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Sunday Things - demoscene edition

posted in Links by Cargo Cult on Sunday March 17 2013

Never excuse 'programmer art'. Witness the demoscene - hackers making hardware do audiovisual things it wasn't supposed to.

Like a tiny tiny Skyrim.

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elevated by Rgba and TBC - fantastic 4kB demo. As in, it's a four kilobyte Windows executable. Essentially just some fancy shaders running on the GPU and a tiny software synthesiser, it's bloody amazing what it manages to produce. pouet.net page with download links etc.

Go away, triangles - the particles are here!

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Agenda Circling Forth by Fairlight and Carillon & Cyberiad - so what happens when demo coders have somewhat more than 4kB to play with? Frequently, they escape the tedious world of polygons and investigate the land of particles. Nifty. pouet.net page

Vector displays break down in splendid ways.

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Where Have All The Pixels Gone? by cmucc - but what do they do when pixels themselves seem needlessly futuristic? Get hacking on a Vectrex from the early 1980s. pouet.net page

Attribute Clash sounds like a great band name.

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Pimp My Spectrum by ate bit - but there's no risk of getting stuck in the past. Take some simulated '80s Sinclair hardware and launch yourself into a glorious alternate future - this demo is absolutely a tricked-out Sinclair Spectrum emulator... pouet.net page

Platform wars will never end.

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Starstruck by The Black Lotus - it's not just virtual hardware being upgraded. This is a demo built for a souped-up Commodore Amiga, but true to the spirit of the platform wars which epitomised the demoscene, here it's running much better on an accelerated Atari Falcon. Never forget which side I'm on. pouet.net page

Bonus No Hardware Available! corner:

Article comments (now closed)

phuzz's gravatar

1. 9fingers

Posted by phuzz at 1:53PM, Sunday March 17 2013

I will never forge the first time I saw 9 Fingers by Spaceballs in my Amiga.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a-bn8iydZc
On just one 880k floppy he managed to fit a (heavily vectorised) video of a woman (his sister I think).
The technical details of how he achieved this are bloody impressive, but for the thirteen (or fourteen) year old me, that was the first time I had seen actual recorded video on my own computer.
Now you can just click on the link and go watch the video on youtube and your only thought is likely to be that the video is only in 360 res, but back then this was pretty much the only example of recorded video being played back on a home computer. I have to repeat, this entire thing, video, music and executable all fitted on a single diskette, running on a system that was never envisaged to do such a thing (sprite based animation was more what it was geared towards.)

tl:dr this demo blew my tiny little mind back in 1993, because it was basically doing the 'impossible'.

phuzz's gravatar

2. ps

Posted by phuzz at 1:54PM, Sunday March 17 2013

oh yeah, with no deference to our gracious host, fuck the atari, AMIGA 4EVA!

;)

Cargo Cult's gravatar

3. Re: ps

Posted by Cargo Cult at 11:45PM, Saturday March 23 2013

"STs have built in MIDI ports, and I saw one with <insert long-forgotten band name here> on Top of the Pops. They're much better than Amigas!"

"Yeah, but Amigas were used to render the graphics in Babylon 5! Take that, Atari!"

"Babylon 5's a big pile of shit!"

"GET OUT!"

jonesy's gravatar

4. flame wars pointless

Posted by jonesy at 9:53PM, Sunday June 2 2013

C'mon, they were both nifty machines, each offering some ahead-of-the-art stuff in the personal computer arena. Methinks, better to celebrate than flame.

Cargo Cult's gravatar

5. Re: flame wars pointless

Posted by Cargo Cult at 12:06AM, Sunday June 9 2013

Indeed - there's more than a little sarcasm in the platform wars here.

(The pointless ST-versus-Amiga fighting helped me realise fairly early on that there's no such thing as one perfect system. Note the Macs, high-end Windows PC and innumerable midget Linux devices surrounding me right now!)

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