Demoscene /dem'oh-seen/ [also `demo Scene'] A Culture Of Multimedia Hackers Located Primarily In Scandinavia And Northern Europe.

HomeFortune CookiesJargon File

demoscene /dem'oh-seen/

[also `demo scene'] A culture of
multimedia hackers located primarily in Scandinavia and northern
Europe. Demoscene folklore recounts that when old-time warez d00dz cracked some piece of
advertisement of in the beginning, usually containing colorful
display hacks with greetings to other cracking groups. The
demoscene was born among people who decided building these display
hacks is more interesting than hacking and began to build
self-contained display hacks of considerable elaboration and beauty
(within the culture such a hack is called a demo). The split
seems to have happened at the end of the 1980s. As more of these
demogroups emerged, they started to have compos at
copying parties (see copyparty), which later evolved to
standalone events (see demoparty). The demoscene has retained
some traits from the warez d00dz, including their style of
handles and group names and some of their jargon.

Traditionally demos were written in assembly language, with lots of
smart tricks, self-modifying code, undocumented op-codes and the
like. Some time around 1995, people started coding demos in C, and
a couple of years after that, they also started using Java.

Ten years on (in 1998-1999), the demoscene is changing as its
original platforms (C64, Amiga, Spectrum, Atari ST, IBM PC under
DOS) die out and activity shifts towards Windows, Linux, and the
Internet. While deeply underground in the past, demoscene is
trying to get into the mainstream as accepted art form, and one
symptom of this is the commercialization of bigger
demoparties. Older demosceneers frown at this, but the majority think
it's a good direction. Many demosceneers end up working in the
computer game industry. Demoscene resource pages are available at
http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/ and
http://www.scene.org/.

Related: