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The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

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Re: The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

#91
post #10

Focusing on "copying" seems like missing the forest for the trees. There's the copyright angle, but copyright laws are unnatural obstacles designed to give the original author some control over what happens after publishing. They're not fundamental, we made the laws. What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying the works of others. It's how you learn. And in that framing, once you publish your deri…

> if you don't credit the original author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience

Even that has its limitations, because otherwise nobody would be able to draw references. The challenge is always where to draw the line.

Re: The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

#92
post #79
post #59

> Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to graphics. One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from: crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we can say it like that. The shift to a more creative and law abid…

I don't know about "recent"... demos for their own sake had clearly splintered off of the cracking scene by 1991, 35 years ago.

exactly, I got into the scene in the mid 90s and none of us was into cracking at all. I mean, if you have the skills to code a demo you could probably crack most software, but at that point it was about taking a hardware and making it do what most thought wasn't possible.

Re: The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really meant in the coding realm, but it's interesting that it created a bootable floppy. That wouldn't be trivial. Questions: 1) Which AI platform did you use? 2) Did it create a binary image of the floppy disk (an ADF perhaps)? If not, what form did it take?

> That wouldn't be trivial. INSTALL DF0: Just type that and your disk is bootable. What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest. "Loads the network driver" - ok, which one? There's no standard network driver, only a specification for writing drivers (SANA-II). Was it a driver for SLIP/PPP over the serial port, or a PCMCIA Ethernet adaptor, or something else? Was it a copy of a driver someone's already writ…

> INSTALL DF0:

That gives you a standard OFS bootblock that returns to AmigaDOS. Mine is a custom bootblock, same DOS\0 magic and checksum format so Kickstart accepts it, but it never enters AmigaDOS.

> What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest

Fair, I should have been more specific. The network driver is the popular cnet.device which is compatible with my PCMCIA ethernet card. It's loaded from fixed floppy sectors.

> it would be madness to try doing this in a bootblock

Agreed, and I don't. It's a multi-stage boot that stays at exec level throughout, AmigaDOS is never started, no process is created, no startup-sequence runs, _DOSBase is explicitly NULL.

The disk is a standard 880K ADF with no filesystem at all, it's just raw binaries at fixed sector offsets. The only ROM libraries used are exec.library, intuition.library and graphics.library for a debug display. Everything else is self-contained on the disk.

So you're right that it isn't the bootblock doing the networking.

Re: The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

#94
post #59

> Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to graphics. One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from: crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we can say it like that. The shift to a more creative and law abid…

And what exactly do you think "mainstream" opinion on intellectual is? To me it seams most people are fine with ignoring it unless they are the one profiting.

Re: The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

#95

Demo scene graphics competitions these days tend to include work-in-progress images, as evidence of originality. The Revision demo party is soon. From the competition rules for "Oldskool Graphics" [0]: > Include exactly 10 (ten) working stages of your entry. All entries without plausible working stages will be disqualified. Yikes... The rules for "Modern Graphics" [1] and "Paintover" similarly also require work stage…

Sounds reasonable? A competition where bad actors can easily submit other people's work would not be fun for anyone else.

Re: The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

#96
post #57

I would contest that choosing not to reveal the use of AI is due to an agreement of the nature of the behaviour. In an ideal world that could maybe be the case, but I think the driving force behind secrecy is harassment. There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but secretly, because they know they will receive abuse. I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneous…

What, criticism is abuse now?

Re: The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

#97
post #57

I would contest that choosing not to reveal the use of AI is due to an agreement of the nature of the behaviour. In an ideal world that could maybe be the case, but I think the driving force behind secrecy is harassment. There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but secretly, because they know they will receive abuse. I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneous…

What, criticism is abuse now?

No, There are ample amounts of both. Good faith criticism is valuable. Bullying less so.

Re: The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

#98
post #53
post #10

Focusing on "copying" seems like missing the forest for the trees. There's the copyright angle, but copyright laws are unnatural obstacles designed to give the original author some control over what happens after publishing. They're not fundamental, we made the laws. What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying the works of others. It's how you learn. And in that framing, once you publish your deri…

This sounds so insane to me. If I own land and grow a tree on it, the tree and its fruits are private property forever (mine until I die, then inherited by my children, then their children, or sold, transferred, etc ad nauseam). At no point does the tree become "public", that would be utter nonsense. It is property. Why should my ideas then be anything different? They come from my head. I own myself, including my hea…

> Why should my ideas then be anything different?

It's not a "should" -- ideas simply are fundamentally different from physical materials, and the norms we use to deal with the inherent qualities of one don't automatically translate over to the other without a suitable rationale.

Physical materials qualify as property because they are economically rival: one party possessing and using them inherently excludes others, meaning that competing claims to the same thing must be resolved by one party surrendering their claims to the other. There's no agree-to-disagree mechanism available, so we need a way to resolve disputes in favor of one party or another.

There is no clear application of this to non-rival intangibles: there is no conflict between two people using similar ideas independently of each other in the first place. Someone copying your idea isn't analogous to them picking fruit off of your tree, it's analogous to them learning from what you're doing, and then going off and planting their own tree on their own land.

Modern "intellectual property" is a contrivance by people desiring to artificially incentivize certain categories of activity by attempting to replicate one of the downstream effects of the inherent exclusivity of goods, namely commercial markets. So you wind up with a positive-law intervention to create artificial scarcity in order to produce similar second-order consequences to what comes about when scarcity exists naturally.

That's why property rights have been recognized in all civilizations in human history -- and are likely a prerequisite for organized civilization to exist in the first place -- whereas copyright laws in their modern form date to the 18th century.

In fact, artificial "intellectual property" conflicts with natural property rights, in that in claiming a universal monopoly on arranging any bits of matter into particular patterns, you are actually claiming the right to stop people from using their own actual property as they please.

Re: The curious case of retro demo scene graphics

#100
post #66
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression. Because AI art is not art, and rips off existing artwork in a way that is more than learning from the style and imitating.

Why do you get to proclaim what is and isn't art? It is a topic that has been debated for millennia. Almost every respected art form today was birthed to cries of "That is not art"

I was raised by two artists who are top of their field and have taught art professionally in multiple ways and mediums. I have done art myself. That makes me more qualified than most people here, and also 99% of the people who are writing AI slop.
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