pouët.net

A TMDC wouldn't be complete without the dedicated pouet thread, so here it is!

<4noobs>
What is TMDC?
Online competition about making Text mode demos.
</4noobs>

Entries can be submitted up to the 12th of december.
Full rules on the site: tmdc.scene.org

Invite available soon!

We're also still looking for prize sponsors!

Have fun doing your demos! I can't wait to see your entries!

Any possibility of bumping this up, considering that it's 2012 and it would be infinitely preferable to use music that doesn't sound like an .xm file?

On one side, it's true there isn't much reason for the demos to be so small. On the other hand, how big is your MP3/OGG ? I mean, 5mb is plenty no? ..unless you want to make 15 minutes textmode epic?
On the third hand (the foot?), how big do you need and what's the closest cool number ?

ogg vbr at around 128 kbps reproduces music at amazing quality and doesn't take much disk space

The size limit was due to historical reasons, and even I don't see much point in it these days.. (hell temperature check, anyone?)

OTOH it's not like you need insanely detailed assets for a text mode demo, so 10mb unpacked sounds plenty.

I actually was thinking along the lines of 15 minutes of ambient stuff. YMMV but I don't think that 128kbps VBR OGG is "amazing quality". I'd rate that as "acceptable in dire circumstances".

(depending on the style of music of course)

Is there a good reason to not change the limit? I've been happy with the current one but if bumping up the limit helps getting more good prods into the compo it should be done. TMDC isn't about size coding anyway.

Like stated above, I don't really care about the limit. With the new age of the internetz, there's no real use for it. I do want to keep a limit however ― just to avoid funny people sending 1GB-big demos :)

Let's up it to 32MB, then :)
Gives you over 20 minutes of 192kbps MP3. If someone still needs more just say so :)

you guys ever thought about letting other systems in? get some petscii demos going.

yes we did.
there's two problems though:
1- judging together very different sets of limitations
2- getting each member of the jury to run the demo.

The last issue is the main one. Even with current limitations, sometimes a prod doesn't run on one's machine (some Dos[Box] prods, for example). I can't ask every member of the jury to have, say , one Mac, one Linux and one Pet :)

4mat: would love to see some petscii demos!
Barzoule: Maybe to get the same limitation, would it be hard to have for a next TMDC, some predefined charset&palette like the PC/VGA and C64?

Why limit the palette and 'resolution' but not the file size. It all seems very arbitrary to me.

trc_wm: they do have some file size. Although this year is up to 32MB. Hum... sounds like someone will encode a movie in text mode.

It's a text-mode demo party.. without limit of the palette, resolution and charset... you will end up with no-text-mode demos!?

I am not a big fan of the EGA 16-colors and PC charset... I feel that the C64 BBS were having better gfx than the PC BBS... maybe because of the petscii which has many gfx chars.. or maybe because I could see colors which are closer to real-life object (not a pure rgb...).

The file size limit was completely removed from the democompo at Revision and now all demos were just 2GB video players.. No wait, they weren't.

How can you make videos of Win32 textmode demos?

Tonic: there's a bunch of apps that can do a grab of the desktop, I suppose you could use that with a windowed demo. For fullscreen, however, you'd be better with a camera and your LCD.

Anni did a bunch of text mode captures, that's probably the best person to ask this to.

BarZoule: well, win7 doesn't even have full screen text mode anymore.. :)

Prize update!

Some awesome money has recently fallen from the sky. So what should we do with that? Give it away indeed! So this year we should have:
1st: 50 euros
2nd: 35 euros
3rd: 15 euros.

In addition to that we will have the famous diplomas, some ND stickers and maybe other random stuff.

Now be motivated and go back to your demos! :D

One week to go!
I hope you all got at least a little something started :)

sol_hsa: well. no actually. tweaking would let it be fullscreen. tmdc has restrictions on the consolebuffer dimensions anyway.

rudi: tweaking would let you put enough chars to fill the screen, but it's still not the same as an actual fullscreen console, it's not "DOS-like" :)

and in other news:
-a potential fullscreen solution has been talked of here

And more importantly, we've got some 5 entries for TMDC! 1 more than last year :)

Judging will probably take a while, like every year, and results and all will be up at the beginning of next year, if we're still there =)

Meh, I failed to make the deadline... :(

I failed this time around :/ Just too much other stuff going on... but next year...