Demoscene coverage ?

[felicemaggie]

I've been a member of the demoscene (on all platforms) and would like to see more coverage of the scene and UK parties, such as Sundown.

I can probably help out on articles if needs be.

Cheers,

Rich

[TMR]

Every time this gets mentioned i make noises about having been involved with the scene since the 1980s and so on... this is just me repeating those noises. =-)

[RichL]

Would love to see an article on this however I have a feeling it could take up the entire 130 pages of the mag and not scratch the surface.

Unless of course it became a bi-monthly feature per system

[Greyfox]

I think one of the reason why it's not covered as allot would see it as a niche subject and other, it's not about games, in which retro "GAMER" magazine circles around as it's basis, I suggested this a few years back and good members agreed it would be a cool entry in the magazine, but no..it doesn't apply to the masses enough to be covered which is a sad thing, as the demo scene is responsible for allot of key software developers which took there talents to work on the Amiga and others, but RichL is right, it would need a serious amount of researching and allot pages to cover it, as it's as active today as it was back then.

[RichL]

My postie used to say he was in LSD all the time, we never EVER believed him, but he always used to have the latest 'releases' first if you know what I mean, the amount of disks he had was ludicrous. So maybe he was afterall.

[TMR]

My postie used to say he was in LSD all the time, we never EVER believed him, but he always used to have the latest 'releases' first if you know what I mean, the amount of disks he had was ludicrous. So maybe he was afterall.

S'always possible, i was mail trading on the C64 around the time i was a postie (around 1988/1989) and would just drop my packets straight into the system so i'd get first class speeds from second class postage. i remember hearing about a member of one of the bigger multi-national crews being a courier in London and, whilst he was delivering stock of newly-released games to shops in the area, he'd arrange to buy the latest stuff straight out of the shipping cartons - that would regularly give him original games to crack before most shops saw them. When the European scene started moving over to using boards the sceners moved into telecommunications, then on to internet companies when the file archives shifted to FTP sites.

That said, "local lamers" (people on the outskirts of the scene who received disks from sceners and then passed them on to friends) could build up massive collections of releases too.

[Greyfox]

This is a brilliant insight to what became the demo scene, and really this should be covered in some form , on paper or digitally.

And I think that postie Rich, must of been maybe the famous Rob.C

[TMR]

This is a brilliant insight to what became the demo scene, and really this should be covered in some form , on paper or digitally.

It's already covered digitally, one of the things that the scene likes to do is write about itself! =-)

A lot of the scrolltexts in demos are pretty much snapshots, covering the latest feuds between groups or sceners, talking about favourite food or television or just generally waffling because the coder got five scrollers going and ran out of ideas for text after the third[1].

And whilst there's a lot of hyperbole in the old disk magazines they'll still give a general sense of "shape" at least for the territory they cover - for example, with the C64 and Amiga scenes the disk mags would contain top tens of demos, coders and indeed crackers[2] because, although there were efforts to produce the appearance of distance between the demo side of things and the scene in general during the 1990s, they were never far apart and continued to rely on the same person-to-person distribution systems. There are in fact still 8-bit mail traders operating to this day, although it's more for the nostalgia.

[1] One thing that most people don't realise about scrollers in demos is that they're not just there to deliver messages; in many demos the scroller is the primary effect and it's like that specifically to prove that said effect is being done in realtime.

[2] That "tradition" continues at least on the C64 with Vandalism News, Attitude and other disk mags, i still receive votesheets for on a semi-regular basis. =-)

[Greyfox]

looks like I'll be booting up some Eurochart issues tonite then

thanks for the insight, and forgot about the fueds groups had back in the day..they are prolly all fat belly'ed couch potatos now..well some of them..

i would be brill to have a recollection of the demo scene from Uk groups, like LSD, Lost boys so many to list, I think this would make great reading.

[TMR]

looks like I'll be booting up some Eurochart issues tonite then

It's worth checking mags like Sex 'n' Crime, Driven (which is primarily about the NTSC scene, a sub faction of a sub faction) or Vandalism News on the C64 as well, the different parts of the scene usually cover their own ground more thoroughly.

And there were paper-based mags for the C64 like Shock (which came in disk flavour too) and Illegal, usually rough-around-the-edges photocopies sent from swapper to swapper - Textfiles (which itself covers some scene history, with a focus on boards) has got a couple of partially ASCII'd up issues of Illegal.

thanks for the insight, and forgot about the fueds groups had back in the day..they are prolly all fat belly'ed couch potatos now..well some of them..

Nah, the scene has always been a cross section of society so there's as many health freaks as couch potatoes (and average people in the middle) as anywhere else. The only major difference is that there are very few female sceners.

[RichL]

I used to love reding Grapevine on the Amiga. Anyone else remember it?

Are there any online websites that may have these for me to read again? Not to download for my Amiga as I am having issues with it reading disks...

Or Jolly Rogers Cookbook??!!

[Greyfox]

I used to love reding Grapevine on the Amiga. Anyone else remember it?

Are there any online websites that may have these for me to read again? Not to download for my Amiga as I am having issues with it reading disks...

Or Jolly Rogers Cookbook??!!

for the Grapvine Issue , also in ADF format too work in Winaue : http://www.back2roots.org/News/Find/?find=grapevine

and the jolly Roger, omg, that takes me back..can also be nabbed from here : http://www.back2roots.org/News/Find/?find=jolly+roger

[RichL]

Thanks Greyfox.

EDIT: Sorry, is there anyway to view them online? As I said, having Amiga problems and this laptop is not for installing WINUAE sadly.

[TMR]

Jolly Roger Cookbook just evolved from anarchy folders present on some underground/scene bulletin boards; Textfiles has archived tons of that stuff from the 1980s/90s and the cookbook itself is in there too, although it may have been altered for the Amiga version.

Of course, nobody should try this at home because it was almost exclusively written by angsty proto-emo teenagers who were angry at the world for no readily apparent reason and didn't know better. Trying to be dark/different/anarchic was a sideline of the scene (to be honest it probably is now, although i don't know many younger players these days) but to it's credit the scene as a whole has usually been more about what people can do rather than who they are so things like JRCB target corporations rather than groups of society.

[Greyfox]

it also gave the secret sauce ingredients to MCdonald big mac to make at home yourself lol..