What does "90 demos exposed" mean. Will there be any way to run them?
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 :)
qbasic_forever 1144 days ago [-]
Download the Mind Candy 2 DVD for Amiga demos: http://www.mindcandydvd.com/2/ It's a fantastic DVD that was released about 10-15 years ago as a physical disc and is now available for free. The demos were captured from real hardware and they went out of their way to ensure it was the highest quality capture at the time. It's a trip, and many of the releases have commentary tracks with their creators.
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).
renaudg 1143 days ago [-]
MindCandy has a nice selection but it's getting old and to be honest, DVD quality doesn't do these demos justice.
I somehow snagged a copy from a local video store back in the day, when those were still a thing. Was weird to see something so niche in a mainstream shop, it was good to put on in the background when entertaining guests, and it feels nice to hold a physical piece of a largely digital history.
taneq 1144 days ago [-]
I won a physical copy of this way back in the day in a little entry level demo compo. Such good times.
b3lvedere 1144 days ago [-]
Thanks for the link! I have a physical copy of the Mind Candy 1 DVD somewhere, but this is way more convenient.
lbj 1144 days ago [-]
Wow! Thanks!
sdenton4 1144 days ago [-]
The internet Archive has a repository of demos for DOSBox and various consoles:
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 :)
I was there in Aars, Denmark in 96 as well! Awesome event!
lbj 1144 days ago [-]
It was pretty amazing and we've probably bumped into each other in the queue for hotdogs.
I also recall we blew out 2 fuse stations and laid the entire city dark for a few hours.
logicchop 1144 days ago [-]
Remember grabbing newly released demos from your local BBS? Remember ansi packs, mod music, all that? It was truly magical.
Dowwie 1144 days ago [-]
I remember being 12 years old, listening to Technotronic dance hits as MOD files. Also, I was among the youngest members of the BBS community in my area of New Jersey. If only I learned how to program back then. The Turbo C++ book in my possession felt like Egyptian hieroglyphics and I gave up trying to learn it fairly quickly.
dm319 1141 days ago [-]
I was a similar age! I didn't have any form of internet, but a friend of mine was somehow able to source MODS, and they were the main music I listened to. Copying some MODS onto a floppy disc so that I could play them on OctaMED at home was one of my best memories of childhood.
TonyTrapp 1144 days ago [-]
> What does "90 demos exposed" mean. Will there be any way to run them?
Probably just a bad translation from French. It's just a book. :)
dm319 1141 days ago [-]
What did you think of desert dream?
notretarded 1144 days ago [-]
Dreamy.
BadassFractal 1144 days ago [-]
Is there anything today that feels like a underground scene that's "happening", that is acting as a technological vanguard, that is full of mystique, but that hasn't gone mainstream yet? The demo scene felt like absolute magic to me as a kid in 80s.
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?
pavlov 1144 days ago [-]
Crypto imagines themselves as this, but in reality it’s got all the creative spirit and intellectual rigor of multi-level marketing. It’s the most depressing computer scene ever.
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.
sorbits 1144 days ago [-]
> Is there anything today that feels like a underground scene that's "happening", that is acting as a technological vanguard, that is full of mystique, but that hasn't gone mainstream yet? The demo scene felt like absolute magic to me as a kid in 80s.
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…
invincing 1144 days ago [-]
I used to be heavily involved in the demoscene during late 80's/early 90's. (And still occasionally visit demoparties.) I think the best thing in making demos was the feeling of achievement when you managed to get a new effect working. Of course it was a bonus if this was something never seen before, or broke some record, or even placed well in a democompo, but the feeling of "I can do this" was the main driving force behind it all for me.
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.
corysama 1144 days ago [-]
> VR? Crypto? Machine Learning? Generative art?
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".
homarp 1144 days ago [-]
Mame and MiSTer team that document old hardware for re-implementation?
