User Interfaces of the Demo Scene | Hacker News Reader

User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

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I vividly remember FastTracker II, and how intuitive and tactile it felt to get things done in it, despite the minimal user interface real estate. As an example, there were no sound effects. So, I routinely manually created echo effects by copying the sounds from one channel to another one of the available channels, offsetting the notes by a few ticks and lowering the volume. It was simpler times.

Maybe I should pick it up again, limited tools are great :) That's why I also love my small Volca collection.

Intuitive? I never thought anyone would ever describe something as arcane as a tracker intuitive. I can't think of something worse. Pure Data comes close.

I would also consider trackers as being very intuitive in a lot of ways compared to DAWs, coming from the perspective of someone who isn't great at playing midi controllers live.

I do find tracker software to not be as immediate compared to a DAW for quickly producing a loop or initial idea, but beyond that initial hump the workflows for fully fleshing out and completing a track seem simpler and intuitive compared to a DAW, IMO. Once you have established the beginning of an idea the UX feels like editing a spreadsheet. The difference between using a DAW or tracker, for me feels like the difference between coding in a text editor versus using a node based UI. They are both intuitive in very different ways.

Loading a module and playing it in a tracker is how I learned to make music. You see what notes and samples are triggered when and whatever effect commands are used to make it sound the way it does.

Besides, once you've memorized screens and hotkeys (which happens pretty fast, because there aren't that many) you don't need it to be intuitive.

A couple of years ago I downloaded SchismTracker. The muscle memory from Scream/Impulse Tracker from 20-25 years prior, coming back in an instant was one of the most wonderful computer interactions of my life. <3

So you basically brute-force your way through?

Like, you load or generate a sine wave as a sample and just keep changing the numbers until you've got a rough idea of what does what?

I guess nowadays it's easier to read the source code of mikmod or milkytracker. But back in the day, heck no. MIDI sorta worked, but not great. My recordings were an awful mess because the timings were always slightly off such that it was impossible to have a bar with normal 1/4 notes.

Being an impatient teenager, I did brute-force the note-key layout, but I didn't have to - each context/screen had it's own help page. You could view all screens (and their respective shortcut) by pressing ESC.

I'd rather label it "experimenting" than "brute-forcing", testing what would happen if I were to put this or that value to this or that effect. Perhaps others would do it differently but I'd go by ear almost all of the time and adjust bit by bit.

Since you could save samples from downloaded modules, you could quickly build a starter library - although "ripping" samples was considered "lame". In lack of (expensive) synthesizers, some musicians would buy Sample CDs.

In my experience (90s Sweden), of those fortunate enough to have a home computer (usually a 486 66 MHz w 8 MB), few also had MIDI. I knew of one person who ran Cubase on Windows 3.11 with hardware samplers etc, which I found immensely exotic!

If you have no serious problem to wrap your head around the columnar presentation of data than "intuitive" is not an unapt way to describe the whole deal. Say, where music theory and practice intersect with something like a spreadsheet, for example... two things one might've already been exposed to before.

I first thought "Elite Sinus Producer" and "The Sinus Creator" were trackers specifically designed for creating nasal-sounding music; but of course the explanation for why the term "sinus" came to be used instead of "sine" is likely because many demosceners were from a native European background, and their language retained the Latin origin word instead of deprecating its usage in favour of "sine", as happened in English.

Can confirm it's sinus in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French.

German

Also in Polish.

Can confirm it's ημίτονο in Greek.

Can confirm all sceners call it sinus in Spain :)

Also in Bulgarian.

Also in Russian

I swear music trackers had the most impressive UI back then. FastTracker and ImpulseTracker were to me the highest piece of art and engineering at the time. They kind of hold up even to this day. Especially ImpulseTracker's instruments and sample editor.

I can verify that modern AI's, even the frontier ones, are absolute crap at producing ASCII art or ANSI art. It's really unfortunate. We need models to be better trained on digital fine art (digital graffiti).

First thing I did at one aerospace company I worked at was get root on the nearby office printer, which served its own webpage, and digitally deface it a bit with some fun ASCII graffiti.

Does your Coffee-automat also grind "Smoke on the Water"-Melody before brewing a fresh cup, at office, while working ? You remember the (C=1541) Floppy-Disk-Sounds, or ...and does the Automat-lights cite someone 'in Morse' ? Enjoy your holidays... (-;

Editet: (Typo)

> I can verify that modern AI's, even the frontier ones, are absolute crap at producing ASCII art or ANSI art.

