pouët.net

while learning asm I got a cd full with sourcecodes from the scene. that day changed my life =)
unlike most other people I didn't watch demos before I was actually already a member of the scene.

What a dumb-ass answer. "That time if you had a computer", most people were playing games like mindless cattle and were generally a bit distractd by cracktros, if ever.

Comedy, thy name is not Tomcat ;)

lol.

Actually, this is a subject that definitelly deserves big sized texts, not just from me. Your replies are for the toilet in comparison to what I have to show you here, so let the Optimus writting lesson begin =)

I got an Amstrad CPC6128 when I was 8 years old. The first time in my life I had ever read about demos was in a greek computer magazine (USER) featuring CPC demo reviews. It was around 1992 (I was 12 years old then), written by Rex of BENG! and Dirty Minds. The article column was called "8bits never die". There were demos like Face Hugger's Ultimate Megademo, The Demo or other less known in there. I had also watched some cracktros in pirated CPC games. But anyways, these facts never got me into the scene back then, even if Rex's extatic words about what the demos did in comparison to the games, hooked me and made me wishing to get them in my hands and watch them. But I was so small then, communication chances were preety impossible, the geek friends were really few (I had one who had an Amiga but never told me about the demos. Now I have communicated with him again, found out that he never had any idea about demos anyways, which is strange. (Every person I know today who once had an Amiga is aware of demos))

Then,.. a really big gap in my history. It was April of 1998 and I was reading for the exams needed to pass in the university, for a second year. When my parents were leaving from home, I was opening my computer and trying various things. Mainly playing games or checking CD-Roms. There was a greek magazine (Multimedia & CD-Rom), the first ever offering a CD-Rom. Two of it's issues had demos like Cronologia and Second Reality. When I looked inside that folder I was extatic! The reason had to do with another letter I once read in the PC Master magazine. Someone, while complaining about the big hardware requirements of software (as always ;P) and dreaming of the old legendary DOS days, said something like "...and legendary demos like Second Reality of Future Crew at Assembly Parties 9x that made all the people to dazzle, and the old 386's and 486's to make things on the screen that neither Microsoft nor any other company will ever succeed, even in a 786!!!". I instantly wondered what the hell is that thing he mentioned and why haven't I heard anything about it before, if it was so fuckin greater than common software?!

That's why my mind flashed months later, when I found Second Reality mentioned in that list. Now it was the ultimate moment! I would witness the unknown miracles that this software was supposed to be doing to my lame 486! I was dissapointed because my 486 (I think it was a Cyrix) was crashing instantly during the demo, but I was still curious because even the few I had seen ruled! (I think I made it till the chessboard/bouncing diamond part) So I left it and ran Cronologia instead. Wow! The vectorpart main music remained to my mind 4ever! Later, I found out the Second 1,2,3,4,5 switches and succeeded watching every effect. I was still blaming my lame PC though for not letting me watch this demo in it's whole from the beginning till the end. All the other demos were oldschool scrollers from 1991-1992 and I am really wondering now why this magazine CD (released in September of 95) didn't contained beauties like Verses or Stars? Imagine a poor freak, having no internet, discovering 1991-1993 demos in a CD released at 1995, while browsing it at 1998 in a 486, like it was a hidden treasure. Sounds preety amazing to me, I wish I could live that moment once again. And I can't really remember the feelings of discovering the community all alone, in my lonely room, reading info files out of curiosity.

It was a strange moment and I remember when I had passed in the university and got an internet connection for the first time. Winter of 1998, interent was an amazing beeing, because it knew everyting in the world and gave it to me when I was asking through the search engines. I thought then, that internet would even know the so unknown demoscene too! I was really wondering if there are still demos today and how they will look. Even wished to find the very old CPC demos through some further searching. And yes! Internet was the ultimate thing, because it knew even the demos unlike anybody in my neighbourhood ;)

I found websites like the Hornet Archive (at the time it was announcing it's closing, ugh.. I then felt weird thinking that the universe was closing exactly at the moment I discovered it!), Orange Juice and scene.org. I remember randomly downloading demos from ftp.scene.org (or ftp.hornet.org?), mainly the 1st positions from Assembly parties 9x as that guy in that letter said (Verses and Stars, yeah! Surprisingly each of these two were fitting in a 3,5" HD disk, so I could copy them and watch them at home). My brain was also hooked by a directory saying 4kb. My 1st thoughts was, "What do they mean?" but I got obsessed with my imagination that they might mean "demos fitting in 4kb" because everything having to do with pushing hardware, doing miracles or totally insane things in computers, the main feature of demos for some strange reasons always hooked my interest even a lot before I knew the demoscene.

