos, all 3D, which I'm not a huge fan of, so I haven't really checked them out but from what I saw, they look pretty good.
The documentary is pretty good too, it does a great job of describing the demo scene and how it evolved from 1992 to now. Some Future Crew members are interviewed in there.
Also, kudos for them for being able to correctly get the output signal for the X14 demo by Orange; this demo was using a weird refresh rate to simulate more colors.
Overall, I think the DVD is really worth it if you have been/are in the PC demoscene. Even only for the fact that you can watch some great old DOS demos (like 2nd Reality or X14) without having to set up an old computer for the task.
Here is why I think this is cool: history, art.
To those of use who have been tinkering since the days before the PC will likely remember demos and what they meant.
They were the cutting edge, pushing technology to the max and sometimes beyond (Future Crew, in the first Unreal demo, came up with trick that allowed them to display a very large number of colours on the screen simultaneously. This was around the EGA and VGA 16 days IIRC. What they did, when they did it, was thought to have been impossible)
When you wanted to see what the next games would be able to do, you watched the latest demos. That was the ultimate demonstration of what the hardware could do.
It was also totally non-commercial. No sponsors, no ads. Just groups of people finding out what their boxes could do... artistically. That was the best part. It wasn't just a technical demonstration, it was art, with incredibly graphics, music, and animations.
One of the few commercial entities to get involved in any way was Advanced Gravis, who gave away Gravis Ultrasound soundcards to demo & game makers, no strings attached, then backed it up with great tech support!
So what does this matter now? It's a great example of what efficient coding can do. Some of these things were under 16k! Inspiration too, check out what can be done if you try.
And, of course, to those of us who remember it's a great chance to look back on something that gave us a lot of joy. I don't know how many hours I spent downloading demos on my C64 and PC... 'borrowing' access to Carleton Universities net access so I could download Second Reality when it first came out... it was fun. It's not really practical to configure the old hardware to play them again... it could take a lot of tweeking.
And hey, if anyone has the Circle A demo for the C64 drop me a mail!
(btw, I realize the demo scene isn't dead, but it doesn't seem to have the same following it once did. Besides, I'm referring to having a collection of all the old demos not just the latest ones)
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
The PC demos are really nice looking, and kudos to everyone involved with the production of this DVD. PC demos just don't interest me near as much as that which came before them.
To me, the real Scene flourished in Northern Europe back in the 8 and 16 bit days, and it peaked sometime in the early 1990s, just before the PC demos started to trickle in with chunky imitations of yesteryear's cool.
The "real" Scene hardware in those days were anemic, RAM cramped microcomputers with CPU clocks in the single-digit MHz range. The PC was still Dad's chunky, sensible spreadsheet processor, and the God Machines were the immortal C64 and the (for its day) multi-media rich Amiga.
Coders, musicians and pixel artists all had their share of the old school Scene glory;
The coders, because they had
The musicians, because they had to program their tunes and work miracles with 3 or 4 channels and make their own 8-bit samples with amazingly primitive technology and software.
Wow! That one brings back some memories. It was the first demo that really impressed me on the PC. I kept seeing Amiga demos that always looked pretty cool and was miffed because I knew the PC could do as well/better. Then Second Reality came along. What a demo. Running it on a 386 with amplified audio was quite an experience in them days. Then the 486 came along and it got even better. Then the pentium came along and, poof, nothing. Wish I could see/hear that one again.
Well, as the person who sent the story to Slashdot, I can swear on whatever you think I need to swear on that there's no kickbacks for this posting of the MindCandy DVD.
This is answered elsewhere, but hey, the more answers the merrier:
What it comes down to, and what this DVD is for in the grand scheme of things, is a way to see some of the incredible demos of the past decade in a form and manner that's easily reproducable and dependable without dragging out old hardware. Fine, some people want to drag out the old hardware. That's why the original demos are on the mindcandy DVD site as well as at scene.org. Others, like yourself, buy into the newest gimgaws available for your specific machine and would rather view those than see these demos on DVD. Fine, excellent, it's not for you.
But the fact remains that myself, and many other people who heard about this project, have been amazed enough to not only buy copies, but evangelize the surrounding area into knowing about the project and buying it, to help the project leaders make back the money they dumped in (and it WAS thousands of dollars, and it WAS years of work).
Might as well not see those 1930s films on video, right? If you can't see them in the original theatre on the original film stock. Heck, get a match, save some time.
Do you have any idea what it costs to master a DVD and have all the packaging designed and made up?
It's going to be a few thousand just to get a single disc ready to test.
Since it's on the DVD in video format, they would also have needed a video editing suite (stand alone or PC based) which are never cheap unless you pirate them). They would also have needed come DVD authoring software to produce all the menus and stuff.
This is aside from all the hardware required to capture all the video output from these old computers (you can't do it in software as most of them write straight into video memory and/or put the graphics card into an undocumented video mode).
I think basically, you have no idea what you're talking about if you think you can knock up a DVD like this for less than a few thousand...
Nick...
Why are the trailers released in Real Crap format and not something more geek friendly, like Divx?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
what are you on crack?.. its not like you're ripping off a major hollywood studio that stands to gross millions of dollars on their next DVD release. you're looking at ripping off a couple guys that did all the work from their basements and to think, I thought most people had ethics about things of this sort. pick up the DVD, i did, and its worth every penny.. and did they mention, its like 16$!?
And if you've ever spent less than $1000 on one of these converters, you know they are definitely not up to par with said "DVD quality" and can't handle all the unusual resolutions and refresh rates used.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
...if you do buy it, it's one more purchase towards the break-even point, and that'll enable Trixter and his band of psychotic vidcap guys to make volume two.
The DVD doesn't cost too much, has no CSS encoding or region encoding making it quite geek-friendly. It runs demos you'll likely never be able to see again due to obsolete hardware issues. It runs modern ones you can show off to your less knowledgeable friends to ooh and aah them. The running audio commentary provides plenty of amusing anecdotes about the scene, some great background information, and in some cases comments directly from those responsible for the video itself.
In short, it's worth it. So very, very worth it. And if you want an Amiga or C64 disc, the best thing you can do is buy this PC disc; without profit from this DVD there won't be a v2.
You have a very good point there .. ... no emulator is that fast or even that accurate that you could even get close to that..
...
a significant number of older demos used various tricks (changing the palette while the monitor was scanning so as to create moving lines of color without having to waste the whole palette on a gradient)
Other demos use tricks even more arcane than that