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."
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.
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.
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
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...