In the 90s the demoscene was really quite exciting. Second Reality was groundbreaking and opened my eyes to what was possible on our pokey old 486s (plus it was awesome to show off to your friends). Going to demo events and realising there were plenty of fellow hackers in Australia doing cool stuff, and having a chance to hack along with them was also a lot of fun. Good times.
Growing up in the scene in the U.S. was quite hard. I was lucky to grow up on the East Coast where most of the little U.S. parties were in the 90s. Drove all the way up for NAID 95.<p>Good times.<p>It's been great to see the demoscene roar back to life these last few years....some amazing stuff to watch on <a href="http://www.demoscene.tv/" rel="nofollow">http://www.demoscene.tv/</a>
Tl;dr: European teens and 20-somethings who sprinkle 68000 opcodes on their Müsli each morning create elaborate real-time visual hacks and general awesomeness -- now, thanks to the demise of the Amiga and the rise of (not-so) DirectX, considered something of a lost art.<p>Sad, really. Nothing else -- not even the game projects I work on and don't quite finish -- comes real close to the raw visceral fun of programming, the reason why I got so deeply involved with these infernal machines in the first place.
"The demoscene" can also refer to the largely overlapping subculture of tracker [1] musicians. There're a few well known electronic artists still using trackers today, like Venetian Snares [2], Bogdan Raczynski, and enduser.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software)</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjAwxG3q3Yo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjAwxG3q3Yo</a>
I used to help organise the (very small) demo scene in South Africa many years ago and it was so much fun. I recently watched some old classic favourites of mine and dang if the bug didn't bite me again. So now I'm working on my real instrument synthesizer that must fit into 16k. Pure asm, fourier transforms, impossible tricks - this is coding at it's most fun.
There's something really beautiful about demos and the demoscene. I'm glad they're being preserved and seen as an art form, was afraid that they'd be forgotten.
The problem is that everyone doing demoscene stuff got jobs and is getting paid for it now. Look at crysis, etc. No one cares about programming dick waving contests anymore, it's all about who can get a job at Microsoft. If it doesn't benefit your resume, no one cares for it. I personally became a computer science major because I wanted to write demos. After about four years is when I really started to get it as far as graphics goes and even though now I have an idea how effects are done, I feel like there's still so much to learn to keep up with what guys in these demo groups like farbrausch and fairlight do. The learning curve for doing this kind of stuff is pretty high. Not only do you have to know programming, but some kind of library like DirectX or OpenGL, shader languages and all the linear algebra behind the effects.
I was very pleased to find recently that the Kosmic/KFMF music archives started working again, after a number of years of being down. I was considering writing some software to brute force fix the CR/LF translation issues in the web.archive.org copy of the .zip files before I saw the return of the original archives.<p>I still get nostalgic when I think about Future Crew's music and demos, too. I believe Skaven of Future Crew put up a big archive of FC music a while ago, though Purple Motion was my favorite FC musician. Second Reality running on a 486 absolutely blew me away -- alpha blending, 3D, realtime mixed music, 60fps.
Block Party is the longest-running demoparty in North America, ever. It's been running four years. Kinda sad. You can see what the North American demoscene is like: archived live video from BlockParty 2010 part 1 <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6264966" rel="nofollow">http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6264966</a> part 2 <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6267675" rel="nofollow">http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6267675</a>