demoscene - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki
DEMOSCENE
- n. demoscene /dem'oh-seen/ [also 'demo scene'] A culture of multimedia hackers located primarily in Scandinavia and northern Europe. Demoscene folklore recounts that when old- time warez d00dz cracked some piece of software they often added an advertisement of in the beginning, usually containing colorful display hacks with greetings to other cracking groups. The demoscene was born among people who decided building these display hacks is more interesting than hacking and began to build self-contained display hacks of considerable elaboration and beauty (within the culture such a hack is called a demo). The split seems to have happened at the end of the 1980s. As more of these demogroups emerged, they started to have compos at copying parties (see copyparty), which later evolved to standalone events (see demoparty). The demoscene has retained some traits from the warez d00dz, including their style of handles and group names and some of their jargon.
Traditionally demos were written in assembly language, with lots of smart tricks, self-modifying code, undocumented op-codes and the like. Some time around 1995, people started coding demos in C, and a couple of years after that, they also started using Java.
Ten years on (in 1998-1999), the demoscene is changing as its original platforms (C64, Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, IBM PC under DOS) die out and activity shifts towards Windows, Linux, and the Internet. While deeply underground in the past, demoscene is trying to get into the mainstream as accepted art form, and one symptom of this is the commercialization of bigger demoparties. Older demosceneers frown at this, but the majority think it's a good direction. Many demosceneers end up working in the computer game industry. Demoscene resource pages are available at http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/ and http://www.scene.org/. (Source: The Jargon File Dictionary aka The Hacker's Dictionary)
The "demoscene" distinguished itself as an emergent online subculture descended from home microcomputer artists who beautified the dovetailed exploits of [crack]ers (who defeated copy protection measures), [phreak]s (who enabled long-distance calling without cost to the caller) and "[warez] d00dz" (self-described [courier]s of recently-released software) who worked together in crews to liberate and distribute commercial software, and whose teams competed among each other to be the quickest and most respected in their illicit field. Cracked software would be distributed online bundled with brief multimedia displays of music and computer graphics touting the achievements and "eliteness" of their crews, often dwarfing the somewhat underwhelming cracked software in the impression it left on users. Due to the undesired yet unavoidable costs of metred phone access throughout Europe, a parallel warez culture emerged there piggybacking on the postal service (among other exploits) and based around "[copyparties]" (bring what you have to share and plenty of blank media!), which yielded a strong social aspect to the culture and led in time to the continent's strong [demoparty] tradition, weaker in other parts of the world.
The origin of the demoscene had taken place during the heyday of the Apple II and especially the [Commodore 64] home computers, and many of its bright lights -- people who had learned how to best milk high performance out of gutless hardware -- went on to develop games for underpowered 16-bit video game consoles and software for limited Nokia phones.