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Comment by timcederman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I remember the feeling I had when Unreal came out.

I was hacking the VGA registers to optimize my bitblt to the maximum, all in assembler, and I felt I knew pretty well what was going on inside my computer. Then I ran this demo and it did stuff that I knew wasn't possible with my hardware. Quite mind blowing..

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.

Yes thats true. It was a really cool time but now as you attend a demo event you just realise that we are all outdated guys who know each other and everybody know in what you are specialised and what you will do. And there are those who just do demos serialisation (demos look like the one you just made before) with neat tools and top algos which is becoming boring. and you realise that their is no young flesh bringing new life and spirit to the whole thing.

we all grow old.

Aussie demo coder here. I've just rejoined the scene after 10 years away, and we are creating our first PC release for Syntax 2010 (Melbourne) in November. I went to Syntax 09 to immerse myself in the scene culture after a decade away. It was a really fun evening. I met a bunch of geeks, drank beer and talked/toyed technology.

When I was young, it was all about the technology.. then I met beer and girls... now I'm married with kids and it's all about the technology.

See you at Syntax 2010.

Voltage/Defame

Apparently it's possible with 1 Mhz, 3 voices and 64 KB ram. :-)

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

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

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