Demoscene the Amiga Years Volume 1
editions64k.fr
editions64k.fr
The demo-scene back in the day was magical. I remember presenting a demo in half ASM half Pascal at The Party in 96 I think it was. Crazy event, 3600 geeks in attendance. We had a gimmick in the demo where it would reset to 80x60 and print a runtime error, only for the music to pick back up and move to the next scene. The entire crowd laughed at that point - But they were evil laughs.
Anyway, a year before we had all reached the level where we could do some very simple 3d with very simple shading/fake lights. That was when Future Crew showed up with 2nd Reality and the double bouncing, transparent balls. I still remember the feeling of amazement and utter loss at seeing that :)
The volume 1 DVD on PC demos is equally good. The blu-ray #3 is great for later 2000's era and early hardware accelerated demos (I don't think this disc is a free download though).
If you don't have real hardware, you're better off watching them in 60fps glory on Youtube, see this channel for example : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdaWE88_VrLbXuQrq3Uudvg
https://archive.org/details/msdos_demoscene
https://archive.org/details/consoledemos
Looks like they also have a 2008 documentary(?) that I haven't heard of before:
I also recall we blew out 2 fuse stations and laid the entire city dark for a few hours.
Probably just a bad translation from French. It's just a book. :)
The demo scene is what got me into programming in my youth - in particular Denthor's BBS tuts, and many late night adventures in mode13h.
Good times!
> That was when Future Crew showed up with 2nd Reality and the double bouncing, transparent balls. I still remember the feeling of amazement and utter loss at seeing that :)
Future Crew's 2nd Reality demo, for those that haven't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes
Making games used to be that in the 80s and maybe 90s, but now it's a well-rehearsed, mostly commercial dance with clear parameters and tooling. Yeah, there are game jams and all that, but I'm not sure how much new uncharted territories are being discovered these days anymore in it.
Making electronic music in 60s-80s used to be magical and now is also mainstream and commercialized. I don't mean this cynically, but more from the perspective that there isn't as much in it left now that hasn't been done plenty before. It's no longer a case of Vangelis buying one of the few outrageously expensive CS-80 ever produced and hammering away at it in his studio producing sounds never heard before. Or hearing a Buchla for the first time. It's all one small VST download away now, with super powerful tools to stitch it all together often available for free.
Where is the bleeding edge magic happening these days? VR? Crypto? Machine Learning? Generative art?
There isn’t anything with the same mystique as the demoscene because everything is so accessible. You can consume endless pages about any topic at will. It’s not like 1992 when getting copies of demos might require legwork around town with floppies in hand.
That said, VR is probably the closest thing. You need hardware and it’s immersive, which means it’s not something you can consume while switching between browser tabs. There are lots of creative people doing interesting things in the space, even at big companies.
Yep. Pretty much.
VR done well is straight-up magical. But, being less convenient than seated distant-screen experience is keeping it fringe.
I've been glancing back at this image https://i.imgur.com/BT8rMuy.png of an on for a couple weeks now. Generated from the text "Little Red Riding Hood meet the wolf in the style of Beksiński"
I also find it really fun that the game emulation scene is moving into the consumer FPGA space with open-source-driven products like "MiSTer FPGA".
like https://www.patreon.com/laxer3a or https://arcade.vastheman.com/decap/
I think it is very hard to get the same feeling today with the internet.
The difference is that pre-internet, obtaining knowledge was a quest and often required a mentor or even a network, because a lot of knowledge was passed on by word of mouth, getting to talk with the people you admired from the demos you had watched, was a (long) journey (from being an observer to a participant), physical meetups were necessary for collaboration, etc.
I vividly recall my own journey, the people I met who taught me things, introduced me to other people, and of course the myths, like the first time I saw a demo with splines, and someone knew somebody who was at the university who could obtain a paper about splines…
Recently I've got similar feeling of achievement in DIY electronics. Back in the day making PCBs was difficult and information on how to design them was hard to find. My best attempt was an audio digitizer based on instructions from a magazine, and I never got it working because my hand-drawn PCB was so bad.
These days one can design PCBs with open-source tools and get them manufactured professionally for very cheap. There is a wealth of various microcontroller modules and add-on boards that can be used as building blocks in projects. Internet is full of design resources, and all possible components one can imagine can be ordered online.
Although I haven't participated in any IRL meetings, I think there's also something similar to demoscene in these communities, both online and IRL. It's not as competitive as demoscene used to be though (but I think that's only a good thing).
Most of these DIY electronics projects would never be possible in commercial setting because there's no viable economy behind them. However, as it's relatively cheap these days to implement even fairly complex electronics projects, we are seeing stuff that's somewhere in this intersection of non-commercial / creative / cutting edge technology - just like the demoscene used to be.
We've had our Amiga 1000 out of the closet for the last 6 months and after our C compiler disks all mysteriously stopped working at once, we've run out of things to do with it for the moment.
So yeah, if you're still using dBASE III in the 2030s, you are technically obligated to stop doing so and return your demagnetized floppies to a defunct company!
I have a friend who got an fpga amiga emulator, and after about a month finally got the thing to do proper smooth scrolling on a modern LCD monitor. I'd heard him talk about demo scene scrolling, and I'd believed him, but seeing the same output on 2 different monitors, one with the proper low latency+variance that the amiga had, and the other not, and it was not even close, low frame rate on both too...
Anyways, I suspect a disk drive emulator will be easier to get working than on new amiga platforms, and these demos definitely exist out there.
Looks like both Amiga and PC demos available there.
Spent a nostalgic time running through some of the older PC demos I remembered. Most run fine on DOSBox!
If you dont have working Amiga it gets more expensive and/or complicated.
Bitmap Books https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/, Stripe Press, and Read Only Memory https://readonlymemory.vg/ are three I’ve really enjoyed.
I avidly read their three books about the Atari ST and its demoscene (https://www.microzeit.com/anthology/).
And they're about to release "The Crackers" (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-crackers--3#/), which will describe the cracking and hacking scene of computer games in the 80s.