That's good.

> We need models to be better trained on digital fine art (digital graffiti).

Only lamers need something like that. And lamers and artists (sceners) don't go together.

“Back then”? You can buy a brand new Polyend Mini right now with built in synths and samplers, all while being portable!

> When a copy was finished (which could take some time), the program helpfully played a little "boing" sound.

And how that "boing" sound worked is interesting in itself. It's one of the few uses of Paula's "attached" mode, where the output of one sound channel is used to modulate the volume or pitch of another.

I put the full source code of the boing sound here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174583

A nice, somewhat nostalgic read. I had X-Copy and D-Copy both, although I'm more familiar with the later X-Copy editions that were quite purple [0] [1]. It was also my first contact with the concept of disk defrag.

[0] https://jope.fi/xcopy/releases.html

[1] https://jope.fi/xcopy/img/xcopy/xcopyapr93en.png

Doesn't mention ScreamTracker. A good example of demo group dogfooding. Unique text based UI too. As far as I can remember this was the first dos tracker.

Pastor Emmanual Laphroaig [1] as well as the phRack crew [2] continue carrying the torch in this tradition as best they can

[1] https://alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

[2] https://phrack.org/issues/72/1

There's a blast from the past. At 16 years old I created Multi-Ripper with a friend, using AsmOne, and smartly included my phone-number in the mods it converted. My parents really appreciated random strangers calling years later.

Never been into building tracks, always the coder (assembler on 6502 and MC68000). Somebody should do a similar article about all the demo build tools like kkrieger, or modern ones like Tixl. Anyway…good old times :)

I loved .kkrieger. The best first person shooter 96kb ever produced! :) [1]

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

.werkkzeug1 was also my first though while scrolling through the article

FR released the source code for their tools in 2012, some of the concepts are described in the repo, e.g.: https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/blob/master/werkkzeu...

A couple of additional links from my bookmarks:

- The EXE packer : https://www.farbrausch.de/~fg/kkrunchy/

- Some tech details in "The Farbrausch Way to make Demos" slides : https://llg.cubic.org/docs/farbrauschDemos/

- Various related videos (search for ryg/chaos/fiver2): https://files.scene.org/browse/resources/seminars/code/

- Overview of their tools + misc links: https://adrianboeing.blogspot.com/2012/04/farbraush-demo-too...

- Some .kkrieger details: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...

ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts were as complicated as vim.

Fasttracker was coded by demoscene people though, namely members of the group Triton (later Starbreeze Studios). It has a couple of demoeffects in its about screen, and even a version of Nibbles (qbasic snake game) you can play.

And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...

For me, Fasttracker II still remains the most nostalgic, intuitive, immersive DAW ever made. Aslo, one of the best thought-out pieces of software in general.

I wrote so many tracks on it, some of which played on local FM radio and in clubs. Fondest memories circa 1996-2001.

Only many years later, Ableton managed to create another DAW that got close to FT in spirit, which is don't impede the creative flow. A DAW written by actual musicians for musicians (hail Robert Henke aka Monolake!).

And recently, Bitwig pulled another stunt and married Ableton Live's simplicity with feature richness more typical of a heavyweight DAW league, without all the inherent clutter.

P.S. This seemingly turned into some kind of advertisement, but it's just gratitude from a devoted user :)

There's also Renoise, which tries to marry the contemporary DAW with a tracker-style timeline.

https://www.renoise.com

Like mentioned FastTracker was created by people in the demoscene, also the module format fasttracker created was fairly dominant in the demoscene from maybe 1994 to 1998-1999 (when PC's were fast enough that people started moving onto streamed music via mp3 soundtracks as shown by State of Mind/Bomb).

The FT2 XM format was more powerful than the ST3 format (limited in track numbers and iirc no 16bit samples?) and less powerful than the impulse tracker IT format (virtual tracks without tying tracks to output channels), but for many demos the XM format was a sweet spot since third party IT replayers were few due to the more advanced features while XM replayers were plentiful and often powerful enough to create the music people wanted to do.

Old man (well only in my 50s but hey it's old) rambling but these were the days. The way it started though is really intereseting: as a 11 years old kid learning BASIC, it quickly escalated...

