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:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=v8zKDotYh9A&is=xAbW7VZVGLn0986B
But I think my favorite so far from the ones I've seen has to be Second Nature, an OCS Amiga demo by Desire & The Twitch Elite, and music by Hoffman.
i second that. "Second Nature" is also my party favorite! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFVxntafsXM&t=1764s
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
It's a really uplifting break compared to all the other news coming out now.
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!
Ah wow.
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.
Amazing demo and homage to the era.
It is a great demo and really nostalgic. I was briefly a courier for Razor 1911 in the mid 90s. I recognize many of the handles throughout the demo and in the list at the end, and even BBS names if you slow down or pause some parts of the demo. So certainly brings back a lot of good memories. The music is great also.
Thanks for your service, you got kids like me into PCs back then.
> 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.
It was quite something... I take it there are quite a few hotshots on HN who used to be in the top groups. I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends and then we'd get infinite leech/upload ratio on those BBSes. Best memory was driving through Belgium / the Netherlands / Denmark / putting the car on the boat / Sweden (Uppsala) with our computers (Amiga, Atari ST and PCs) to participate at a demo compo. Forgot its name but in the PC category we tied first place with Future Crew (we would have been first had I not screwed the sound playback routine which crashed half-way the demo), before they had their big breakthrough on the PC demoscene. I think that was in 1991.
Cops/customs stopped us as the boat arrived in Sweden and thought we were dealing drugs: they tore the car apart and had no idea what we were talking about when we were explaining them in broken english that we were going to participate in a demo compo :-/
I still have a few effects as executables but I don't have the code anymore for these.
Thankfully I still have the entire source code of a game I made in assembly (for PC / 386+) in 1991 (never published but it's how my career started, long story) and lately I've been having a huge lot of fun trying to compile it again with Claude Code CLI / Sonnet. I'm using UASM, which is compatible with MASM which I used to use. I managed to have all the utilities I wrote back then (picture converters / sprites extractor / etc.) compiling and running (in DOSBox) but haven't managed to compile the main game yet. A few more hours with Claude Code CLI and I should get it running.
FWIW it's hilarious to go back to code from 1991 and see comments in my code talking about this and that bug and asking the LLM: "Find where that bug could be" and the LLM manages to find it. It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories. Copy/pasta code everywhere. And then 10 000 lines of code per source code file.
What an era. Diving in that old code of mine brings me back: the decades they've been flying.
P.S: funnily enough by lack of luck a macro I had used back then happen to become a reserved keyword/macro in assemblers later on. I had named back then a macro "incbin" and that was preventing my code from compiling in UASM: Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 found that issue instantly.
P.P.S: 0x777 in hex gives 1911. RZR, legendary: probably the most legendary of them all. Probably still have a few 5"1/4 floppies (both C64 and Amiga for I had an Amiga with a little software mod to read 5"1/4 floppies as if they were 3"1/2 for the 5"1/4 were way cheaper) with Razor 1911 "cracktros" (even if they weren't called that yet) still working (back in 2020 quite a few of my floppies were still reading: maybe half to 2/3rd of them). I know it won't last, nothing will.
> It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories.
I can understand that - under dos - but as I recall quite a lot of gnu/nix tooling was workable on the Amiga - RCS harks back to 1984...
> I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends
Ah that would have been such an awesome time. Thanks for sharing!
What are using as a linker? Also, do you use protected mode and if yes, what do you use for that, PMODE or CWSDPMI or something else?
It's an old MS-DOS .EXE. Actually it compiles with the ".286" directive too. So I don't use protected mode.
It requires a VGA card and those were more common in 386 IIRC and, anyway, performance-wise to run at 60 Hz it needs a 386. I never tried to run it on a 286 with a VGA card: don't know if that was a thing.
It's funny looking at that old assembly code and see ax, bx, cx, dx registers and not the eax, etc. ones.
