Literally (literally literally, not figuratively literally) every time I see the word "demoscene" after not seeing it for a few days, I think it's the name of a geologic age, like pleistocene.

You are so close from the truth :-)

I wrote demos some while back (~ 1990 -> 1998 roughly).

They were running on the hardware of that time (including specific soundcards like the Gravis UltraSound), using modified DOS modes etc.

As years passed, it became difficult to run them, because the hardware was harder to find.

Ultimately I wasn't able to watch my own creations anymore!

At some point though, I discovered DOSBox (the emulator). But running it on the available hardware in say 2005 would not give anything good!

So I had to wait more years until technology improved (good enough to ensure the emulation would run fast & without too many glitches, but also fast enough so that video can be captured decently), until 2019 roughly, when some friend from back then captured my own work on their brand new PC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVwesW3PSwg).

So yes, it feels like archeology to me!

Great work! Good use of Mode-X blending effects to achieve "true color" :). I missed this one when it got out, but I'd have loved it.

Thank you :-) Yes, well it looked much better on CRT screens, which provide a good blending!

How did those two words get mushed together for this, anyway? Nobody talks about the hackingscene, or javascene, or gamescene, or magicscene (the trading card game), or baseballscene, or anything else like that.

It came from the warez or cracking scene, often just called "the scene" [1]. I don't know where the name came from, but the demoscene is definitely a (legal) spinoff of the (illegal) warez scene.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

> Demos in the demoscene sense began as software crackers' "signatures", that is, crack screens and crack intros attached to software whose copy protection was removed.

You may notice that many demoscene groups have the same name as warez groups, this is not a coincidence as they were originally the same people. All part of "the scene".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

Might be my bias showing, but I just assumed that demo scene stuff mainly developed in Europe, and at least in German, referring to a hackingscene[1], or javascene[2], or gamescene[3], or magicscene[4] wouldn't feel out of place at all either.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22hackerszene%22 [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22java-szene%22 [3] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22game-szene%22 but https://www.google.com/search?q=%22gaming-szene%22 probably hits better [4] ok this one is a bit of a miss but still https://www.google.com/search?q=%22magic-szene%22

I don't have a definite answer. It might be a mixture of analogies to other creative "scenes" (music / cinema), it might have been improved by the fact most competitions were later projected on large screens etc!

Maybe because demo ends with a vowel and it would be hard to come up with a smooth transition to a second word?

Happens to me too sometimes, and I was even involved in the scene back in the 90s.

https://www.dwitter.net/ is a codegolfing community around a JS-based shim with a 140 bytes limit (or 194 with some unicode conversion-deconversion trickery).

Ah, Demoscene, my favorite of the Ancient Greek philosophers, who once wrote, 'In the realm of pixels and sound, true wisdom lies, not in what is seen, but in what is rendered in the mind's eye.' He was quite ahead of his time as you can see.

The page is outdated. It shows Breakpoint in the parties section, which was shut down more than a decade ago. New popular parties like Revision aren't mentioned. Many links are dead. Exercise caution :)

What year should we put on the title above? archive.org has it back to 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20041206000418/https://www.demos...

2004 might be correct. It mentions Breakpoint, the demo party I had been the main organizer of, which last ran in 2010. So any case, this site hasn't been updated since 2010.

2004 it is until proven otherwise. Thanks!

One of the upsides of COVID was that a lot of demoscene parties which had previously been in-person only started to live stream their parties.

The first time I was able to “attend” Revision was by watching the live stream in 2020. I had been wanting to go for many years.

I love the demoscene, and am very active in it.

But that specific web site linked here hasn't been updated in 15 years.

No clue why this got submitted...?

Honestly it's probably just that demoscene minded people see the word and click because of nostalgia and belonging. You'd rather upvote this than an AI link or something about ventures. It's part of our identity :)

PS: Amigaaaaaaaaa

No idea, but I'm a simple man. I see "demoscene," I upvote.

Second Reality for Apple II!!!! http://deater.net/weave/vmwprod/second/

This is more impressive than Chaos Theory 64k demake. They didn't have to go that hard!

Any HN ppl wanna meet up at Revision 2024? :)

Yeah that would be cool. I think we may be going

Feel free to email me thomas.ludwig@gmail.com, I'd like to make a first demo entry and have some other fractal art friends with ideally :)

In general we could org a little HN mini submeet.

ASM!

def!

I dream of a 21st century AI demo scene that competes to get the most AI out of the least hardware just for the glory.

That's basically the AI industry already!

In 2008 there was a Demoparty sponsored by Nvidia https://demozoo.org/parties/554/

There's not much to discuss about this submission, but here's a twitch link to the talk from Andreas Fredriksson today at Handmade Seattle. It's about some of the approaches they took to make their absolutely incredible Eon demo for original Amiga 500 hardware.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1978214964?t=01h31m12s

"Who cares about features if it runs like ass" made my day.

And in case you ever wish to experience a demo party yourself, here is an always up-to-date list of upcoming parties around the globe.

(Yes, these days there are a lot of streaming-only parties, and that's very nice, but no, this is nowhere comparable of being actually part of the fun on-site. So leave your sofa and go to the real thing, please.)

https://www.demoparty.net

And yes, the US demoscene sadly is pretty much dead for a couple of decades now (with a couple of EU sceners getting exported there from time to time).

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