pouët.net

Did I understand it correctly: for now you have a list of download links for the demos, but you are still working to include the configurations needed to run the individual demos? If you add all the configurations, this will be a great, very useful thing.

Adok: That's probably the end goal, I might turn it into a community effort somehow. For now I'm working on repository completeness (at a guess I'm missing around 20% of productions, and a lot of those may be gone forever due to link rot).

Maybe in time I'll develop a tool that downloads and catalogs demoscene productions in such a way that it's very little effort to watch the latest demos, and if that isn't possible it can fall back to good quality captures (maybe I should have a fireside chat with Mr. Annikras!).

I'm not a very good coder though, although I guess it can't be that hard to parse an xml document, download the odd file and populate a listview control, can it? (Famous last words!).

I just checked, out of 2529 DOS and DOS/GUS demos, I've got 733 left to sort out.

ruari: you should dump the list of demos with dead links somewhere public, i'm sure folks will help you fins alternatives to the dead links, and even upgrade pouet db while at it.

I feel A list of missing dead links would be very helpful. I've done a lot of crack-tro hunting in the past for my website. Often alternatives could be found easy enough by typing the file name within quotes into Google. There are a lot of long forgotten, abandoned websites out there hosting all kinds of files.

Here are some tips and profiles I've used with D-Fend and DOSBox for capturing intros and cracktros.

Make sure you select Hardware > Graphics > Render and change it from surface to either ddraw or opengl. This improves the DOSBox performance with both graphics and audio.

DOSBox DOS (GUS only, full speed) Profile
Hardware > CPU
CPU Type = auto
Emulation core = auto
CPU Cycles = max
Hardware > Sound
Activate Disney Sound Source = unchecked
Hardware > Sound > SoundBlaster
Type = none
Hardware > Sound > GUS
Activate GUS = checked

DOSBox DOS (SoundBlaster only, full speed) Profile
Hardware > CPU
CPU Type = auto
Emulation core = auto
CPU Cycles = max
Hardware > Sound
Activate Disney Sound Source = unchecked
Hardware > Sound > SoundBlaster
Type = SB16
Address = 220
Interrupt = 5
DMA = 1
Hardware > Sound > GUS
Activate GUS = unchecked

DOSBox DOS (SoundBlaster legacy, full speed) Profile
Hardware > CPU
CPU Type = auto
Emulation core = auto
CPU Cycles = max
Hardware > Sound
Activate Disney Sound Source = unchecked
Hardware > Sound > SoundBlaster
Type = sbpro1
Address = 220
Interrupt = 7
DMA = 1
Hardware > Sound > GUS
Activate GUS = unchecked

I sometimes found that if you have both SB and GUS enabled together some intro and cracktro audio auto-detection sequences would not play any audio or at worse would crash either themselves or DOSBox.

Linking the proper XML file/entry on the product page would be sweet to be able to run the Demo directly and to fixitbeautiful...

You should take a look at http://pferrie.host22.com/misc/dosbox.htm too. Lots of fixes for demos not running in DOSBox.

@ruairi your site is no longer up?

@BiasZ Um, yeah! I might fish it out of the backups and put it back online. To be honest, it's going to be a lot easier with Gargaj kindly making the site data open and Demozoo doing the same.

Also - the data is offline at the moment but I'm also working on a demoscene package manager type thing:
https://github.com/rc55/demoscene

It is broken of course, but I'd eventually like it so anyone who wanted to could just type
demo-get install assembly-2019
...and it would pull down all the prods ready to run.

The linked page was my first experiments using a basic package manager called scoop, although I took the file mirror down a while back.

ah no worries, had it in my head that you had made something different and just wanted a look, reading the whole thread for once, i see whats up!
Nice work!