Games - Demoscene

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	Games - Demoscene

The demoscene is a computer subculture that came to prominence during the rise of the 16/32-bit micros (the Atari ST and the Amiga), but demos first appeared during the 8-bit era on computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

Demos began as software crackers' "signatures". When a cracked program was started, the cracker or his team would take credit via an increasingly impressive-looking graphical introduction called a "cracktro". The first time this appeared was on the Apple II computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Later, these intros evolved into their own subculture independent of cracking software. These were not initially called demos but rather letter, message, etc. Quite a few of the young talents that spent their time "coding" demos and thus gaining in-depth experience programming computer graphics later ended up working in the games industry, whose products they had initially cracked.

The main aim of a demo is to show off superior programming, artistic and musical skills over other demo groups.

Concept

Since any given computer platform before the PC age meant every computer of a given line had identical capabilities, a comparison between demos on earlier platforms was directly possible. This created a competitive environment where demoscene groups would try to outperform each other creating amazing effects. Demo writers went to great lengths to get every last ounce of performance out of their target machine. Where games and application writers were concerned with the stability and functionality of their software, the demo writer was typically interested in how many CPU cycles a routine would consume and how best to squeeze as much effects and activity onto the screen. This went so far as to exploit known hardware errors to produce effects that the manufacturer of the computer had not intended, giving the demo groups a feeling of having gone into extremes that nobody else had reached before.

Simple demo-like music collections were put together on the C64 in 1985 by Charles Deenen, inspired by crack intros, using music taken from games and adding some homemade color graphics. In the following year the movement we now know as the demoscene was born. The Dutch groups 1001 Crew and The Judges, both Commodore 64-based, are often mentioned as the earliest demo groups, both producing pure demos with original graphics and music involving more than just casual work and extensive hardware trickery whilst competing with each other in 1986. At the same time demos from different individuals such as Antony Crowther (Ratt) had started circulating on Compunet in the United Kingdom.

Recent computer hardware advancements include faster processors, more memory, faster video graphics processors, and hardware 3D acceleration. With many of the past's challenges removed, the focus in making demos has moved from squeezing as much out of the computer as possible to making stylish, beautiful, well-designed real time artwork - a fact that lots of so-called "old school demosceners" seem to disapprove of. This can be explained by the break introduced by the PC world, where the platform varies and most of the programming work that used to be hand-programmed is now done by the graphics-card. This gives demo-groups a lot more artistic freedom, but can frustrate some of the old-schoolers for lack of a programming challenge. The old tradition still lives on though. Demo parties have competitions with varying limitations in program size or platform. Different series are called compos. On a modern computer the executable size may be limited to 64 kB or 4 kB. Programs of limited size are usually called intros. In other compos the choice of platform is restricted. Only old computers, like Commodore 64 or Atari ST, or mobile devices like handheld phones or PDAs are allowed. Such restrictions provide a challenge for coders, musicians and graphics artists and bring back the old motive of making a device do more than it was intended for.

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