Demoscene
The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills. Demos and other demoscene productions (graphics, music, videos, games) are shared at festivals known as demoparties, voted on by those who attend and released online.
The scene started with the home computer revolution of the early 1980s, and the subsequent advent of software cracking.[1] Crackers altered the code of computer games to remove copy protection, claiming credit by adding introduction screens of their own ("cracktros"). They soon started competing for the best visual presentation of these additions.[2] Through the making of intros and stand-alone demos, a new community eventually evolved, independent of the gaming[3]: 29–30 and software sharing scenes.
Demos are informally classified into several categories, mainly of size-restricted intros. The most typical competition categories for intros are the 64k intro and the 4K intro, where the size of the executable file is restricted to 65536 and 4096 bytes, respectively. In other competitions the choice of platform is restricted; only 8-bit computers like the Atari 800 or Commodore 64, or the 16-bit Amiga or Atari ST. Such restrictions provide a challenge for coders, musicians, and graphics artists, to make a device do more than was intended in its original design.
64K intro[edit]
A 64K intro is a demo with an executable file size limit of 64 kibibytes, or 65,536 bytes. This is a traditional limit inherited from the maximum size of a COM file. Demos traditionally were limited by RAM size, or later by storage size. By the early 1990s, demo sizes grew, so categories were created for limited sizes that forced developers to not simply stream data from storage.
To reduce the file size, 64K intros often use executable compression and procedural generation, such as sound synthesis, mesh generation, procedural textures, and procedural animation.[22]
[23]
fr-08, a 64k PC demo by Farbrausch released at The Party 2000 in Aars has since been claimed[24] to mark a watershed moment in the popularity of the category. Others include Chaos Theory by Conspiracy (2006), Gaia Machina by Approximate (2012),[25] F — Felix's Workshop by Ctrl-Alt-Test (2012)[26] Fermi paradox by Mercury (2016),[27][28] and Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me by Conspiracy (2016).[28]
Every year, awards in the demoscene celebrate the creativity, technical prowess, and artistic vision of demoscene groups and individuals: