I vividly remember FastTracker II, and how intuitive and tactile it felt to get things done in it, despite the minimal user interface real estate. As an example, there were no sound effects. So, I routinely manually created echo effects by copying the sounds from one channel to another one of the available channels, offsetting the notes by a few ticks and lowering the volume. It was simpler times.
tiborsaas 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe I should pick it up again, limited tools are great :) That's why I also love my small Volca collection.
userbinator 8 hours ago [-]
I first thought "Elite Sinus Producer" and "The Sinus Creator" were trackers specifically designed for creating nasal-sounding music; but of course the explanation for why the term "sinus" came to be used instead of "sine" is likely because many demosceners were from a native European background, and their language retained the Latin origin word instead of deprecating its usage in favour of "sine", as happened in English.
vidarh 7 hours ago [-]
Can confirm it's sinus in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French.
TeMPOraL 6 hours ago [-]
Also in Polish.
windenntw 4 hours ago [-]
Can confirm all sceners call it sinus in Spain :)
5 hours ago [-]
profi2000 7 hours ago [-]
German
p2detar 6 hours ago [-]
I swear music trackers had the most impressive UI back then. FastTracker and ImpulseTracker were to me the highest piece of art and engineering at the time. They kind of hold up even to this day. Especially ImpulseTracker's instruments and sample editor.
Schlagbohrer 54 minutes ago [-]
I can verify that modern AI's, even the frontier ones, are absolute crap at producing ASCII art or ANSI art. It's really unfortunate. We need models to be better trained on digital fine art (digital graffiti).
First thing I did at one aerospace company I worked at was get root on the nearby office printer, which served its own webpage, and digitally deface it a bit with some fun ASCII graffiti.
justafewwords 7 minutes ago [-]
Does your Coffee-automat also grind "Smoke on the Water"-Melody before brewing a fresh cup, at office, while working ? You remember the (C=1541) Floppy-Disk-Sounds, or ...and does the Automat-lights cite someone 'in Morse' ? Enjoy your holidays... (-;
Editet: (Typo)
momocowcow 6 hours ago [-]
Doesn't mention ScreamTracker. A good example of demo group dogfooding. Unique text based UI too. As far as I can remember this was the first dos tracker.
pastage 52 minutes ago [-]
> [a ripper written to look for sources] in memory after the computer had crashed
I used this to reboot my machine faster, keep info in RAM and just continue were you left off after reboot. I think there even were ram drives that could persist crashes/reboots, someone did really fast reboots with it.
krige 8 hours ago [-]
A nice, somewhat nostalgic read. I had X-Copy and D-Copy both, although I'm more familiar with the later X-Copy editions that were quite purple [0] [1]. It was also my first contact with the concept of disk defrag.
Never been into building tracks, always the coder (assembler on 6502 and MC68000). Somebody should do a similar article about all the demo build tools like kkrieger, or modern ones like Tixl. Anyway…good old times :)
b3lvedere 3 hours ago [-]
I loved .kkrieger. The best first person shooter 96kb ever produced! :) [1]
.werkkzeug1 was also my first though while scrolling through the article
amiga386 4 hours ago [-]
> When a copy was finished (which could take some time), the program helpfully played a little "boing" sound.
And how that "boing" sound worked is interesting in itself. It's one of the few uses of Paula's "attached" mode, where the output of one sound channel is used to modulate the volume or pitch of another.
ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts were as complicated as vim.
wartywhoa23 6 hours ago [-]
For me, Fasttracker II still remains the most nostalgic, intuitive, immersive DAW ever made. Aslo, one of the best thought-out pieces of software in general.
I wrote so many tracks on it, some of which played on local FM radio and in clubs. Fondest memories circa 1996-2001.
Only many years later, Ableton managed to create another DAW that got close to FT in spirit, which is don't impede the creative flow. A DAW written by actual musicians for musicians (hail Robert Henke aka Monolake!).
And recently, Bitwig pulled another stunt and married Ableton Live's simplicity with feature richness more typical of a heavyweight DAW league, without all the inherent clutter.
P.S. This seemingly turned into some kind of advertisement, but it's just gratitude from a devoted user :)
mhd 5 hours ago [-]
There's also Renoise, which tries to marry the contemporary DAW with a tracker-style timeline.
Fasttracker was coded by demoscene people though, namely members of the group Triton (later Starbreeze Studios). It has a couple of demoeffects in its about screen, and even a version of Nibbles (qbasic snake game) you can play.
And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...
weinzierl 9 hours ago [-]
Oh, the memories!
My favourite one was on a C64 disk mag called "Input". It looked roughly like this:
menu entry 1
<-> * menu entry 2
menu entry 3
-----------------------------
with
<-> a little space ship
* a projectile
----- the ground
You had to move the spaceship up and down and then fire at the menu entries to select them.
