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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

Why "intro"? As if "demo" wasn't confusing enough.

The demoscene started out of the software piracy scene. An intro was a short thing like this one, that people put into the boot sequence of games they cracked or otherwise made available to the scene. Over time these got more elaborate and people started making them separate from the games to show off their prowess in coding, called demos. Nowadays the names serve to differentiate the runtime length and size of the program. Intro = short thing, demo = long full effort thing.

> Intro = short thing, demo = long full effort thing.

The problem is that that's not true anymore either. Many intros are equally "long full effort" as your average demo. Intro simply means "demo with a size limit", these days (and by "these days" i mean "the last 15 years")

An intro is a demo with a size limit.

It is standard demoscene terminology for a small Demo.

Just wait until you get to the "megademo". :)

These already exists and are called wild demos:

From http://tomaes.32x.de/text/faq.php:

  A wild demo can be pretty much everything. Some possibilities:
  
   - It's any kind of film, usually available as divx/avi file
     (music videos, shorts, comedies, trash, prerendered animations...)
  
   - It's a demo that requires very rare/strange hardware to run
     (c64 with SCPUs, for example)
  
   - It's a demo that simply does not fit in any other competition (and the
     applying rules) of a given demoparty.
  
   - Sometimes, live performances count as 'wild' demos too. ;)
  
  However, in most cases, it IS a short movie (clip), either tradionally filmed
  or CG/animated.

Not quite. Megademos are simply really big demos, the very first example of which being Second Reality by Future Crew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTjnt_WSJu8

Nowadays megademos might be put into the wild demo compo, but from what i know parties put length restrictions on those as well. The primary purpose of wild demo compos however is to allow platforms that do not compare well with the classic demo platforms, such as the various ARM mini computers, game consoles or really old computers.

While Second Reality is a classic. It was not the first megademo. I remember the term not being new in the late 80's on the Amiga and ST

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1331 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3119 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3242 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3972

I stand corrected, my wording was absolutely wrong and i should've written "one of the earlier". Thanks for the examples too! :D

Some even use overhead projectors https://youtu.be/LCIsIfEOEI8

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