User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I put the full source code of the boing sound here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174583

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.

[0] https://jope.fi/xcopy/releases.html

[1] https://jope.fi/xcopy/img/xcopy/xcopyapr93en.png

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.

Pastor Emmanual Laphroaig [1] as well as the phRack crew [2] continue carrying the torch in this tradition as best they can

[1] https://alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

[2] https://phrack.org/issues/72/1

There's a blast from the past. At 16 years old I created Multi-Ripper with a friend, using AsmOne, and smartly included my phone-number in the mods it converted. My parents really appreciated random strangers calling years later.

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 :)

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.

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).

I think a lot has been lost by an overfocus on chasing a unified look and feel for User interfaces.

Standardising the user interface allows applications that have no design to share a common appearance. Making a custom user interface requires designing something. It can result in monstrosities if the designer lacks skill, or experiments with new ideas that don't work out. The antidote to that is dogfooding. Using the interface you made is the next incentive to make it good.

The demo scene philosophy of building precisely what you want to serve a function was clearly one of the influences on winamp, which was beloved by many.

I guess a lot of this went away with the lack of software choice. If you didn't like winamp you didn't have to use it. When a program is marketed as the only solution to a problem and they want everyone to use the same program (often by locking people in). If the software aims to be to everyone's taste it is to no-one's taste. It just becomes bland.

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.

If you're interested or nostalgic for these types of UIs, I would strongly recommend Picotron[0]. Not only is its UI very reminiscent of these types of programs, with its own music tracker software, but developers have been making their own software and utilities with their own custom design sensibilities.

[0] https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

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/

Yes! The details about trackers in this post are something I've needed straight away for a chiptune-related project. Thanks for sharing

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.

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.

https://media.demozoo.org/screens/o/82/e2/a055.334456.png

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 :)

This made me feel old and nastalgic. RIP BBS's

Omitting Scream Tracker, especially v3 is a big miss. Notably coming from Future Crew, iconic/influential Finnish scene group, with v3 definitely in the competition mix when FastTracker 2 was around, and the UI influenced the next DOS iteration of trackers in Impulse Tracker.

> [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.

What a great thing to add to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM

I'm not from this era and this article explains a lot of things from the video!

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.

> To the best of my knowledge, the scene never produced a pixel painter for the Amiga (except later ports of Grafx2), [...].

The 86ers got one, on the other hand. It's from Sweden. :)

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.

Back when you had to create a design language and an interface, to express what ideas you were experimenting with

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?

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Not trying to be a jerk, but demoscene is one word afaik?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

and everyone wrote it as a single word, here in comments to this article.

    writes "demoscene" all across the scene
            ^^^^^^^^^             ^^^^^^^^^

    Alternative spelling of demoscene.

    The informal computer art subculture that produces and watches demos (audiovisual computer programs).

    Etymology: from demo + scene

    A participant in the demoscene

    A member of a scene, especially the demoscene

    ORION, CODER:                           
    -------------                           
    LEFT THE DEMO SCENE FOR ABOUT A WEEK AS 
    HE STARTED CODING A GAME.               
    AFTER A WHILE HE CHANGED HIS MIND, DID A
    DENTRO, AND RETURNED TO THE DEMO SCENE. 
    NOW A MEMBER OF FLASH PRODUCTION.