I was really obsessed with such things, perhaps I don't know why. At the earlier times, a crazy author in the PC Master magazine was writting things like "The companies are putting high requirements, I want to see my PC dancing xasaposerviko, not crawling like hell because Bill Gates hired his brother-in-law as a programmer in M$" and me and other readers were obsessed by these texts. Perhaps either these things got into my personality, or the idea of exceeding hardware by writting perfect software was really an obsession of mine even before I knew anything about demoscene or even programming! (oh, I am really a perfectionist as a self) I don't know why I had this idea, but when I found the similar ideology inside the demomaking, it was another thing to keep me inside. Today I am wondering about some things, as why I loved demos at first sight while others despise them. I guess everyone has his/her own reasons for getting into computers and dis/liking things like demos. Other people are bored when I am showing them demos and wonder which are the keys :) I remember myself a lot before learning all these, beeing hooked in a computer screen of a greek computer exhibition (infosystem) for hours, showing FLI animations one after the other randomly. Others didn't cared. They prefered to play some games or get informations on some deadly serious programm. I was getting emotions from moving graphics. Actually, my passion for animated graphics, perfectionism and perhaps my personality who wanted to be a part of something and succeed becoming known were 3 of the things that kept me in the scene..

Oh,. where was I? Yeah,. later. I also remember finding a friend in the university exactly the time I first got into the net and learned the scene. He was AkumaX but never became active into the scene, he just knew demos from the older times because of having a friend in Sweden who copied them for him. Then, I only had a 486 and hadn't run newschool demo and so he showed me some Pentium and the first accelerated demos. Of course they were far above what I had seen alone. Also, at the same winter, I was searching for a quickbasic compiler because it was a dream for me back then that I would be able to make a programm running as an EXE :) I stumbled into a website of the quickbasic scene and hooked once again by some other crazy claimings of unbeleivable stuff,. unbeleivable because I didn't knew that people were coding raycasters, 3d engines and 2d effects under quickbasic! =)

That's how I met the quickbasic scene? But the CPC one? It's funny. Since I surprisingly found out that people are still coding unbeleivable stuff for C64, I wondered if the same is happening with my beloved childhood computer. I wrote in a CPC mailinglist and asked if there existed a CPC scene and got a personal reply from Antitec/Dirty Minds. He said something like "CPC scene exists and there is even on in Greece! You won't beleive it!!! Have you seen my latest demo Bombastic98??? The scene is living!!!!!!!!", almost something like that anyways. And the greatest thing is that he was living in the same city as me, Thessaloniki. We met and he showed me everything concerning the scene and he told me he would fix a 3,5" drive for my CPC and then asked me to do some graphics for him. I did my first graphics for Ovation5 and he liked them very much :) I was a member of Dirty Minds and the first scene release I participated ever was Ovation5 diskmag. Btw,. just a bit later and I released the Poor Freak :)

Then I met the dead greek scene and it started reviving. The feelings of my starting are unregretable and I wish I could live them again. But this text has gone far beyond than the main question, I am not talking about how I came in the scene but about my demobio, whatever. But sorry, they were teasing me about my big texts ;)

So, I guess I have to stop right here now :P

Dumb-ass answer, yeah. Not everybody was addicted to games, just games and only games. When I got my first PC, demos came along with games. And I think I was not alone. Having demos on a computer was just as natural as having games. Nobody asked where you got them, or what are these. It was just part of it.

Jesus on Es, Grapevine and The Word! Jesus on Cheese was another cool demo.

I upploaded jesus on cheese for you all to see!

Tomcat, your "everybody" is completly off the mark. At least in the part of europe I was living in. People I knew who had 386s and 486s, who were playing castle of wolfenstein or ultima underworld.. I had never seen a demo on their harddrive. No cracktros either since the warez was local handmade stuff, stuff like copying the disks and photocopying the manuals. Maybe it would have been different had they had amigas or ataris previously?

Holy fuck, Optimus! Your post is encyclopaedic in size!!!

I only wish my dick was as half as big as your posts...

:))) optimus showed us what size "optimus class" really is!! :)))
No way i'm gonna read it though... somebody would summarize it in max 50 words?

Tomcat i don't share your enthuasism in the good ole days... On Plus/4 this was -mostly- the case ('because of the lack of original software support, and converted games got intros from their creators) but not even there was everyone part of the scene. At least not since '90 or so... I've met a lot of computer owners never ever heard of anything like demos - or thinking: "yeah, that useless piece of crap?"

Few people around here were ever aware of demos too. I saw one or two that my friend's dad had (he was a major pirate, trading 1000's of disks directly with major warez groups on amiga :) He was receiving lots of stuff directly from sweden I think, even he had only a couple of demos.

