The demoscene, largely unknown to a lot of chip-people (specially those of the young/neophyte type), is in my regard, one of the biggest nurturers of today’s chipmusic. A lot of your nowadays inventions for “contemporary chipmusic” have come out of the minds and style of these (mostly) european whizzes, who hack at their keyboards marvelous code routines that try to get the most out of their hardware of choice.
Of all the demoscene of today, the branch most related to us and, to me, the most interesting one, is the “oldschool demoscene”, where old computers are milked way, way past their original limitations, putting the old saying “teaching an old dog new tricks” to very good use.
With no further to add, I present you to the first nomination in these series.
Doctor, by Trilobit
[Atari 2600]
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/63_nw-z2inQ" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]
Comments
8 responses to “Best Demo Production I”
Alright, embed code didn’t work, but the first one is on demoscene.tv and the second’s on capped.tv. Unless you’ve already decided demo nominations, in which case forget it! :D
Syphus!
First off, sorry, no PC productions. This is an oldschool-only nomination. Why? Because it makes a lot of sense to us :D
Second, teh nominations are closed, yes. Peter has posted about this a-plenty on 8BC! Sorry about that, next year we maybe should mail out about this :)
This is a tasty fucker on so many levels
Are the nominations for this category closed yet? I’ve got a few essentials to throw in:
Firstly, evilpaul’s 64k PC winner from Breakpoint. He coded a Spectrum emulator inside the 64k demo engine to do this, and there’s amazing ay/ym stuff going on too.
Pouet: http://web.archive.org/web/20160826123438/https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50107
Vid:
And my choice for size-limited demo on oldschool platform is Ephidrena’s winning 4k Amiga demo with the most amazing micro-softsynth anyone’s ever heard on Amiga:
pouet: http://web.archive.org/web/20160614080954/http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50125
video:
Haha it might make sense in an arbitrary way, but considering the nature of the Speccy-on-PC demo in the context of this competition, and considering the prevalence of emulation amongst 8bc and related communities, it’s a bit bogus. That prod was an achievement for oldschool platform code but also for the sort of outreach to newschool, PC-bound fools that our communities are so keenly engaged in. I guess that’s why Phoenix showed it as the climax of his Oldschool Demo seminar at Blip Festival.
So I guess I’m just keen not to sound like I was suggesting a PC prod for an oldschool category simply because I’m some sort of contrary idiot, but because I felt there was a good reason. But I fundamentally agree and appreciate your reasoning – oldschool is oldschool, even if the kids don’t care.
Still, arbitrary regulations make me feel right at home as a demoscener:) If you’ll stand with me, we could campaign for emulator-related threads and the VST subforum to be banned from 8bc! :D
Yeah, I know I should have nominated earlier – I actually decided not to, because I hate having to choose between things and people I like equally. My fault, but yes – do a big mailout next year once the blog has gathered steam etc. I’ll be spreading the word as much as I can.
Oh, by the way – did those floppies arrive yet? I’ve figured out you should be able to do what you need, and using RAD: might help (recoverable ram device). Come on IRC one of these days and we’ll talk about it :)
Peace!
BEST AMIGA
Well, as I said Syphus, this is absolutely arbitrary :) I don’t actually care what prevails in 8BC or anywhere, to be honest, 8BC being specially far away of being considered the example of anything I’d stand up for :D
Also, I don’t think that Ate Bitten demo would qualify. As explained in the TXT file of this demo, there’s actually no purpose for this to run on a Z80 emulator, except for just “showing off mah tech skillz”… everything that makes a Spectrum limited has been removed, it’s using the GPU (parallel processing), no color fringeing, extra colors (halfbrite-style shading), fast CPU speeds, etc… I would go on. This is not an oldschool production, and if people think this is the apex of oldschool production, they can suck a fuck and look at our demo nomination for the ZX Spectrum category ( the *real thing*).
The apex of oldschool productions is still sticking to the old hardware and pushing it. That’s why I also think most Amiga demos are borderline, but we had to choose a 2008 demo and hardly anyone is producing anything for a machine 030 or under. Then again the Amiga demoscene is dead :D
Those are, then, the strict rules under which this category has been constructed.
I hope Edge of disgrace is nominated…
I have deep regrets for not submitting nominations but it was very hard in many categories :)