Since the menu entries had gaps between them you could miss. You likely missed by accident even, because control on home-computers was not what we are used to today.
When you missed the projectile was reflected from the opposite wall and if you didn't dodge, it hit your own ship.
The little ship crashed to the ground and a tiny, just a couple of pixels, figure appeared complaining and dragging his broken ship off the screen.
apples_oranges 6 hours ago [-]
This reminds me why I studied CS. I planned to do something else but one day in school we got the assignment to write a computer program and I wrote an ascii scroller game instead and I realized how fun that is and changed my plans to become a programmer.
sph 5 hours ago [-]
I miss the colorful interfaces of DOS, before standardisation and "human interface guidelines" were even a thing.
As a kid, running an .exe from the floppy discs my father was bringing home from work meant being blasted with unknown colours and sounds, never knowing what to expect. Just experiencing random user interfaces from programs and games was great fun.
truemotive 9 hours ago [-]
Yes! The details about trackers in this post are something I've needed straight away for a chiptune-related project. Thanks for sharing
HexDecOctBin 5 hours ago [-]
Another good one is the visual editor of .werkkzeug3 used to make .kkrieger which serves as an alternative interface to the typical node based shader editor.
and everyone wrote it as a single word, here in comments to this article.
amiga386 4 hours ago [-]
It can be either. In the demoscene, sceners just call it the scene.
They also like to agglutinate words, e.g. copyparty, sizecoding and so on.
You can split or join the word if you like.
vidarh 4 hours ago [-]
I suspect that it, like the "sinus" mentioned elsewhere, may well be a result of the scene (at least at the start) being dominated by people natively speaking Northern European Germanic languages.
I started learning English about 43 years ago, and I still struggle with when words are combined or separate in English because it largely follows no logic while in Norwegian it carries meaning.
larodi 39 minutes ago [-]
How come we(you?) decided it can be either, given everyone and their dog writes "demoscene" all across the scene?
amiga386 2 minutes ago [-]
writes "demoscene" all across the scene
^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^
Which scene is that? Is it the scene about demos? A "demo" "scene" if you will?
If I talk of a "demo scene", and you understand it meaning the same thing as "demoscene", then "demo scene" has meaning, even if it's not your preferred spelling.
Alternative spellings of words don't have to be dominant or even popular, they just have to be understood.
The demoscene is full of funny-English words — ”compo”, ”graphician”…
gilrain 51 minutes ago [-]
What’s your point?
larodi 42 minutes ago [-]
exactly what is stated. it is demoscene, and people been calling it such. https://www.pouet.net/ calls it demoscene, https://scene.org/ calls it demoscene, and so does https://assembly.org, which existed for at least as long as the demoscene been a thing.
so something that is called "demo scene" perhaps may designate other matter. the same way copyright is one word, and not "copy right", which is semantically diffrent thing.
it is not about what HN folk decides to call things, really. and written as "demo scene", well it took a second for my eyes to pattern-match the title.
cbold 3 hours ago [-]
I wonder if there still is a demo scene? It is easier than ever to make cool stuff. I wonder in which scenes it happens?
Sesse__ 3 hours ago [-]
The demoscene still exists, although it doesn't seem to attain a lot of new members, and most (not all!) of the activity is back on oldschool platforms like Amiga or similar. See e.g. https://www.pouet.net/; Assembly 2026 is this weekend, so there's likely to be new interesting releases coming out.
jsonc 8 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, great read! I was an amiga demo scene coder down here in Australia, spent many long nights in asm-one :)
I had no idea there were tools for pre-calc lookup tables back then!
Instead I just generated my own from code as I assumed everyone else was :D
Using pre-calc sine tables freed up so many clock cycles.
Big shout to all the sceners on here! I really do miss coding 68k asm sigh :)
windenntw 4 hours ago [-]
Greetings from Spain!
We somehow got a copy of Defy diskmag, started swapping with Cro^Cydonia and got to enjoy Satisfaction Guaranteed by Pearl :)
I always did all my small tools and stuff in blitz basic 2, would dump binary file and incbin them in Devpac.
I mostly just wrote mine by hand unless I needed something complex. E.g. just halving the y delta until 1, then doubling the x delta for however long, then the reverse.
Tepix 7 hours ago [-]
The screenshot of "The Virus Protector 1.0" brings back ancient memories. If I remember right, it played a short jingle from the Queen song "A kind of magic" whenever it had removed a virus. It sure felt very magic at the time.
meerita 6 hours ago [-]
I remember FastTracker II pretty well from the gatherings we had with our demoscene friends in Buenos Aires. Many of them worked exclusively with it for our demos.
TacticalCoder 59 minutes ago [-]
Old man (well only in my 50s but hey it's old) rambling but these were the days. The way it started though is really intereseting: as a 11 years old kid learning BASIC, it quickly escalated...
