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This is such a cool passion project, thanks for sharing your collection with us. Will bookmark this one for sure. It's great to see remnants of the demoscene p

This is such a cool passion project, thanks for sharing your collection with us. Will bookmark this one for sure. It's great to see remnants of the demoscene pop up like this from time to time. I'm sure there are many of us relative old-timers here that got their first taste of graphics programming thanks to those demoscene BBS tuts from back in the day (Denthor of Asphyxia anyone?). Just the other day I was reminiscing with a fellow programmer on freenode about mode13th shenanigans and the all-nighters that ensued. This HN post put a smile on my face. Cheers from South Africa!

bemmu 6y ago
mov ax, 13h int 10h The two most important lines of asm for any teen trying to emulate their demoscene heroes.
- shric 6y ago
  And don't forget Mode X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X
  - thibaut_barrere 6y ago
    Warmly remembered & overused for all sorts of reasons! https://twitter.com/thibaut_barrere/status/1329796980978159618 https://twitter.com/thibaut_barrere/status/13297969809781596...
- ninjaoxygen 6y ago
  Wow, you triggered a real flood of memories for me. I remember being bored in in an unrelated training course and using debug.com to write 320x240 scrollers with rep movsb. Being a kid I had no internet access at the time so a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and Borland's Turbo C++ documentation was pretty much all the documentation I had. Then later discovering djgpp and protected mode, what a time to be alive! I really want to let my kids (7 / 11) have a simple programming environment where they can get stuff done quickly. They have struggled a little with Python so far (it always comes down to needing complex libraries to do what they want e.g. write simple games.) Anyone have suggestions for an alternative language to let them be fairly self-starting?
  - herodoturtle 6y ago
    I guess it depends on their competency, but something like https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ is really good for really young kids. Alternatively if your kids are a bit further along then why not try re-create your childhood experience? In my case I'd spin up a virtual box with DOS 6 installed and a copy of QBasic, because hacking away at the GORILLA.BAS source code to try make my bananas more explosive was how it all started for me at a very young age. Point being - QBasic was pretty easy to pick up with little external support. Hope that helps! That being said, what has your experience with Python been like? What else have you tried?
    - dagw 6y ago
      One problem I've found as the expectations of what a computer game or program 'should' look like has exploded. Making a circle move across the screen doesn't hold the same fascination with kids today as it used to. GORILLA.BAS was pretty close to a game that used to cost real money when it first game out. Back in my day I could look at the very simple game I wrote in a a few hundred lines of Basic and see a path from there to commercial games that came in a box. Today my daughter looks at the simple thing we did in Scratch, then looks at Fornite, and sees no connection between the two.
      - IggleSniggle 6y ago
        I guess it depends on exposure. My son was moving the cat around in ScratchJr last week and he is definitely HOOKED. We've hardly touched it and he keeps talking about it / wanting me to give him simple loop instructions for him to act out as if he was the ScratchJr cat.
  - whizzter 6y ago
    I showed a bit of JS and while Scratch did get a bit of the way in explaining concepts, it's simply too inefficient to get anything "serious" done. What stuck for my older kid (12 now but started with it at 11 or earlier) was Roblox (with it's Studio), he was already playing the game a lot and making levels was fun and to get them beyond the basics one needs to script and even if 3d maths really were above his head (I've explained 2d/3d vectors and angles) the connection to something "real" has really helped him push through most obstacles. He writes horrible code by copying kinda bad tutorials on Youtube but getting things done is fun enough that he just keeps going and lately helping him debug issues I've noticed that he's started to develop the intuition about reasoning about states and the effects code has on it in an async picture. TL;DR Find the areas your kid might have passion in and if there's a way to mod/play with it with code the sheer fun will help them push through the drudge.
skrebbel 6y ago
> remnants It's alive and kicking! ps. did you know that Denthor is also South African? I wonder where the .za scene went after the nineties
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  > It's alive and kicking! My bad! I am ashamedly completely out of touch. > ps. did you know that Denthor is also South African? Yeah, his tuts were introduced to me by a friend of a friend of his. Or something like that. Durban lad if I'm not mistaken. Never met him though. > I wonder where the .za scene went after the nineties Your guess is most definitely better than mine! ^_^

bemmu 6y ago

mov ax, 13h int 10h The two most important lines of asm for any teen trying to emulate their demoscene heroes.

