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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."
Most of the demos i downloaded from BBSes back in the day were 64k intros, and before that on the 8-bits they were even tinier things usually attached to cracked games... And i seem to recall they were always on an endless loop. How can you make a DVD or DivX of demos without "fading out" after X repeats? How many repeats?
I remember listening to the music on one demo on my 8-bit Amstrad years ago... The Equalizer demo i remember it was called. Just the same three (!) songs repeating over and over playing three simple square-waves coming out of that old Yamaha chip... Ahh those were the days.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
It's not very impressive watching a video of a demo. Half the glory of a demo is seeing how well it runs on your slow hardware. I was in awe the first time I saw a demo run off one floppy disk on an amiga500 and how AMAZING the graphics looked. But seeing a pre-recorded video would not have been impressive at all.
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater! God bless the USA!
Everybody knows that the real Demo Scene was on the Amiga. Hypnautic Hammer. State of the Art. Substance. blah.
If you were there, you know. If you weren't there then no words are going to properly express the concept.
Yes, you can emulate and run the demos now days, but they won't impress you like they did back in the day. The best of the best PC scene demos sucked by comparison to what was typical on the Amiga.
Blah blah blah. Like I said, you had to be there to fully appreciate it.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I've got a GUS siiting in my drawer right now..
Memories......
Actually was in a demo group in the early 90's... only ever made one demo... called LAMER... groups name was D.E.A
did a pretty cool triple swirl plasma.... revolutionary at the time..
cool... might get the DVD
Burma?
Here's some other questions people might have. I'll do my best to head them off:
What are you, Jason Scott, getting out of all this?
I am working on a Documentary about BBSes and run a site about 1980's BBSes and have a soft spot for anyone who dedicates so much time to bringing back computer history, as I'm doing myself. I know how much they spent in money on this (equipment, DVD pressing) and they went for tip-top quality in all of it, and I think this should be rewarded. Slashdot brings people to a site that might otherwise be overlooked.
What about the Amiga, C-64 and other machines?
I know they have plans to do those machines as well for the next in the series; that's why it's Volume 1. If this one sells well, they can afford to do another one. Therefore it's important that everyone who could want a DVD like this know about it. I know they're working on the technical issues of taking video output from these machines and making them look good.
Big deal, they hooked a VCR to a PC
No, that is not the case! When the site lightens up, and you read all they had to keep track of to make the demos look decent on a DVD, you will understand what a massive undertaking this is. Flicker, color-quality, even the problems of general radio interference across the video cables.... they had to handle all these problems, find solutions, and deal with them.
Who are these people?
If it means something to you, these folks are the driving forces behind the Hornet Archive and Mobygames. They care. They care a lot.
Also try kohina, the oldskool radio with 8-bit and 16-bit game and demo music. Unlike Nectarine, all tunes on kohina have been recorded straight from original machines or soundchips, NOT emulated.
You're missing the three fourths of what the demo scene is all about. Even the grandfather of the modern demo, the C=64 scroller, wasn't about performance but about the creativity, skill and advertisment of the cracker who opened up a game for disk trading without the xeroxed manuals.
The demoscene now is a collaborations of multiple disciplines to make something that, ulitimately, is cool to watch. And that's what that DVD is. Something that will be cool to watch.
You're exactly right. Andy Voss deserves major props for his sluthing in tracking down all the demo groups wanted on the disc. This was especially hard with the older demos, since most of those guys moved on to Real Life(tm) long ago, and to varying degrees lost touch with the scene. He even went to Helsinki in August to get a hold of a few stragglers. In particular, Dope and Stars were last minute permissions that almost slipped. Personally, getting Stars on there makes the whole thing worth while. I made the featurette, by the way. These guys behind the DVD project care more about the scene than you probably imagine. We're taking no profit from Volume 1; it goes straight into the Volume 2 budget. Jeremy
Actually, we had to buy a DVD burner (a year ago they were $500), a dedicated computer with 240 Gigs of space for capture and editing (two-years-ago prices), a dedicated capture card that supported both PAL and NTSC 4:2:2 (Matrox RT2000, again two years ago)... THAT is what cost us the bucks. The hardware I had in my crawlspace :) and some of the other hardware was donated.
We had to get permission from everyone who had their content on the DVD, so we gave them some DVDs. Past that, we're trying to break even. If we make any profit, it will get folded into the next volume. For example, most people want Volume 2 to be Amiga demos. If Volume 1 makes a profit, it will be the production and mastering capital for volume 2.
But does anyone know where to get LUMINATI.exe? This was always my favorite. It had about 3 layers of graphics and did so by tinkering with the graphics card in such a way that it was impossible to run under windows.
Since I upgraded my (final) dos box to Win95 (thus ruining it), I have never been able to run it. Recently my grandfather died, and I inhereted his 486, but alas it is too slow to run it well. (His life's work fits on one cd, kinda sad.)
Anyway, if anyone could point me in the right direction it would be worth losing some karma over... :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I remember when I got my fiorst pc (a packard bell 486 in 1993), one of my friends was all drool-faced and couldn't wait to run these "demos" on it. Of course I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, but I was freakin impressed to say the least. Beautiful imagery, funky sounds, ray-tracings... wow.
I had no idea back then what kind of work it took to make those things. Seems like they did even more work to do it all over again, finding hardware and building bozes and all that.
So why didn't they use emulation? If these people were so damn good, to literally push hardware and programming skills beyond their limitations, surely programming an emulator to run the code thru today's harware couldn't be too much of a stretch. Heck, it would seem right up the proverbial alley: a logical progression, making the most of today's hardware and programming abilities to duplicate stuff that no longer exists. (Or would that be a regression, to take today's stuff and make it run like a 286? ARRGH I hate contradicting myself)
Of course I can appreciate that maybe some hardware had strange nuances just just can't be matched thru emulation. But has anyone ever given it a try?
~~~
"The slave thinks he is released from bondage, only to find a stronger set of chains" - NIN
It would be soo easy to do an amiga video as they have native output of NTSC. just plug straight into any VCR or capture card!
I doubt that any of the members ever saved those 5.25" or 3.5" floppies, which really is too bad. But what stunned me most is that I discovered the music that we created and used (using Rob Hubbard's Routine). For those interested, you can find some of our music here:
http://exotica.fix.no/tunes/HVSC/VARIOUS-S-Z-Selle s_Ward.html
You need a SID-player to hear it, and that's just what I'm going to do right now :-)
Man, I'm getting old....
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
I also found this: Future Crew formed bitboys, a graphic cards company.
But I have a vague memory of that they also made some games...
This is totally OT, but I'm wondering, why do you believe "DivX ... has done more to harm desktop video than help it"? Just curious...