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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic in so many ways. As a demoscener going back to the early 90s, I know myself and other people in the scene enjoy the extraordinary value the scene provides us. I think just as important is that among other intangible assets around the world, the demoscene is particularly vibrant -- with tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of people participating, enjoying, or at least knowing about the scene.

It's a big source of innovation, an amazing social activity, and has quietly just done things for years that were thought to not be possible, or to be very very hard. It definitely has it's own culture, way of doing things, ideas, ethos, philosophy, and most importantly, is constantly evolving. It's amazingly aware of what's to come as well as effortlessly incorporating its own heritage.

Believe it or not it's around half a century old and going strong!

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Old scener here. But those are days past, and I prefer it that way. Did learn C64 and Amiga inside out. Was there at Assembly to see Second Reality when it won the compo. Good times. :-)

Demo scene parties are ongoing globally. They are not past.

Didn't suggest so. Although I have to say I prefered how it was back then. No gaming apart from floppy throwing compo. :-)

I can see how your statement could be misinterpreted, it was slightly ambiguous. I did, upon careful reading, realise you probably meant that it was in your past and you were happy not to go back, but saying "in the past" rather than "in my past" made it sound a little as if you were dismissing the scene in general as being in the past - and possibly irrelevant.

Hope that helps clear up the misunderstanding between yourself and previous poster :-)

Thanks, you're right. I do still occasionally follow 8-bit and 68k Amiga & Atari demoscene. https://pouet.net FTW!

Sadly I no longer own genuine hardware. Maybe I'll buy C64 and Amiga once again one day...

I know Assembly now has the reputation of primarily being a gaming party, but the only games I've ever seen at other demoparties have been compo entries for oldschool hardware.

It's not correct. Half the room is dedicated to demo scene and gaming is not tolerated. Assembly itself is many things now, with world class eSports arena, sales fair, boothbabes, demo scene arena, temporary TV broadcast studio and so on.

For other demo parties, smaller demo parties there is no gaming and the experience is exactly the same as it was back in the early 90s.

Still you're off. There is no gaming on real contemporary demoparties.

real party is outside

This weekend I was lucky enough to witness Revision 2020 demo compos on Twitch. It was really a warming experience, as I'm an old-gen scener myself. Still some familiar names (e.g. Jogeir, Romeo Knight) out there producing top-notch stuff!

The year you saw that must have been when Assembly was still held at a school?

I was one year too late to be there, but saw it at the next Assembly when someone I met there was in disbelief upon hearing that I hadn't seen it and insisted he show it to me immediately.

Yup. It was held at a school in Kerava, near Helsinki Finland.

Wow, I wish I could see the crowd reaction.

I found the demo here if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/rFv7mHTf0nA

Amiga demoscene has introduced me to the electronic music, cutting-edge 3D graphics, and generative art. And it's been inspiring that such cool things can be written by small groups of amateurs.

I'm super happy it has got recognition.

I loved being part of it in the early days, have most of hugi collected somewhere, the endless hours with Protracker made me a fan of electronic music, during the .com day Nectarine was my online streaming radio, and it was my path into graphics programming.

Great community!

Cool, what was/is your handle?

I used moondevil, not sure if anything from those floppies survived, it was just done in these small get together parties during Amiga/MS-DOS heyday.

My bible was "PC Intern: System Programming : The Encyclopedia of DOS Programming Know How", as I happened to be the only one in the gang with a PC.

Man, RIP necta :( I loved it so.

You're welcome https://scenestream.net/demovibes/

> It's a big source of innovation

that's enthusiasticly true, it is somewhat big and it is the source of some innovation, maybe. But it isn't a research center by any measure.

People working in research might contribute, and that's nearly always awesome when it happens. But the roots of the demoscene are slightly more humble, between game producers, the cracking scene, teenage engineers and bed room musicians, the scene remained rather conservative. Oh I like to ramble, like the lamer that I am. I don't even know what the scene!? The scene is dead!!1

Also, "intangible" by definition means it never produced tangible results ;)

I was under the impression that 'intangible' means 'not physical'.

it does, the other definition is not an accepted definition

It was a pun, I'm sure.

There are also lots of research centers that don't as much innovate but rather just chew through grants.

Finnish Demoscene is the origin of the current Finnish game industry with lots of world class studios (Remedy, Supercell, Rovio, etc etc) . If that's not innovative enough I don't know what is.

Yes, it is not mentioned enough. The demoscene in Finland (or the people there) pretty much created a 2 G$ dollar game industry from scratch.

It's very different from academic research, yes. But the demo scene produced things that were at the very limit of what computers were capable of at the time, and they were/are every bit as 'innovative' as some of the top academic research. Some of the techniques used would be top contenders at CS graphics conferences around the time they were produced. That were 'published' as executables rather than papers, but that doesn't make them less 'innovative'. That they were produced by people working on them part time doesn't make it any less innovative in my view, nor were the results worse than those produced by full timers (in academia or elsewhere).

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