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User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

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Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#41

Post by tiborsaas »

superted wrote: post #25

I vividly remember FastTracker II, and how intuitive and tactile it felt to get things done in it, despite the minimal user interface real estate. As an example, there were no sound effects. So, I routinely manually created echo effects by copying the sounds from one channel to another one of the available channels, offsetting the notes by a few ticks and lowering the volume. It was simpler times.

Maybe I should pick it up again, limited tools are great :) That's why I also love my small Volca collection.

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#43

Post by Sesse__ »

cbold wrote: post #42

I wonder if there still is a demo scene? It is easier than ever to make cool stuff. I wonder in which scenes it happens?

The demoscene still exists, although it doesn't seem to attain a lot of new members, and most (not all!) of the activity is back on oldschool platforms like Amiga or similar. See e.g. https://www.pouet.net/; Assembly 2026 is this weekend, so there's likely to be new interesting releases coming out.

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#44

Post by b3lvedere »

gokohl wrote: post #39

Never been into building tracks, always the coder (assembler on 6502 and MC68000). Somebody should do a similar article about all the demo build tools like kkrieger, or modern ones like Tixl. Anyway…good old times :)

I loved .kkrieger. The best first person shooter 96kb ever produced! :) [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#45

Post by kilpikaarna »

amiga386 wrote: post #35
larodi wrote: post #32

Not trying to be a jerk, but demoscene is one word afaik? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene and everyone wrote it as a single word, here in comments to this article.

It can be either. In the demoscene, sceners just call it the scene . They also like to agglutinate words, e.g. copyparty , sizecoding and so on. You can split or join the word if you like.

The demoscene is full of funny-English words — ”compo”, ”graphician”…

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#47

Post by MK2k »

gokohl wrote: post #39

Never been into building tracks, always the coder (assembler on 6502 and MC68000). Somebody should do a similar article about all the demo build tools like kkrieger, or modern ones like Tixl. Anyway…good old times :)

.werkkzeug1 was also my first though while scrolling through the article

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#48

Post by TacticalCoder »

Old man (well only in my 50s but hey it's old) rambling but these were the days. The way it started though is really intereseting: as a 11 years old kid learning BASIC, it quickly escalated...

At first we got pirated C64 games (because of course and that's how I became best friend with my neighbors and, to this day, we still exchange Telegram message on a near daily basis) and those games had an "intro" (a "cracktro" except the cracktro term only came much later on). And for some crappy games, the intro was better than the game. So we'd just look at the pirates' intro.

The intros became demos of their own and half my Amiga floppy disks were demos. I loved musicdisks and "diskzines": and some diskzines had articles explaining how to code certain intro/demo effects.

And as of course we had to learn how to code that, these tutorials in diskzines were most welcome. So BASIC gave way to assembly and then 680x0 and x86 assembly had no secret cycles for us.

Then we wrote intros for pirate BBSes etc.

Some of those screenshot do feel like home: XCopy, DeluxePaint, the trackers, etc.

I still have all those machines and some are still working but I don't turn them on often. Last we tried (with my brother) is a SNES and its rare (and now valuable) chinese Super Pro Fighter Q+ copier: a PC USB floppy drive, formatting old 3"1/2 floppies and copying SNES ROM from a modern PC, and we've been able to run old SNES games (fun fact: there were a few demo effects for the SNES that people who had such copiers could obtain on floppy disks).

Another rarity I've got is a pirate 5"1/4 floppy disk reader for the Commodore Amiga (that was supposed to use 3"1/2 floppies, not 5"1/4 ones), with a switch to pick if the Amiga is to boot on the 3"1/2 or the 5"1/4.

Nostalgia is a real heavy drug but those were really better days than ads-infested websites and inferior devices spying on you (looking at the smartphones).

P.S: and don't get me started on the cars from the 80s/early 90s, they were much better than the "I update OTA without your consent / I show you ads on you car's screen / I spy on you": but then I own two very fancy, very spiffy, cars from that era (one german, one italian).

Re: User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

#50

Post by Schlagbohrer »

p2detar wrote: post #17

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.

I can verify that modern AI's, even the frontier ones, are absolute crap at producing ASCII art or ANSI art. It's really unfortunate. We need models to be better trained on digital fine art (digital graffiti).

First thing I did at one aerospace company I worked at was get root on the nearby office printer, which served its own webpage, and digitally deface it a bit with some fun ASCII graffiti.

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