The utilities I've compiled to .EXE so far are self-contained in one file and I just use UASM to create directly the .EXE:
uasm -mz myutil.asm
https://www.terraspace.co.uk/uasm.html
I haven't tried yet to compile the entire game yet: that one is more involved as it implies many files.
VGA was pretty common on 286, I even had an SVGA card on my own back in the day. And it also had protected mode but was still 16-bit.
> VGA was pretty common on 286, I even had an SVGA card on my own back in the day. And it also had protected mode but was still 16-bit.
Oh that's intriguing. Well I still have one, so now I'll have to find a VGA card and see if my code even works on a 286!
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.
I'd say 'MIDI music' became a catch-all for music that's represented as data that is in turn triggering samples, rather than being a pure audio file. Might be actual MIDI or might be tracker music etc.
A more appropriate term is "chiptunes". I also heard people refer to it as keygen music.
If it's a tracker module of some kind with very short looping samples, then yeah, it's a chiptune.
Right. Basically using simple waveforms either using samples or onboard chip like ZX Spectrum's. For tracker modules with more "normal" samples, we simply referred to them as modules or mods for short.
IMHO, a “chiptune” is music for an FM synthesis chip, like on the NES, the SID chip in Commodore 64, or the AdLib sound card for PC. A “mod” or “tracker music” is music made for a range of platforms in a rather narrow time-band, that could play digital samples, but could not reasonably store entire songs recorded digitally, like the Amiga, Atari ST, or early PC’s like 386s or 486s.
Neither the NES nor the SID employs FM synthesis. I'm not even sure what the collective noun is for these. Wikipedia tells me it's PSG (programmable sound generator).
The same behavior could be (also was) teased out of a MOD player if you choose samples with a handful of sample points, like 12. You could also draw up a sawtooth in paint and use that as a sample. These are down-to-earth honest true Scotsman chiptunes.
Those are SID etc. tunes. Not chiptunes.
They've probably been converted over the years, just like you might convert an mp3 into flac or ogg or whatever.
No, those are the original formats. MOD (Soundtracker [0], Protracker, etc.), IT (Impulse Tracker), XM (FastTracker) and S3M (ScreamTracker 3) are all from the nineties.
[0]: Soundtracker, the tracker that started this all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Soundtracker
Do you know if someone is hosting these in web radio format so I could stream in a car and such?
You might enjoy this: https://scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/
qUAntUm RaDio
I don't. I'm sure you could find an archive of just midi files out there though.
Superb demos this year at Revision. Triplet by Otomata Labs for the Atari 2600 is exceptional
Original release video (probably running on Stella)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJ0A8Wvdxs
And a video of it running on Gopher2600.
The parts where it exits fullscreen and starts messing around with separate windows is really well done. In a way it's playing with the limits of what defines a demo (ie. the user's desktop is part of the performance), which is something I love to see. Same with the notepad animation part. I wonder if they implemented their own notepad-alike from scratch or it they used something like this: https://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Note...
Legendary demo group Razor 1911 submitted this beautiful demo as the closer for the Revision 2026 demo competition.
It is an homage to 40 years of hacking from the group.
For context, they were pioneers in both the demoscene and in the warez scene in the 80s-00s.
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Oh man, I watched "non-live" earlier today but hearing the live vers with the crowd audio is amazing. So damn good <3
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mtctbodNXY (20 years old this year, now I feel really old)
Great demo. My favorite of theirs is MF Real. Nothing crazy but so stylish https://youtu.be/rvhGp9NGwos
This is so sick!
Revision faded out the credits part, which is still really cool on its own. The full version (10m 16s) can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM
Sadly, that full version isn't in 4K, unlike the submission.
But this is Hacker News, we can do much better! Here is the actual binary: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954
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.
the nfo notes >This demo will not run on intel iris gpus and only in 1080p
Just install pirated Windows in a VM (really the only valid way to run Windows these days). Razor would approve.
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Executable here: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954
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)!!!
More about Razor 1911 and Future Crew for the young readers of HN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Crew
P.S. Too many groups to mention, but these two hold a special place in my mind ;-)
P.S.2. Extra mention to the most famous Greek demo group - ASD (Andromeda Software Development) - https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1317
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).