At first we got pirated C64 games (because of course and that's how I became best friend with my neighbors and, to this day, we still exchange Telegram message on a near daily basis) and those games had an "intro" (a "cracktro" except the cracktro term only came much later on). And for some crappy games, the intro was better than the game. So we'd just look at the pirates' intro.

The intros became demos of their own and half my Amiga floppy disks were demos. I loved musicdisks and "diskzines": and some diskzines had articles explaining how to code certain intro/demo effects.

And as of course we had to learn how to code that, these tutorials in diskzines were most welcome. So BASIC gave way to assembly and then 680x0 and x86 assembly had no secret cycles for us.

Then we wrote intros for pirate BBSes etc.

Some of those screenshot do feel like home: XCopy, DeluxePaint, the trackers, etc.

I still have all those machines and some are still working but I don't turn them on often. Last we tried (with my brother) is a SNES and its rare (and now valuable) chinese Super Pro Fighter Q+ copier: a PC USB floppy drive, formatting old 3"1/2 floppies and copying SNES ROM from a modern PC, and we've been able to run old SNES games (fun fact: there were a few demo effects for the SNES that people who had such copiers could obtain on floppy disks).

Another rarity I've got is a pirate 5"1/4 floppy disk reader for the Commodore Amiga (that was supposed to use 3"1/2 floppies, not 5"1/4 ones), with a switch to pick if the Amiga is to boot on the 3"1/2 or the 5"1/4.

Nostalgia is a real heavy drug but those were really better days than ads-infested websites and inferior devices spying on you (looking at the smartphones).

P.S: and don't get me started on the cars from the 80s/early 90s, they were much better than the "I update OTA without your consent / I show you ads on you car's screen / I spy on you": but then I own two very fancy, very spiffy, cars from that era (one german, one italian).

I'm younger than you, but I did had contact with the 2000's internet, where sites existed just for fun.

I try to find these types of sites today, a collection of fun and interesting ones.

https://matbm.net/gold - it's a WIP but so far it's been a fun ride.

I think a lot has been lost by an overfocus on chasing a unified look and feel for User interfaces.

Standardising the user interface allows applications that have no design to share a common appearance. Making a custom user interface requires designing something. It can result in monstrosities if the designer lacks skill, or experiments with new ideas that don't work out. The antidote to that is dogfooding. Using the interface you made is the next incentive to make it good.

The demo scene philosophy of building precisely what you want to serve a function was clearly one of the influences on winamp, which was beloved by many.

I guess a lot of this went away with the lack of software choice. If you didn't like winamp you didn't have to use it. When a program is marketed as the only solution to a problem and they want everyone to use the same program (often by locking people in). If the software aims to be to everyone's taste it is to no-one's taste. It just becomes bland.

Oh, the memories!

My favourite one was on a C64 disk mag called "Input". It looked roughly like this:

              menu entry 1
              
    <->   *   menu entry 2

              menu entry 3


    -----------------------------

with

    <->   a little space ship
     *    a projectile
    ----- the ground

You had to move the spaceship up and down and then fire at the menu entries to select them.

Since the menu entries had gaps between them you could miss. You likely missed by accident even, because control on home-computers was not what we are used to today.

When you missed the projectile was reflected from the opposite wall and if you didn't dodge, it hit your own ship.

The little ship crashed to the ground and a tiny, just a couple of pixels, figure appeared complaining and dragging his broken ship off the screen.

This reminds me why I studied CS. I planned to do something else but one day in school we got the assignment to write a computer program and I wrote an ascii scroller game instead and I realized how fun that is and changed my plans to become a programmer.

If you're interested or nostalgic for these types of UIs, I would strongly recommend Picotron[0]. Not only is its UI very reminiscent of these types of programs, with its own music tracker software, but developers have been making their own software and utilities with their own custom design sensibilities.

[0] https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

I like that the demo scene is quite creative. It seems as if the non-demo scene kind of abandoned creativity to a large extent here, at the least with regards to the User Interface. I noticed almost the same with regards to menuet OS. Personally I would not use Assembly, but creativity is still leading to changes: https://menuetos.net/

Yes! The details about trackers in this post are something I've needed straight away for a chiptune-related project. Thanks for sharing

I miss the colorful interfaces of DOS, before standardisation and "human interface guidelines" were even a thing.