At first we got pirated C64 games (because of course and that's how I became best friend with my neighbors and, to this day, we still exchange Telegram message on a near daily basis) and those games had an "intro" (a "cracktro" except the cracktro term only came much later on). And for some crappy games, the intro was better than the game. So we'd just look at the pirates' intro.
The intros became demos of their own and half my Amiga floppy disks were demos. I loved musicdisks and "diskzines": and some diskzines had articles explaining how to code certain intro/demo effects.
And as of course we had to learn how to code that, these tutorials in diskzines were most welcome. So BASIC gave way to assembly and then 680x0 and x86 assembly had no secret cycles for us.
Then we wrote intros for pirate BBSes etc.
Some of those screenshot do feel like home: XCopy, DeluxePaint, the trackers, etc.
I still have all those machines and some are still working but I don't turn them on often. Last we tried (with my brother) is a SNES and its rare (and now valuable) chinese Super Pro Fighter Q+ copier: a PC USB floppy drive, formatting old 3"1/2 floppies and copying SNES ROM from a modern PC, and we've been able to run old SNES games (fun fact: there were a few demo effects for the SNES that people who had such copiers could obtain on floppy disks).
Another rarity I've got is a pirate 5"1/4 floppy disk reader for the Commodore Amiga (that was supposed to use 3"1/2 floppies, not 5"1/4 ones), with a switch to pick if the Amiga is to boot on the 3"1/2 or the 5"1/4.
Nostalgia is a real heavy drug but those were really better days than ads-infested websites and inferior devices spying on you (looking at the smartphones).
P.S: and don't get me started on the cars from the 80s/early 90s, they were much better than the "I update OTA without your consent / I show you ads on you car's screen / I spy on you": but then I own two very fancy, very spiffy, cars from that era (one german, one italian).
madhu_ghalame 8 hours ago [-]
Performance is important, but developer productivity matters just as much. I'm curious how this balances both.
vidarh 8 hours ago [-]
As should be clear from the screenshots, in the 80's and 90's we were entirely unable to perform without gradients everywhere. Even my school notebooks where full of pencil- and pen-drawn logos full of gradients. At least one submitted essay had a heavily gradient-laden front page.
More seriously, most of the scene were teenage boys who were playing, not doing serious work. While some of the tools were mostly productivity focused (e.g. the assemblers, trackers), perceived cool-factor outweighed productivity for a huge proportion of them.
For the trackers in particular, while there were still the embossed metallic look and sometimes gradients, the dense UI is largely a factor of small screens (often down to 14" monitors) and very low resolutions giving you very little to play with. And the thing is, while it's messy, everything is there on one screen, and almost every tracker followed almost exactly the same principles and layout, so you learnt quickly enough.
flohofwoe 6 hours ago [-]
Productivity was usually excellent once you discovered and learned all the little details of the UI, which could take a while (think of vim versus regular text editors). Most of those tools were basically 'single-page-apps', e.g. all features crammed into a single UI page, but it also meant that all features were only one mouse click away.
noufalibrahim 8 hours ago [-]
Yes but going really far down that path has given us sterilized UIs that have no character and no personality. Every website and app looks more or less the same. I, for one, enjoy a thriving baroque culture of weird interfaces with different levels of usability. Given the nature of the people who write these (usually for themselves or their teams), I'm sure usability was important and good atleast for their own audiences.
shevy-java 6 hours ago [-]
I like that the demo scene is quite creative. It seems as if the non-demo scene kind of abandoned creativity to a large extent here, at the least with regards to the User Interface. I noticed almost the same with regards to menuet OS. Personally I would not use Assembly, but creativity is still leading to changes: https://menuetos.net/
deton3991 2 hours ago [-]
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Lynavo 5 hours ago [-]
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Haley_076 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
luciana1u 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 14:00:14 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
[1] https://alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/
[2] https://phrack.org/issues/72/1
First thing I did at one aerospace company I worked at was get root on the nearby office printer, which served its own webpage, and digitally deface it a bit with some fun ASCII graffiti.
Editet: (Typo)
I used this to reboot my machine faster, keep info in RAM and just continue were you left off after reboot. I think there even were ram drives that could persist crashes/reboots, someone did really fast reboots with it.
[0] https://jope.fi/xcopy/releases.html
[1] https://jope.fi/xcopy/img/xcopy/xcopyapr93en.png
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
And how that "boing" sound worked is interesting in itself. It's one of the few uses of Paula's "attached" mode, where the output of one sound channel is used to modulate the volume or pitch of another.
I put the full source code of the boing sound here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174583
I wrote so many tracks on it, some of which played on local FM radio and in clubs. Fondest memories circa 1996-2001.