Later, there were some swapping parties, and a few people there had some demos to swap, and even later there were some people selling pd disks with some demos at the computer markets. Sometimes the magazines had demo reviews, or if you were lucky one on the cover disk :) But mainly I had to order demos from PD distributors, as nobody really knew much about them.

So I think tomcat must have been living in the scene capital of europe perhaps :)

Oh yes, and congratulations to optimus, you just set a new record for post length I think (discounting bullshit source dumps of course)

In 1998 I think it was Megamies/Gluterol who showed me some demos like Gateways by Trauma from Assembly'98 + some pwp's and moottori's 64k textmode intros. In 1999 I visited Assembly for the first time, but only after Assembly'00 I got really-really interested in the scene.

So yeah, I'm quite new to the scene :)

"You" doesn't equal "Everyone", Tomcat. :)

Well, everybody *around me* was doing this scene thing likewise. I don't remember knowing anyone who was just owning a computer - any kind of computer - without knowing what are demos. There were of course many who were not interested in them. But they knew what are they, and knew what is the demoscene.

I ofcourse saw some c64-cracktros in the 80's and kinda liked them. But my mind was blown away when a friend of mine showed RSI and Rebels megademos on his A500 in 89-90. I myself owned a lame PC at the time and was really amazed by the great graphics and musicsyncs. :) I ofcourse instantly started to make "demos" (that mainly consisted of a logo and beeper-music) in gw-basic. Later in 92-93 when I started phoning BBS's and had access to a VGA-machine I really started to consume demos. And in '94 c-64 entered my life :)

Let's see... for me, it was coming across Karl Hornell's Urbanoids game on a Java games site in like, 2000. It's a great game.
I downloaded it and then while poking around in the folder I found the mod and sid music files (they were "Thing on a Spring/Hubbard", btw)... lo and behold, Winamp could play the mod file! I thought the mod file was cool, so I went to Modarchive, found more mods, got a better player called Modplug, and while poking around on the modplug site I found a link to Oliver Lacqpiques's (sorry) site.
He had .exe versions of Stash and Jizz online (ixa included in the exe). I downloaded them thinking, ooh cool, a movie. I was amazed.
I found hornet, and after watching a bunch of demos (including .the .product) I noticed that pouet.net kept being mentioned. So here I am.
Oh yeah, and thanks to Modarchive's featuring of two C64 remixes they also introduced me to sid music.

crackintros on c64 and lyra ii by ESI on speccy

I ROCK! I READ ALL OF OPTIMUS'S POST!

mr. eggbird scares me

mazochist don't rock

bought some random computer magazine, found some article about demos...interesting. managed to get a hold of a couple, got hooked.

Well, people were expecting me and I decided to write something big for fun. But the summary of this is: Even if I once read about some CPC demo reviews in a greek computer magazine released around 1992 (Rex of BENG! and Dirty Minds was writting that!), I never had the chance to find out, I was so small and communication with the very few scene fans in Greece never happened then. Much later, after reading a letter of some enthousiastic DOS freak praising Second Reality and other demos, I was wishing to get that thing in my hands even if I wasn't aware of what he was talking about. I accidentally found it among with other 91-93 PC demos in another CD of a commercial magazine and watched them in my old 486 around 1998. Later I joined the university and so the internet and found out everything about demos since I was in love with them! And then I found some good friends around Thessaloniki who shared the same passion..

I can be brief if I want,.. btw: Tomcat, if Hungary is a country where demos are kept in everyone's HD then I would like to live in there :) Seriously, I am amazed by what you say, because not only in Greece but also in north European countries as far as I have heard, demos is an underground thing, known only by few people. Strange but sounds really cool if they were a common thing in your place as you say.

i see what you ask i do not know what others say about this. i join in scene last year only for fun. i come to england and meet men with PC they show me heven7.

I go wowya! itis demo? men says yes we show more on internet! i watch and wish for to be also scener.

when i was 11 i was on a local copyparty called "hackerence" in Hörnösand. and with my luck i was placed beside Lizardking´s seat.
at that time he wasnt so wellknown. the first thing i did was to make a fool out of myself :-) i asked if i could copy his protracker ( i miss d-copy) and he asked: "why, you have the same version?" and i said "no, my version got blue colors, you have gold colors" hehehe :-)

However, the year after we started on a musicdisk called "dasmih" witch in swedish is a short of " the worst musicdisk ever " :-) containing some good old songs like: julirma, ladi-di-ladi-da etc. I think that was my introduction to the scene. Other people who had have a big influence on me is waveraider^Orbital , stryperTBL and Madcap^dual access

Live long and prosper!