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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.
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.
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!
What did Searchking do to them?
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
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.
...and hosting their site on it!
You're using her as bait, Master!
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.
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.
And I suppose you're some type of computer selling expert. Here's one for ya, I need a 286 right now. Wait a minute I can't go to the local computer store and buy one, nor can I order one from any big name computer dealer. That would mean I'm at the mercy of garage sales flea markets and the public school system. I would say that a 286 is worth thousands of dollars just like any piece of crap deamed old at a antique mall is worth thousands of dollars.
Perhaps you should think about starving children in the artic before you just spout out crap like this on a reputable site like slashdot.
You insensitive clod ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
ftp://ftp.scenespot.org/static_line/issues/sl-042. txt
...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'
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.
Reputable....Slashdot....does...not...compute...
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
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.
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.
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...
One of the mirrored files is coming from cache.cow.net. Made me smile.
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
Why are the trailers released in Real Crap format and not something more geek friendly, like Divx?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
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
Ferraris, LOL! We're still trying to break even ;-)