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I think the demoscene is what it is: a treasure, a heritage.

I was/still a part of it, but essentially, every demo evolved into a video during the 90th.

A shift came with the more powerful machines, especially on PC.

C64, Amiga 500 - technical prowess was necessary for certain optical illusions; the video illusion stems from hacks. This reversed.

I think that this is ok. Device hacking is now the new old low-code hacking.

Today's demoscene is also totally meta. From fighting emulators to accepting to utilizing was quite a ride.

The massively impressive demos of today on C64 or Amiga are a testament to the heritage they capitalize on. Here and there, a minor tweak or final secret was finally totally understood; differences between serial numbers of C64 were a thing, too - and that's it.

I am impressed by what has been done and achieved in the early days by machine code on C64 during the 80th.

Massive influence was also time. The Scandinavians find a cool thing to do during the winter months and hack for days and nights - hardly anyone would do this today.

There was no harddisk, code revisioning. Compiling took time, and saving the stuff on disk was a tedious procedure during debugging. Printed Assembler code etc.

Today, you can dump the most elaborate code and data on emulators within seconds, all well compiled and checked - it is a wonder. IDEs, etc., are standard.

Even back then, some elite coders used cross-development platforms, such as Amiga and C64, to deal with the burden of memory and slow compile times on C64.

But the thing is that you had to develop the tools yourself. An advantage of this scale was earned.

Anyway, it was a fantastic time. Copy parties, puberty, trash talk - and, to be honest, a lot of doxxing and mobbing in retrospect.

I am glad I was part of the scene from 1987 to 1994 and attended Venlo and other infamous Copy parties.

Greetings from Beastie Boys/C64

> everything is locked down in the name of safety, and people loosing out on the ability of just having fun by modifying devices we already own.

Do you have any specific examples? I’m not convinced this problem exists for demoscene.

For other kinds of hacking, maybe yes, but demoscene was always about pushing graphics and sound limits of the device, and that is absolutely still possible and not being traded for security. If anything, the actual problem to lament is that GPUs are so damn good that no crazy hacking is required anymore, at least not to work around the hardware, though just using the hardware as designed these days can sometimes be categorized as crazy hacking. The hardware now does far more than everything we wished it could do thirty or forty years ago. We got what we wanted in the first place: programmable graphics hardware. Nonetheless, people are still pushing GPUs to do things it wasn’t quite designed for.

I’m not sure anyone’s fun is being hampered, demoscene graphics hacking is alive and well:

https://demozoo.org/parties/4813/

https://www.shadertoy.com/playlist/featured

> It's sad to think that the computing devices our newer generations are growing up with are trying their best to shoot down this exact use case; making the device do things no one made it do before.

Buy a Steam Deck.

I think the term "Use case" has done a fair bit of the shooting itself.

So many times I have seen people hold things up with "What's the use case" always transforming the problem at hand into convincing a person who doesn't comprehend that other people's experiences are also valid.

> Instead, everything is locked down...

There's an argument that that just raises the bar.

Computers are mostly appliances, like dishwashers, now.

I think it's fine that some things just disappear with the sands of time. Not everything needs to be preserved.

> There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.

Sure but I don't see how being on a UN list helps fix that. Seems to me like efforts from people behind eg scene.org, archive.org (hat tip to jscott) etc are substantially more valuable to preservation efforts than convincing some folk dance geeks who work at the UN that rotating nipple balls are also cool (which of course they are)

EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean to dismiss the effort. The entire point of the demoscene is "because we can!", so obviously this also holds for getting our hobby listed by the UN.

> fund and prop up/support said practice

I wonder how this would look in practice in the case of the demoscene.

I feel like there was a moment in the earöy 2010s-ish when there was an interest in the demoscene as one aspect of "digital art", along with games, animation etc. Seems to have faded a bit, maybe because the focus of the demoscene shifted towards size limits where the aesthetic accomplishments can be less immidiately obvious to the uninitiated.

And Impulse tracker is from South Australia! Jeff Lim is totally one of my local heroes!

Soundtracker was German

Noisetracker was Swedish

Protracker was Norwegian

MED/OctaMED was Finnish

1987: https://cpcrulez.fr/applications_graphic-NWC-demomaker.htm

I was going to mention Scream Tracker, but the Swedish language link names Fasttracker (apparently Swedish made, while Scream Tracker is by the Future Crew who hail from Finland).

There's been specialized tools in use since the very beginning though. I'd count assemblers and such among them. :)

They haven't yet had their sudden change of heart on the subject.

It's haram now.

Fabrice Belliard, among other things, implements neural networks for fun and compression.

I don’t think though he ever struggled to fit 32k or to do art, so dunno how this relates.

hah, I sure do know where and when many of the legendary productions got released. besides - we (demogroup ancient pain) released two in 1996 and 1997. when were yours released to down-vote my actually very informed comment, for real?

the fx scene in 2025 is full throttle with a short-form single-effect pieces being released daily, and some of them are actually quite good. some people also release the code to them unlike what demoscene guys did back in the day, as it all was closed culture, albeit free.

my comment was really - if kids are incentivized to do genart for money, or to just share pieces of short-attention spam material, why do it for the classic fun of it of the demoscene?