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Comment by xal | Hacker News Reader

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xal·

Heh, kids these days. We needed to do that to even have a chance at competing in 4k intro competitions.

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Ah the joys of getting Watcom C to work with PMODE [1] before PMODE/W made it easier.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PMODE

Why would one use PMODE with Watcom when Watcom comes with DOS/4GW?

Size, ability to have a single executable, requirement to display their copyright, and probably a few technical ones I can't remember anymore; I vaguely recall stuff about DOS4GW being more strict with certain CONFIG.SYS and HIMEM settings, but it was almost 20 years ago. :)

Neat, do you still have any of your code from your 4k competition days lying around? I'd be curious to see what kinds of tricks you used.

Sadly, I don't have any of my own work anymore, although I'm sure I could write out a few procedural texture generators from top of my head.

Luckily, the demo scene has collectively decided to go back and open source much of it's best work recently: http://www.displayhack.org/2012/the-great-demoscene-sourceco...

The most recent 4ks are nothing short of stunning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0...

That is pretty amazing. I don't know the demo scene. Is it real-time or does the 4k do rendering that is viewed with a movie player?

Real time, it's a 4kb executable.

The demo scene has been around for decades

> Real time

Wow. That is super-impressive.

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