As a kid, running an .exe from the floppy discs my father was bringing home from work meant being blasted with unknown colours and sounds, never knowing what to expect. Just experiencing random user interfaces from programs and games was great fun.

Another good one is the visual editor of .werkkzeug3 used to make .kkrieger which serves as an alternative interface to the typical node based shader editor.

https://media.demozoo.org/screens/o/82/e2/a055.334456.png

Wow this looks like the Unreal Tournament interface somewhat

Oh wow, great read! I was an amiga demo scene coder down here in Australia, spent many long nights in asm-one :)

I had no idea there were tools for pre-calc lookup tables back then! Instead I just generated my own from code as I assumed everyone else was :D

Using pre-calc sine tables freed up so many clock cycles.

Big shout to all the sceners on here! I really do miss coding 68k asm sigh :)

I mostly just wrote mine by hand unless I needed something complex. E.g. just halving the y delta until 1, then doubling the x delta for however long, then the reverse.

Greetings from Spain!

We somehow got a copy of Defy diskmag, started swapping with Cro^Cydonia and got to enjoy Satisfaction Guaranteed by Pearl :)

I always did all my small tools and stuff in blitz basic 2, would dump binary file and incbin them in Devpac.

-- winden^TNC^Network

[ https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=14404 and https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=7645 ]

This made me feel old and nastalgic. RIP BBS's

> [a ripper written to look for sources] in memory after the computer had crashed

I used this to reboot my machine faster, keep info in RAM and just continue were you left off after reboot. I think there even were ram drives that could persist crashes/reboots, someone did really fast reboots with it.

Omitting Scream Tracker, especially v3 is a big miss. Notably coming from Future Crew, iconic/influential Finnish scene group, with v3 definitely in the competition mix when FastTracker 2 was around, and the UI influenced the next DOS iteration of trackers in Impulse Tracker.

What a great thing to add to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM

I'm not from this era and this article explains a lot of things from the video!

The screenshot of "The Virus Protector 1.0" brings back ancient memories. If I remember right, it played a short jingle from the Queen song "A kind of magic" whenever it had removed a virus. It sure felt very magic at the time.

> To the best of my knowledge, the scene never produced a pixel painter for the Amiga (except later ports of Grafx2), [...].

The 86ers got one, on the other hand. It's from Sweden. :)

I remember FastTracker II pretty well from the gatherings we had with our demoscene friends in Buenos Aires. Many of them worked exclusively with it for our demos.

I wonder if there still is a demo scene? It is easier than ever to make cool stuff. I wonder in which scenes it happens?

The demoscene still exists, although it doesn't seem to attain a lot of new members, and most (not all!) of the activity is back on oldschool platforms like Amiga or similar. See e.g. https://www.pouet.net/; Assembly 2026 is this weekend, so there's likely to be new interesting releases coming out.

Kinda offtopic, but I was somewhat surprised by Assembly having an “exclusive AI partner” this year.

Back when you had to create a design language and an interface, to express what ideas you were experimenting with

FuckPaint need a whole office productivity anti-suite called FuckWork 365:

  FuckWork 365 - Subscription Required, Dissatisfaction Guaranteed
  FuckPlay — steamy games and entertainment, featuring Fuck Machine, Multiplayer Action
  Fucktorio — factory automation, featuring ContinuousInsertion
  FuckAll — the complete productivity suite, featuring Absofuckinglutely Everyfuckingthing.
  FuckPaint — pixel graphics, featuring the legendary RetentiveAnalizer
  FuckDraw — vector graphics, featuring the AutoStroker
  FuckWrite — word processing, featuring SpellFuck
  FuckSheet — spreadsheets, featuring CellMate, AutoSpread, BetweenTheSheets
  FuckBase — databases, featuring RearEnd, BackThatAssUp, MyMilkShake
  FuckShow — presentations, featuring SlideIn
  FuckMail — email, featuring Office ReachAround 180
  FuckPlan — project management, featuring AgilePositions, Scrum-N-Come, StandUpComedy
  FuckMoney — accounting, featuring DoubleEntry, Pay4Play
  FuckDrive — cloud storage, featuring SharedAccess, LargeFuckStorage
  FuckSlack — workplace chat, featuring LooseChannels
  FuckTwitch — livestreaming, featuring ComeWatchMe
  FuckFlix — streaming entertainment, featuring Binge&Regret
  Fuckr — photo sharing, featuring Exposure and Developing Relationships
  FuckBook — social networking, featuring People You May Have Fucked, MarketFace, MarkFuckerberg
  FuckerNews — social news and online discussion, featuring Threads You’ll Regret Pulling, XXXCombinator
  FuckedIn — professional networking, featuring Open2Fuck, CastingCouch
  FuckPilot — AI Assistant (Artificial Insemenation Agent), featuring Autofill and Regret
  FuckTube — video sharing, featuring Upload Yourself
  FuckHub — source control, featuring Pull Requests
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  FuckNote — personal notes, featuring ScratchPad
  FuckDesk — desktop publishing, featuring FullSpread
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Not trying to be a jerk, but demoscene is one word afaik?

