At one and a half hours I thought there was no way I would watch it all.. I did it. The pc demo was great and it's amazing how new ideas just keep coming.
This brought back a few memories. Remember discovering random demos in the past. Wasn't expecting to watch the entire video without skipping, but glad i did!
Extremely enjoyable! thanks for posting this up. Brings back a lot of memories from the 90s, I remember watching a lot of demos and playing a lot of mod files. Lot of messing around in Turbo Pascal to try and replicate some of the effects, and remember swapping a lot of code on fidonet and BBSes.
Splendid auto-bio presentation, Ian. And a teary eye view back over a decade now (ooold) when we first crossed paths at said Revision, competed against each other in the Amiga 64k compo, had lots of cheers together and even spun the good old "Ardcore on one of those late nights, even though I couldn't manage the half-a-second delay of the PA and basically (almost literally) threw records at you to make 'em sweat. Since Revision WILL be a real thing this year again, I hope to finally crack a beer again with you! Cheers mate p.s. they changed the rules for the Tracked Music compo because of you hooligans. No more "demo fx on patterns" ;D
It's funny when he started talking about group rivalry the first thing that popped up in my mind was that Paradox anti-Angels intro with the red devil doing, ahem... things to an angel. From behind.
I really enjoyed this. Its amazing to see the demo heroes you grew up with talk about their amazing achievements. Whyh do I love computers? Because people like Hoffman take the limitations they are presented with and push that envelope to the maximum. Really good stuff Neil. More of this.
I had the same curiosity if I could make a demo, being a musician aswell, so I made a Javascript demo (using p5.js). But since I'm an Amigascener by heart I now found it very intriguing to make something with the Rose Engine :D .. got to finish my album first though. (for real xD)
I had no idea who he was until he mentioned the name he used. Then I went "Oh its *HIM*!" in my head and knew exactly who he was. Then again this is pretty typical when your experience of the demoscene is from looking in from the outside. Most of the guys who I'm familiar with a real name and face are the Finnish demoscene guys that went on to do things like found Remedy, Bugbear and Frozenbyte (on account of being from Finland).
I have a similar story to the “do not use VHS as a backup” one, but minus the VHS part! My Amiga 1200 was in storage for years along with the disks. One day I became all nostalgic and set it up. I had a small internal hard drive at this point so had some stuff, but the majority of my coding, mod music and graphics were all on disks. I tried loading some stuff from one disk, didn’t read properly. Tried another, same issue. And another and another and another … Eventually I decided all the disks must be so old that they’d demagnetized or were just damaged. So I took every disk and threw them away, heart-breaking. It was only about a year later I discovered it was probably only the disk drive that was faulty. I was gutted.
Great talk, like a lot of us of a certain age, we really liked the demo scene. I ran along similar lines for the first part of the talk, ZX81, Spectrum 48K, Spectrum 128K but then went Atari ST but I also bought an Amiga. Moving house in 1993 killed things for me and I didn't really carry on.
i stayed at Akiras place in london for two nights along with c-trix..... awesome awesome time. I think this must have been about two years before pt-1210 came out.
Fantastic, very nostalgic, similar experience zx81->16k speccy->amiga tinkled with a sampler on the amiga in my bedroom loved it and all the demos from the scene
Interestingly there was a Hungarian documentary released a few months ago about the local scene back in the day ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YUqn1OPxtmE.html and there was a previous episode of the same series specifically about the demoscene ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-iRkZcTg1JWU.html
Ah yes, the good ol' days of "re-using" stamps. Swapping was expensive when your only income as a 14 year old was a paper route, so we'd cover the stamp with a bit of clear tape and a layer of glue to make it easier to wash off the stamp marks. One could usually re-use a stamp 4-5 times. A couple of times a postal worker would write a nasty message on the package on how this was illegal, as if we gave a damn, so over the years the volume of these hacks had started to gather the attention of some postal workers. I can't quite understand why they would care though; in those days the postal service was state run and if some kids managed to send a package for free, what harn did it really do... In the end, those kids grew up and made the internet what it is today, making the postal service largely obsolete, so I guess we got the last laugh.
