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.
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.
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.
Editet: (Typo)
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...
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
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 :)
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.
And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...
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
-----------------------------
<-> a little space ship
* a projectile
----- the ground
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.
The 86ers got one, on the other hand. It's from Sweden. :)
I'm not from this era and this article explains a lot of things from the video!
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.
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.
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 :)
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 ]
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 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.
More seriously, most of the scene were teenage boys who were playing, not doing serious work. While some of the tools were mostly productivity focused (e.g. the assemblers, trackers), perceived cool-factor outweighed productivity for a huge proportion of them.
For the trackers in particular, while there were still the embossed metallic look and sometimes gradients, the dense UI is largely a factor of small screens (often down to 14" monitors) and very low resolutions giving you very little to play with. And the thing is, while it's messy, everything is there on one screen, and almost every tracker followed almost exactly the same principles and layout, so you learnt quickly enough.
If you're curious, it's not hard to get an emulator up and running. Some of this software can even run in the Internet Archive. Here's a link to fast tracker II: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Fast_Tracker_2_1994
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
and everyone wrote it as a single word, here in comments to this article.
They also like to agglutinate words, e.g. copyparty, sizecoding and so on.
You can split or join the word if you like.
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.
writes "demoscene" all across the scene
^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^
"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.
The informal computer art subculture that produces and watches demos (audiovisual computer programs).
Etymology: from demo + scene
A participant in the demoscene
A member of a scene, especially the demosceneso 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.
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.
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?"