shric 6y ago
And don't forget Mode X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X
- thibaut_barrere 6y ago
  Warmly remembered & overused for all sorts of reasons! https://twitter.com/thibaut_barrere/status/1329796980978159618 https://twitter.com/thibaut_barrere/status/13297969809781596...
ninjaoxygen 6y ago
Wow, you triggered a real flood of memories for me. I remember being bored in in an unrelated training course and using debug.com to write 320x240 scrollers with rep movsb. Being a kid I had no internet access at the time so a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and Borland's Turbo C++ documentation was pretty much all the documentation I had. Then later discovering djgpp and protected mode, what a time to be alive! I really want to let my kids (7 / 11) have a simple programming environment where they can get stuff done quickly. They have struggled a little with Python so far (it always comes down to needing complex libraries to do what they want e.g. write simple games.) Anyone have suggestions for an alternative language to let them be fairly self-starting?
- herodoturtle 6y ago
  I guess it depends on their competency, but something like https://scratch.mit.edu/ https://scratch.mit.edu/ is really good for really young kids. Alternatively if your kids are a bit further along then why not try re-create your childhood experience? In my case I'd spin up a virtual box with DOS 6 installed and a copy of QBasic, because hacking away at the GORILLA.BAS source code to try make my bananas more explosive was how it all started for me at a very young age. Point being - QBasic was pretty easy to pick up with little external support. Hope that helps! That being said, what has your experience with Python been like? What else have you tried?
  - dagw 6y ago
    One problem I've found as the expectations of what a computer game or program 'should' look like has exploded. Making a circle move across the screen doesn't hold the same fascination with kids today as it used to. GORILLA.BAS was pretty close to a game that used to cost real money when it first game out. Back in my day I could look at the very simple game I wrote in a a few hundred lines of Basic and see a path from there to commercial games that came in a box. Today my daughter looks at the simple thing we did in Scratch, then looks at Fornite, and sees no connection between the two.
    - IggleSniggle 6y ago
      I guess it depends on exposure. My son was moving the cat around in ScratchJr last week and he is definitely HOOKED. We've hardly touched it and he keeps talking about it / wanting me to give him simple loop instructions for him to act out as if he was the ScratchJr cat.
- whizzter 6y ago
  I showed a bit of JS and while Scratch did get a bit of the way in explaining concepts, it's simply too inefficient to get anything "serious" done. What stuck for my older kid (12 now but started with it at 11 or earlier) was Roblox (with it's Studio), he was already playing the game a lot and making levels was fun and to get them beyond the basics one needs to script and even if 3d maths really were above his head (I've explained 2d/3d vectors and angles) the connection to something "real" has really helped him push through most obstacles. He writes horrible code by copying kinda bad tutorials on Youtube but getting things done is fun enough that he just keeps going and lately helping him debug issues I've noticed that he's started to develop the intuition about reasoning about states and the effects code has on it in an async picture. TL;DR Find the areas your kid might have passion in and if there's a way to mod/play with it with code the sheer fun will help them push through the drudge.

skrebbel 6y ago

> remnants It's alive and kicking! ps. did you know that Denthor is also South African? I wonder where the .za scene went after the nineties

herodoturtle 6y ago
> It's alive and kicking! My bad! I am ashamedly completely out of touch. > ps. did you know that Denthor is also South African? Yeah, his tuts were introduced to me by a friend of a friend of his. Or something like that. Durban lad if I'm not mistaken. Never met him though. > I wonder where the .za scene went after the nineties Your guess is most definitely better than mine! ^_^