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."
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"
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
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
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.
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...
"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
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.
Why are the trailers released in Real Crap format and not something more geek friendly, like Divx?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.