Only many years later, Ableton managed to create another DAW that got close to FT in spirit, which is don't impede the creative flow. A DAW written by actual musicians for musicians (hail Robert Henke aka Monolake!).
And recently, Bitwig pulled another stunt and married Ableton Live's simplicity with feature richness more typical of a heavyweight DAW league, without all the inherent clutter.
P.S. This seemingly turned into some kind of advertisement, but it's just gratitude from a devoted user :)
https://www.renoise.com
And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...
My favourite one was on a C64 disk mag called "Input". It looked roughly like this:
with You had to move the spaceship up and down and then fire at the menu entries to select them.Since the menu entries had gaps between them you could miss. You likely missed by accident even, because control on home-computers was not what we are used to today.
When you missed the projectile was reflected from the opposite wall and if you didn't dodge, it hit your own ship.
The little ship crashed to the ground and a tiny, just a couple of pixels, figure appeared complaining and dragging his broken ship off the screen.
As a kid, running an .exe from the floppy discs my father was bringing home from work meant being blasted with unknown colours and sounds, never knowing what to expect. Just experiencing random user interfaces from programs and games was great fun.
https://media.demozoo.org/screens/o/82/e2/a055.334456.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
and everyone wrote it as a single word, here in comments to this article.
They also like to agglutinate words, e.g. copyparty, sizecoding and so on.
You can split or join the word if you like.
I started learning English about 43 years ago, and I still struggle with when words are combined or separate in English because it largely follows no logic while in Norwegian it carries meaning.
If I talk of a "demo scene", and you understand it meaning the same thing as "demoscene", then "demo scene" has meaning, even if it's not your preferred spelling.
Alternative spellings of words don't have to be dominant or even popular, they just have to be understood.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/demo_scene
so something that is called "demo scene" perhaps may designate other matter. the same way copyright is one word, and not "copy right", which is semantically diffrent thing.
it is not about what HN folk decides to call things, really. and written as "demo scene", well it took a second for my eyes to pattern-match the title.
I had no idea there were tools for pre-calc lookup tables back then! Instead I just generated my own from code as I assumed everyone else was :D
Using pre-calc sine tables freed up so many clock cycles.
Big shout to all the sceners on here! I really do miss coding 68k asm sigh :)
We somehow got a copy of Defy diskmag, started swapping with Cro^Cydonia and got to enjoy Satisfaction Guaranteed by Pearl :)
I always did all my small tools and stuff in blitz basic 2, would dump binary file and incbin them in Devpac.
-- winden^TNC^Network
[ https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=14404 and https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=7645 ]
At first we got pirated C64 games (because of course and that's how I became best friend with my neighbors and, to this day, we still exchange Telegram message on a near daily basis) and those games had an "intro" (a "cracktro" except the cracktro term only came much later on). And for some crappy games, the intro was better than the game. So we'd just look at the pirates' intro.
The intros became demos of their own and half my Amiga floppy disks were demos. I loved musicdisks and "diskzines": and some diskzines had articles explaining how to code certain intro/demo effects.
And as of course we had to learn how to code that, these tutorials in diskzines were most welcome. So BASIC gave way to assembly and then 680x0 and x86 assembly had no secret cycles for us.
Then we wrote intros for pirate BBSes etc.
Some of those screenshot do feel like home: XCopy, DeluxePaint, the trackers, etc.
I still have all those machines and some are still working but I don't turn them on often. Last we tried (with my brother) is a SNES and its rare (and now valuable) chinese Super Pro Fighter Q+ copier: a PC USB floppy drive, formatting old 3"1/2 floppies and copying SNES ROM from a modern PC, and we've been able to run old SNES games (fun fact: there were a few demo effects for the SNES that people who had such copiers could obtain on floppy disks).
Another rarity I've got is a pirate 5"1/4 floppy disk reader for the Commodore Amiga (that was supposed to use 3"1/2 floppies, not 5"1/4 ones), with a switch to pick if the Amiga is to boot on the 3"1/2 or the 5"1/4.
Nostalgia is a real heavy drug but those were really better days than ads-infested websites and inferior devices spying on you (looking at the smartphones).
P.S: and don't get me started on the cars from the 80s/early 90s, they were much better than the "I update OTA without your consent / I show you ads on you car's screen / I spy on you": but then I own two very fancy, very spiffy, cars from that era (one german, one italian).
More seriously, most of the scene were teenage boys who were playing, not doing serious work. While some of the tools were mostly productivity focused (e.g. the assemblers, trackers), perceived cool-factor outweighed productivity for a huge proportion of them.
For the trackers in particular, while there were still the embossed metallic look and sometimes gradients, the dense UI is largely a factor of small screens (often down to 14" monitors) and very low resolutions giving you very little to play with. And the thing is, while it's messy, everything is there on one screen, and almost every tracker followed almost exactly the same principles and layout, so you learnt quickly enough.