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

and everyone wrote it as a single word, here in comments to this article.

It can be either. In the demoscene, sceners just call it the scene.

They also like to agglutinate words, e.g. copyparty, sizecoding and so on.

You can split or join the word if you like.

I suspect that it, like the "sinus" mentioned elsewhere, may well be a result of the scene (at least at the start) being dominated by people natively speaking Northern European Germanic languages.

I started learning English about 43 years ago, and I still struggle with when words are combined or separate in English because it largely follows no logic while in Norwegian it carries meaning.

The demoscene is full of funny-English words — ”compo”, ”graphician”…

How come we(you?) decided it can be either, given everyone and their dog writes "demoscene" all across the scene?

    writes "demoscene" all across the scene
            ^^^^^^^^^             ^^^^^^^^^

Which scene is that? Is it the scene about demos? A "demo" "scene" if you will?

"demoscene" comes from demo + scene. "demo scene" and "demoscene" refer to the same thing. The latter is a more common spelling. We can also write "the scene" (meaning the demoscene) and "sceners" (meaning demosceners) and it's fully understood.

Alternative spellings of words don't have to be dominant or even popular, they just have to be understood. If you try and force someone to use a specific spelling even if you understood them with the spelling they used, that is somewhat jerk-like.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/demo_scene

    Alternative spelling of demoscene.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/demoscene

    The informal computer art subculture that produces and watches demos (audiovisual computer programs).

    Etymology: from demo + scene

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/demoscener

    A participant in the demoscene

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scener

    A member of a scene, especially the demoscene

What’s your point?

exactly what is stated. it is demoscene, and people been calling it such. https://www.pouet.net/ calls it demoscene, https://scene.org/ calls it demoscene, and so does https://assembly.org, which existed for at least as long as the demoscene been a thing.

so something that is called "demo scene" perhaps may designate other matter. the same way copyright is one word, and not "copy right", which is semantically diffrent thing.

it is not about what HN folk decides to call things, really. and written as "demo scene", well it took a second for my eyes to pattern-match the title.

English compound nouns can be open, hyphenated or closed. What is acceptable usage changes over time. Some say that compound nouns "harden", e.g "file name" became "file-name" became "filename", and they all mean the same thing, but currently "filename" is the most common spelling. "Foot ball" was acceptable in the 1800s but only "football" is acceptable now.

Your example, "copyright", has only existed in this closed form. "copy-right" and "copy right" are not recognised.

On the other hand, "demo scene" is a recognised variant of "demoscene". It may look as wrong to you as "color" looks to me, but it's recognised.

Want a citation or two?

The Death of Kefrens (1991):

https://ftp.scene.org/mirrors/amigascne/Scrollers/K-Groupste...

    ORION, CODER:                           
    -------------                           
    LEFT THE DEMO SCENE FOR ABOUT A WEEK AS 
    HE STARTED CODING A GAME.               
    AFTER A WHILE HE CHANGED HIS MIND, DID A
    DENTRO, AND RETURNED TO THE DEMO SCENE. 
    NOW A MEMBER OF FLASH PRODUCTION.

How about "Break's Amiga Demo Scene Collection"? http://arabuusimiehet.com/break/amiga/

Or this 2007 interview of Fiver2? https://www.hugi.scene.org/online/hugise03/hugi%2033%20-%20d... "How do you think Debris will influence the demo scene?"

Completely off topic, but I love your username.

I would imagine lots of occurrences of "demo scene" are due to autocorrect on phones.

Imagine being so pedantic that you're gatekeeping because of a whitespace character. Couldn't be me.

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