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User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

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Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#11

Post by vidarh »

jsonc wrote: post #9

Oh wow, great read! I was an amiga demo scene coder down here in Australia, spent many long nights in asm-one :) I had no idea there were tools for pre-calc lookup tables back then! Instead I just generated my own from code as I assumed everyone else was :D Using pre-calc sine tables freed up so many clock cycles. Big shout to all the sceners on here! I really do miss coding 68k asm sigh :)

I mostly just wrote mine by hand unless I needed something complex. E.g. just halving the y delta until 1, then doubling the x delta for however long, then the reverse.

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#12

Post by profi2000 »

vidarh wrote: post #10
userbinator wrote: post #4

I first thought "Elite Sinus Producer" and "The Sinus Creator" were trackers specifically designed for creating nasal-sounding music; but of course the explanation for why the term "sinus" came to be used instead of "sine" is likely because many demosceners were from a native European background, and their language retained the Latin origin word instead of deprecating its usage in favour of "sine", as happened in Eng…

Can confirm it's sinus in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French.

German

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#14

Post by noduerme »

ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts were as complicated as vim.

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#15

Post by Tepix »

The screenshot of "The Virus Protector 1.0" brings back ancient memories. If I remember right, it played a short jingle from the Queen song "A kind of magic" whenever it had removed a virus. It sure felt very magic at the time.

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#16

Post by apples_oranges »

weinzierl wrote: post #3

Oh, the memories! My favourite one was on a C64 disk mag called "Input" . It looked roughly like this: menu entry 1 * menu entry 2 menu entry 3 ----------------------------- with a little space ship * a projectile ----- the ground You had to move the spaceship up and down and then fire at the menu entries to select them. Since the menu entries had gaps between them you could miss. You likely missed by accident even,…

This reminds me why I studied CS. I planned to do something else but one day in school we got the assignment to write a computer program and I wrote an ascii scroller game instead and I realized how fun that is and changed my plans to become a programmer.

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#17

Post by p2detar »

I swear music trackers had the most impressive UI back then. FastTracker and ImpulseTracker were to me the highest piece of art and engineering at the time. They kind of hold up even to this day. Especially ImpulseTracker's instruments and sample editor.

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#18

Post by bitwize »

noduerme wrote: post #14

ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts…

Fasttracker was coded by demoscene people though, namely members of the group Triton (later Starbreeze Studios). It has a couple of demoeffects in its about screen, and even a version of Nibbles (qbasic snake game) you can play.

And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#19

Post by shevy-java »

I like that the demo scene is quite creative. It seems as if the non-demo scene kind of abandoned creativity to a large extent here, at the least with regards to the User Interface. I noticed almost the same with regards to menuet OS. Personally I would not use Assembly, but creativity is still leading to changes: https://menuetos.net/

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#20

Post by wartywhoa23 »

noduerme wrote: post #14

ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts…

For me, Fasttracker II still remains the most nostalgic, intuitive, immersive DAW ever made. Aslo, one of the best thought-out pieces of software in general.

I wrote so many tracks on it, some of which played on local FM radio and in clubs. Fondest memories circa 1996-2001.

Only many years later, Ableton managed to create another DAW that got close to FT in spirit, which is don't impede the creative flow. A DAW written by actual musicians for musicians (hail Robert Henke aka Monolake!).

And recently, Bitwig pulled another stunt and married Ableton Live's simplicity with feature richness more typical of a heavyweight DAW league, without all the inherent clutter.

P.S. This seemingly turned into some kind of advertisement, but it's just gratitude from a devoted user :)

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