Damn, that’s awesome. Any memory to share?
Wasn't a member for too long, I think there was some anti-piracy raids around that time that I vaguely remember where some of the fallout for whatever reason was the other guys going over to Fairlight but I were already involved enough with other groups (and our highschool equivalent or perhaps work by that time?).
Funniest thing perhaps is that Smash was a musician back then for 2 things where I did the code (one musicdisc and one joke intro), Smash then went on to become a damn accomplished coder of quite a few famous Fairlight demos, Sony tools and made the commercial Notch visual toolset/editor/player that has roots in the Fairlight demoeditor codebase (Notch startup logo often pops up in democompos for those that haven't followed the scene).
Oh yeah Smash is god tier. Saw his name on so many amazing FLT demos
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.
I also liked Triton. They made great demos and also FastTracker 2!
FT2 was written in Borland Pascal 7 and TASM, btw.
Shout out also to Cubic Team, I spent countless hours using Cubic Player, they also made some cool demos/intros.
CNCD and Orange are two of my most favorite groups! Inside, Secret Life of Mr Black, Megablast are some of my favorites of all time.
Future Crew's "Second Reality" was my introduction to demos, back in the 486 PC days.
Yes - Razor 1911 was a core memory unlocked.
Along with Skidrow and Paradox crews
The song can be gotten for free / pay what you want at: https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto8...
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 addition, here is the Bright White Lightning discography:
https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/bad-teeth-data024
https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/dirty-nails-data038
Having not seen anything from them since 2014, so I am very happy for another track.
Demos used to have sizes - I can't see one for this, is it just an 'open' category? This thing is far too insane to be size limited, surely?
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.
[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 has a download link
30 megs is like 2005 era size :D , obvious that it's realtime stuff (and music is probably a significant fraction?).
> The Razor1911 zip[1] is 30MB, which actually is very much on the small side for a current-day demo.
> and music is probably a significant fraction?
For the Razor1911.exe in the ZIP which ends up being 31MB on disk, which is almost entirely made out of a compressed 145MB executable, whose size is mostly 48 PNG files (11MB), 69MB of zeros (nice?), 329 compiled DirectX shader blobs (DXBC) totaling 6MB, One large MP3 of about 17MB and finally like 34MB of what seems to be other types of runtime data like asset tables, font and UI data,
Seems about right then, my guess was about a third for music, classic 128kbps mp3's are at about a meg a minute (960kb/m) so this is at a slightly higher bitrate. Not sure how compressible those parts are but between half and a third in the end depending on the final compressor checks out.
from the nfo >Sorry for the not very optimized file size for this party version, we'll make sure to push a PROPER once Revision 2026 is finished
Love the 69MB of zeros.
I bet that neatly compresses during packaging too :)
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.
Edit: better answer below
Idk what Revision actually enforces but that used to be the rule at Assembly.
For the 1k, 4k, retro systems etc it’s specified!
Revision had no maximum filesize in the demo compo.
Demos were limited to 2GiB. Size-coding competitions, like PC Intros, were of course limited to the size of their respective category (256 Byte, 4K, 8K, 64K).
I like that you linked the live show instead of the video of the demo alone, as the crowd noise adds to the experience.
This demo is a salute to everyone in the scene. And it’s emotional. Had to be this version!
Beautiful. Masterfully done. I love all the BBS-era aesthetics and callouts. I hadn't seen FILE_ID.DIZ art in forever.
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!
Copy-pasting is a clever way to do it!
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 keep a list of all current ASCII art (and related + other creative tools) editors out there, if you're interested:
https://hlnet.notion.site/text-art-tools
I recommend Moebius for traditional ASCII and ANSI art.
That's sick. Ty for sharing!
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.
Damn, this made my entire week. Absolute legends.
Release is here: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954
Absolutely amazing.
Nice to be reminded that Revision is still active, on my bucket list to visit at least once in my life.
