Assembly 2001 Demo Party

[Moonbender]

Recently, the Assembly '01 party took place. Since then, you can download the releases of the various groups using the scene.org FTP. I can really recommend getting the list of the winning releases (result.txt) and downloading them, there are some fantastic demos and 64k intros available.

If you need further convincement, try getting last years Mekka/Symposium's winner in the category 64k intro, Heaven 7 by Exceed. It's a 135k download, but you'll be surprised how much those guys cram into a 64k executable, I know I am everytime I watch it.

I don't know if anyone here - besides me - is into watching this stuff, but if you like eye-candy, you should try it. In case you like it, there's lots of it: the releases of mekkasymposium01 and takover01 (both available on the ftp) are at least as good. Heck, just mirror the whole FTP!

 

[Moonbender]

To prevent confusion, here's the definition of 'demoparty' and 'demoscene' taken out of the current Jargon File:

demoparty n.
[demoscene] Aboveground descendant of the copyparty, with emphasis shifted away from software piracy and towards compos. Smaller demoparties, for 100 persons or less, are held quite often, sometimes even once a month, and usually last for one to two days. On the other end of the scale, huge demo parties are held once a year (and four of these have grown very large and occur annually - Assembly in Finland, The Party in Denmark, The Gathering in Norway, and NAID somewhere in north America). These parties usually last for three to five days, have room for 3000-5000 people, and have a party network with connection to the internet.

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 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 - or anyway safer. Around 1990 there began to be very serious police pressure on cracking groups, including raids with SWAT teams crashing into bedrooms to confiscate computers. Whether in response to this or for esthetic reasons, crackers of that period began to build self-contained display hacks of considerable elaboration and beauty (within the culture such a hack is called a demo). 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 demosceners frown at this, but the majority think it's a good direction. Many demosceners 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/.