There were many really nice demos on Revision this year. Hacker News favorite (and mine, too!) LFT put out another microcontroller demo, Sum Ergo Demonstro:
How they pulled that off on a stock A500 (okay, a stock A500 with 512kb RAM expansion, but still) is far beyond me. It's pretty awesome and really deserved the 1st place
Classic first comment on the Youtube video: Hey lft, I designed the RISC-V core you're using, and I had a ton of fun watching and re-watching this video and trying to guess some of the tricks you used. Awesome work and I'm looking forward to a write-up!
I really enjoyed the demoscene back in the 90s. Was never a part of it but I was always fascinated by the effects and music and ascii art that these guys created.
A BBS in my city always had the latest e-zines like Reality Check Network and Affinity, and others I forget. Reading up on the scene and about groups like Razor1911 was something I spent a lot of time on when I was younger.
That was amazing, really great song & visuals too. Takes me back to the days when you couldn't close the keygen because the midi playing was such a banger.
MIDI songs? I checked, I couldn't find any from the link you posted. Most were different module formats, like XM, Protracker, S3M, Impulse Tracker. Those have nothing to do with midi other than they also produce music.
At one point in time, (I think maybe in connection with some mobile phone being able to play .midi files?) MIDI songs was (incorrectly) referring to a style/type of music rather than the transport/protocol we use for sending notes between instruments/devices, or the file format.
I'm still since then always assuming the above when someone says "MIDI music"; they really mean "really basic/simple music" or just straight up "chiptune" sometimes.
It has nothing to do with MIDI really, just a misnomer.
Sadly I couldn't get it to work on Linux with Wine/Proton, like a lot of demos they seem to really be using less common paths, so of course it crashes.
Really cool retro-mix, and some slick transitions.
Most of that was before my time though, so 1995 by Kewlers[1] hit harder for me, since that was when I really got into the demo scene and with it my drive to learn programming.
Glad the demo scene is alive and kicking, though I get why a lot is oriented around old hardware, modern hardware makes things too easy almost.
I upvote every post related to the demoscene due to my age, so I couldn't let this one, especially when it's coming from RZR.
Imagine if we could get a new release from FC as well in 2026 (40 years since their founding)!!!
Razor 1911 and FC are different in that FC was one of those team/friend-groups that depended more on a constellation of people working together and producing until life took them away to other things.
Razor, Fairlight and some others became more of continious groups with evolving memberships (I was briefly a member of the demoteam back in 1999 and did one production in association with the people that moved over to Fairlight).
ASD - Spin lives rent free in my head. I remember a colleague explaining how the morphing between meshes was really just random noise but the proximity and speed made it look like a real transformation. So cool.
Should out to TheBlackLotus, Fairlight, Orange, CNCD also for those of you who want to look up epic demos.
or you can unpack the executable (it's packed with UPX) and extract the MP3 from that ;-) You can also get high-res PNGs of some of the scenes that way (e.g. the floppy disk pan, or the fake Windows desktops)
In demoscene nomenclature, an "intro" is a demo with a sizelimit. This was entered in the demo compo, ergo "no size limit".
With file size, most democoders go all the way, both ways. By that I mean that if they choose a sizelimit category, they squeeze out every last byte, and if they don't, most don't care about filesize at all. There's demos these days that are many times bigger than an acceptable video recording would be because nobody bothered to eg compress the assets, it includes an entire game engine, etc. Like 800MB for a 3 minute audiovisual show. Kinda ridiculous but it's just.. well, call it either laziness or focused pragmatism :-) Gotta get that prod out before the deadline!
The Razor1911 zip[1] is 30MB, which actually is very much on the small side for a current-day demo.
This came up in the Discord party chat, basically there isn't a size limit in the rules[1], but going beyond 2GB would be concerning that it's not a real-time demo but instead just playback of animation.
When I was learning to make games and just hack around the pc, I used to try to copy paste the characters from their nfos to make my own “releases” of mini mods. Didn’t know there were ascii drawing programs! Wonder if you did the same. I’m sure we all did but pre www era made it difficult!