Wow, and this is their “mid career retrospective”. Wait for the end of caree retrospective…
My first time hearing the name RAZOR1911 was on the cracktro for GTA IV, which had this banger of a music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy4-9PsZHqI
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
incredible work!
such a nice way to remember their fallen teammates at the end there.
First time the shout outs weren’t just respect or cheese. RIP, til Valhalla.
PS: I never knew Westbam (of Love Parade fame?!) was involved.
Different Westbam. The DJ you're thinking of is still alive.
Thank you
Anyone understand why multiple demos have voices singing now.. how do they do it ?
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.
It has been a thing for some time. Even back in the 16-bit days:
- Movement Mina Omistan (1994): https://youtu.be/Ryq8fz_XAhI
- TBL Tint (1996) second part: https://youtu.be/KcSV4qAG-xk?t=459
First one I remembered with a proper song was 303 by Acme : https://demozoo.org/productions/62/
Even on 8-bit systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SdGkkp1aq8
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.
This 64kb intro has speech synthesis to generate the voice of the song.
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9424
More info: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/08-04-2003.shtml
> I suppose part of the demo scene has always been secretive and reverse engineer it if you want to know.
Not really, there's tons of info and source code out there, but fairly scattered and disorganized. It just may not be easy to know how to search for it when coming from outside. But if you can strike a conversation with a demoscener, I never saw anyone wanting to hold back secrets, on the contrary, everyone has always been excited to talk about the magic to another enthusiast like themselves (ourselves).
Literally just singing! It’s an mp3 :)
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
Such a throwback. If you were doing floppies there was the whole sing and dance you’d do with pkzip or arj to split your files across many disks!
Great music.
Bright White Lightning, but didn’t see a track name.
Overall, wow.
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Awesome, I remember some of these from back when, mostly from the 90's and early 2000's I believe.
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!
Excellent demo and good music to go with it. My favorite part was probably the X-Copy sector map transitioning into a 3D cube with a running sprite.
Same! Beautiful nod to this amazing demo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMFBAOjuMWw
The tunnel going from ascii to RT gave me chills and made me teary. It was 40 years of progress in seconds.
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.
Somebody needed to hack the Soviets! CCC were beasts
Isn’t AI affecting the demoscene as it is affecting other programming hobbies? Why?
There have been lots of discussions around AI in the demoscene. Revision limits how you can use AI (https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/general-rules/), even if it's not always enforceable.
There's a lot of push back against AI-generated graphics and music. For code, it's more difficult to know. AI is used by some people to automate the boring tasks, so that they can focus more on the artistic side.
At revision there was a cool seminar about the author of a music synth who used AI to modernize it. He begun his talk with words for the audience along the lines of "Please don't do a Life of Brian, I am not here saying Jehova".
It makes sense that a creative medium with a long tradition of pushing boundaries of what people can create, frowns on use of generative tech unless you have created it yourself. Back in the day the pushback was against using AMOS, or a PC, or programming in C, or using a GPU, or using MP3, or using Photoshop, or using another group's demo engine, or using a commercial game engine, or... AI is just the latest. And like its predecessors, it will gain legitimacy if people create genuinely interesting experiences with it.
Game engines and their useage hit harder
Demos are now often using Unreal engine Unity Godot
not sure I've experienced goosebumps like this before
This is awesome!
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!
Nice!
absolute banger :D
I know. I must have replayed it 20 times already
I think a modern equivalent might be WebGPU. Anybody doing cool stuff that? I'd like to see the code.
Web shaders? Ues check out shadertoy
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Did they state if/how much AI agents they used in creating this demo?
How many inkjet printers did Da Vinci use for the Mona Lisa?
None. That would defeat the entire purpose
Of course they used none.
Tell us you don't understand the demoscene without telling us you don't understand the demoscene.
Aren't you in your 70s? What's with the juvenile parlance?
70s? Where did you pull that out of, your ass?
Direct link with the correct timecode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw4W9V57SKs&t=5716s
Ty. I pinged the mods and they updated it