The Demoscene -- an Overview • Hacker News Board

Re: The Demoscene -- an Overview

#31

Post by nitrogen » Thu, May 20, 2010, 7:03 AM UTC

anatta wrote: post #26

thunk wrote: post #4

"The demoscene" can also refer to the largely overlapping subculture of tracker [1] musicians. There're a few well known electronic artists still using trackers today, like Venetian Snares [2], Bogdan Raczynski, and enduser. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software) [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjAwxG3q3Yo

Who could forget FastTracker 2! I was about 13 or 14 when I discovered it. There is something intoxicating about composing with the computer in that way. Granted, there was and are a ton of corny .mod files out there but I feel like mod tracking is where I fell in love with the aesthetics of editors and code. Thanks so much for bringing this to attention! :)

FT2 and Impulse Tracker were amazing pieces of DOS software. Impulse Tracker somehow eventually supported DirectSound audio output when running in a Windows 98 DOS box, IIRC. IT did all of its graphics in pure text mode by reprogramming the VGA card's font table.

Re: The Demoscene -- an Overview

#32

Post by nitrogen » Thu, May 20, 2010, 7:08 AM UTC

I was very pleased to find recently that the Kosmic/KFMF music archives started working again, after a number of years of being down. I was considering writing some software to brute force fix the CR/LF translation issues in the web.archive.org copy of the .zip files before I saw the return of the original archives.

I still get nostalgic when I think about Future Crew's music and demos, too. I believe Skaven of Future Crew put up a big archive of FC music a while ago, though Purple Motion was my favorite FC musician. Second Reality running on a 486 absolutely blew me away -- alpha blending, 3D, realtime mixed music, 60fps.

Re: The Demoscene -- an Overview

#33

Post by jcl » Thu, May 20, 2010, 3:24 PM UTC

ctkrohn wrote: post #25

gokhan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxGtPAhkEQU

Great link. I love the part at 4:30 where it says "Apparently this is possible."

The story behind this is that there was an article in Scientific American in the early nineties featuring Clifford Pickover's procedural computer graphic images of "alien life forms". These consisted mainly of a series of spheres along a path: http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/high.jpg

In the article, he said that these graphics were generated on special hardware, and that such images would be "impossible" on commodity PCs. Naturally, this chafed several people in the demoscene -- who set out to prove him wrong, in real-time.

Re: The Demoscene -- an Overview

#34

Post by cadr » Thu, May 20, 2010, 8:28 PM UTC

timcederman wrote: post #2

In the 90s the demoscene was really quite exciting. Second Reality was groundbreaking and opened my eyes to what was possible on our pokey old 486s (plus it was awesome to show off to your friends). Going to demo events and realising there were plenty of fellow hackers in Australia doing cool stuff, and having a chance to hack along with them was also a lot of fun. Good times.

I'm watching Second Reality on youTube now, and I'm amused how much poorer the quality is than it was on my 286. :)