I used to use TheDraw for doing ANSI art, but I also ended up making my own ANSI drawing tool back then. It's stupid to think of now, but one reason I made it was because I had a monochrome monitor, so I couldn't "see" color. I wanted a feature where I could put the cursor over a character and it would tell me the color there when I was drawing so I could still use color in the work.
I wasn't prolific, but did do a handful of ANSI art pieces for local BBS SysOps who liked them well enough. Only later on I realized when I got an actual color monitor that I had a few color mistakes in them and they never told me. lol
Damn, more OG than me. I must have looked up to you and your peers back then! It’s crazy how it was so common to just go in a hex editor and mess with files to see what would happen. Would love to see a submission of what you / group / other notables did.
I dabble in ASCII art and use Playscii these days. Its still pretty hard to make amazing looking art even with these great tools, which just shows how legendary the demoscene is.
Most full demo (no tech or sizelimit) soundtracks since the early 00s are just mp3 streams or alike, size-coded that have soft-synths or retro categories were singing is an issue due to datasize or hardware power often don't (sometimes they do as a technical demonstration).
But I did notice some 64k's and small synths-executables had singing this year, I've added small voice-samples (compressed) but that's just seconds whilst these entries had longer sequences so I'm a tad curious as well.
I wish there was more info about how they're made but I suppose part of the demo scene has always been secretive and reverse engineer it if you want to know.
The first one said made with Godot and blender so is it using premade assets? (Which I thought was not allowed)
Edit: #22 Heart of Glass says 144kB of WebGL + audio. I assume this means the audio is separate.
OMG. Thanks so much for posting this - completely awesome! Such a nostalgic roller coaster ride, from Qmodem to Xcopy and everything in between... brought back so many memories... - thanks again!
as a broke kid from the third world, the amount of coping Razor1911 enabled for me with gaming got me through high school during the 2000s (edit due to not finishing a sentence originally) cannot be understated.
Wow, a real throwback to my earlier years exploring the Warez scene as cash poor teenager, which meant you had to get creative to find what you wanted.
Looking back in my 30s, I think part of my brain has atrophied because I can now purchase and download games and content with a few clicks on Steam and £40, which will be ready to play after dinner.
Before you had to think and search forums (both public and private) for DDL links, CD keys, cracks, passwords to unzip files.
Then once you had downloaded these multiple RAR/Zip files you then had to check and verify them for corruption or viruses. After that it was reading the sacred README.nfo file included in the crack zip. Which if you didn't specify to open in Notepad or Notepad++, it would open the Windows System information window.
The last stage before firing up a game was the patching/cracking phase; that could involved things like editing hosts files, unplugging or disconnecting from the internet, or modifying your firewall to prevent network requests for anti-piracy software. Then you ran your crack or copied a patched .exe file over into the game directory. Aye presto, you're ready to fire up (hopefully it didn't have a virus or rootkit)
...but wait there is no loading videos or splash screen (panic). Well that's because the pirates were saving storage space and removed unnecessary game videos and music assets.
<Play game> Bioshock
Ah, that was a nice nostalgia trip.
Also for any other nostalgia trippers, do you remember the first thing you always installed was a cracked version of WinRar (before 7zip became cool), running on a fresh install of Windows_7_SP3_BLACK_EDITION_XXX.iso
That Dynamic Duo disk at the beginning reminded me of my friend who got his house raided in 1987 for exchanging (not selling) cracked computer games for the C64 at the age of 18 in super rural Germany. He still managed to get into the army as an officer.
The game was notoriously hard to crack too. Rockstar had a lot of former demosceners, so they put all sorts of protection that would mess with the game.
I recall my friend describing Nico being randomly drunk, or vehicles suddenly accelerating. Razor eventually nailed it iirc
A lot of old school demo enthusiasts cried. These guys cracked all the games we couldn’t afford as kids/teens and did the coolest demos and cracktros to show off how cool they were. I saw them as high tech Robin Hoods. Hope you were around for that!