Demoscene

[Sage In All Fields]

From the wiki article in case you don't know what demos are:

The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audio-visual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills. Demos and other demoscene productions are shared at festivals known as demoparties, voted on by those who attend, and released online.

I started thinking about the demoscene again recently and I've gotten really into it. Here are some of my favourites:
8088 Domination, in which a guy gets 640x200 30 FPS video running on the Intel 8088

Chaos Theory by Conspiracy, a 64k demo with stunning visuals and music

1995 by Kewlers & mfx, the music on this one just slaps and it's the last demo Kewlers ever made

Most of the demoscene seems to be over at https://www.pouet.net/index.php

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Farbrausch has some cool demos.

This one was made on the GameBoy Advance

 

[Gatdam Animal Person]

Elevated is one that I really dig. Beautifly rendered hills and cool beats in just under 4k, it's very well made.

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

I misread the title as "Demonscene" and was expecting some weird Tumblr shit.

Remember this one:

 

[Celebrate Nite]

I misread the title as "Demonscene" and was expecting some weird Tumblr shit.

Remember this one:

Speaking of Amiga, there's one Amiga Demo that I like

Someone took that demo song and used it to make the famous (?) SPOONYRIDE.MOD tune

 

[NOT Sword Fighter Super]

Speaking of Amiga, there's one Amiga Demo that I like

Someone took that demo song and used it to make the famous (?) SPOONYRIDE.MOD tune

That song reminds me of the soundtrack to Tempest 3000.

 

[Drain Todger]

I love that C64 SID sound.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Second Reality, probably one of the best known demos. Some of the Future Crew members went on to found Remedy Entertainment and created Death Rally, which has a similar feel in the 3D graphics and music.

 

[Govt. Shitposting Machine]

Finally I have an excuse to link to these sites!
I think if you're interested in demoscene shit you already know about pouet, but just in case you're new it's a community for people to post demos they've made.
dwitter is neat, make demos in JS with a 140 character limit, this is perhaps the only good use for JS I've seen online.

 

[AlexaAutismo]

One that always really stuck out to me was the Demo that was on the PSN back during the ps3 days. It was called Linger in Shadows and was highly interactive. Thought it was always interesting how you could control the flow of time and such.

 

[Gatdam Animal Person]

I find this one to be really funny. It's a parody of the massive amount of Bad Apple demos made for various systems.

 

[The Bovinian Derivative]

This was made in Assembly and the whole things is 256 byte.

 

[Dick Justice]

The demoscene has to be like the last active remnant of the time when computers were these cool future machines of infinte possibilities that people were willing to explore on their own terms and for that I can't help but wonder how much longer it's going to last.

 

[Coolio55]

Farbrausch has some cool demos.

This one was made on the GameBoy Advance

You mention Farbrausch but not .kkrieger?
For those not aware, kkrieger was a doom 3 level FPS in only 96k of memory.

ryg wrote up it's development here: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Still one of my favorites from recent times, it shows how demo groups can compete with big-budget games when it comes to graphics on the PC. It's leveraging design and, as dumb as it sounds, higher quality pixels. There's like a broadcast quality to the colors and anti-aliasing.

The Scene Is Dead by Razor1911 is probably the only thing I've seen with a decent CRT-filter. It doesn't show up in the Youtube video due to compression so download it from Pouet, it runs on basically anything and is only 64KB.

With old demos, when they were sequences of effects, many people doesn't understand that those are/were the computer version of magic tricks. Sleight of hand, diversions, stacking the deck, I don't know any more magic terms. A large part of the entertainment was trying to figure out how they did it, because it wasn't possible to do it the way as it was presented just like how a magician can't actually do what it appears that he is doing.
These days a lot of those effect doesn't look that impressive, just like how an old sleight of hand trick wouldn't be that impressive today if stage magicians could move 100,000 times faster than in 1989 and had infinite pockets.

 

[Ahriman]

You mention Farbrausch but not .kkrieger?
For those not aware, kkrieger was a doom 3 level FPS in only 96k of memory.

ryg wrote up it's development here: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/

There's a fantastic video about kkrieger

 

[George Orson Welles]

God I miss the old internet, well, can we throw the Amiga ball demo in here too?

 

[AmpleApricots]

Lots of demos written these days for old systems are made with heavy support of modern technology, nobody would've been able to pull some of that stuff off with the tools he had available in the 80s and 90s, or in other words: They might run on a 8088 or 68k but they certainty weren't developed on one.

 

[The Grognard]

This was made in Assembly and the whole things is 256 byte.

That's neat. Have a 256 byte demo with music and multiple scenes.

 

[Belisarius Cawl]

Necroing this thread. Felt like enjoying some great classic demos, like this one:

And this one:

And this one:

I really envy the people who made these things. I'm pretty sure I could be stepped through the strictly mathematical stuff, even if it had to be in assembly, but couldn't match their artistic imagination and attention to visual and audio details. I even saw that one of the co-authors of the German Megademo, "der Perser" ("the Persian") went on to become a medical researcher:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Darius-Moharregh-Khiabani