Absolutely this. What people are doing on the Pico-8 is nothing short of magical, the system is very limited yet people produce all kinds of crazy demos for it.
quelsolaar 1144 days ago [-]
Shadertoy?
qbasic_forever 1144 days ago [-]
Mash the 'show' button at the very top of this page...
dm319 1144 days ago [-]
The double buffered smooth scrolling and 4-channel sequencing sound of my Amiga A1200 will always hold a place in my heart. I'm glad that people have started preserving this community, and over the years I did wonder when or if people would do this. I imagined other teenagers, dotted across the Netherlands, France and Scandinavia, a little too obsessed with female anatomy and crude jokes, and I just thought they were the coolest. Would love to see some interviews of them now and the reality behind the floppy-disk passing community persona.
LocalH 1139 days ago [-]
Good chance that a decent chunk of that smooth scrolling was beam-raced rather than double-buffered. Which of course makes it more impressive to me
wcarss 1144 days ago [-]
(Under the original title) I was selfishly hoping this would have links to runnable Amiga demos :)
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.
qbasic_forever 1144 days ago [-]
Sadly floppy disks will lose their magnetism over time. There will be a point in the not too distant future that all original copies of computer work on floppy are dead forever. If you have any old disks with old data, now (or realistically 10 years ago) is the time to get them backed up somewhere safe.
swiley 1144 days ago [-]
It's kind of terrible that copyright for those will probably last an order of magnitude longer than the actual media will.
bitwize 1144 days ago [-]
At least one EULA for a major PC software product stated that the terms of the license lasted for fifty (50) years, after which the licensee was obligated to return the distribution media to the vendor.
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!
TacticalCoder 1144 days ago [-]
Yeah. During the lockdown I was stuck by "chance" alone at my parents' old house, the one were I grew up. I found my old C128 (which I'd use in C64 mode all the time) and cleaned it, cleaned its disk drive, cleaned my floppies and tried them. To my surprise about 2 out of 3 were still working (they're a bit more than 30 years old). Heck, I even found a "New In Unopened Box" of 5"1/4 floppies and started making a few copies of some of the disks that were still working (out of boredom and curiosity more than to save data).
bitwize 1144 days ago [-]
The floppy drive was rekt in my Amiga 500 when I bought it. I decided that I wanted to run the Amiga rather than have it serve as a museum piece, so I replaced the floppy drive with a Gotek floppy emulator and installed the open source FlashFloppy firmware on it, and I can now use USB sticks with floppy images and the Amiga thinks it's a real disk. Breathes life into the old hardware.
milesvp 1144 days ago [-]
Time to get a usb to amiga disk drive emulator? I know they exist, and a quick google search turned one up.
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!
aspaceman 1144 days ago [-]
Retro computing communities are pretty active at the moment. You should be able to get copies of software via disk drive emulation. There’s various SD Card options out there for the C64, so I imagine the Amiga is similar. I was playing with a racket c64 compiler the other day, so I figure the amiga has something cool.
bni 1144 days ago [-]
GoTek external floppy drive emulator is the easiest and cheapest way to get files of your old Amiga floppies, assuming you have a working Amiga.
If you dont have working Amiga it gets more expensive and/or complicated.
snvzz 1144 days ago [-]
Look into GreaseWeazle and FlashFloppy.
tiahura 1144 days ago [-]
I remember a super early eagle demo on the 1000. IIRC it was pre Kickstart 1.0. I’ve never been able to find it. False memory?
jeffgreco 1144 days ago [-]
Does anyone have recommendations for other books/publishers like this? Some combination of tech/game history and beautiful book design?
I really love the demoscene from the mid-to-late 80s into the beginning of the 90s.. Second reality from future crew was just mindblowingly awesome.. About 91/92 PCs were no joke anymore (Amiga and Atari ST users used to pick on them and still do ;-) )
aricz 1144 days ago [-]
The book is out of stock :(
peterhil 1144 days ago [-]
This is an advertisement of a book, although on an interesting subject. I find it surprising the book does not seem to come with digital medium to hold the demos.
Rendered at 09:58:15 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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:
https://archive.org/details/demoscene/demoscene.ogv
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
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. :)
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.
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.
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/
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.