7 ms·

Revision Demoparty 2026: Razor1911 [video]

384 points by tetrisgm 6mo ago

esafak 6mo ago
I think a modern equivalent might be WebGPU. Anybody doing cool stuff that? I'd like to see the code.
- unixhero 6mo ago
  Web shaders? Ues check out shadertoy
- SteltekOne 6mo ago
  [dead]
tetrisgm 6mo ago
Legendary demo group Razor 1911 submitted this beautiful demo as the closer for the Revision 2026 demo competition. It is an homage to 40 years of hacking from the group. For context, they were pioneers in both the demoscene and in the warez scene in the 80s-00s.
- SteltekOne 6mo ago
  [dead]
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
moodiverse 6mo ago
[flagged]
MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
Direct link with the correct timecode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw4W9V57SKs&t=5716s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw4W9V57SKs&t=5716s
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  Ty. I pinged the mods and they updated it
0xbs0d 6mo ago
This is awesome!
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  A lot of old school demo enthusiasts cried. These guys cracked all the games we couldn’t afford as kids/teens and did the coolest demos and cracktros to show off how cool they were. I saw them as high tech Robin Hoods. Hope you were around for that!
amatecha 6mo ago
Oh man, I watched "non-live" earlier today but hearing the live vers with the crowd audio is amazing. So damn good <3
krige 6mo ago
Excellent demo and good music to go with it. My favorite part was probably the X-Copy sector map transitioning into a 3D cube with a running sprite.
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  The tunnel going from ascii to RT gave me chills and made me teary. It was 40 years of progress in seconds.
- richrichardsson 6mo ago
  Same! Beautiful nod to this amazing demo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMFBAOjuMWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMFBAOjuMWw
bowmessage 6mo ago
incredible work! such a nice way to remember their fallen teammates at the end there.
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  First time the shout outs weren’t just respect or cheese. RIP, til Valhalla. PS: I never knew Westbam (of Love Parade fame?!) was involved.
  - janfoeh 6mo ago
    Different Westbam. The DJ you're thinking of is still alive.
    - tetrisgm 6mo ago
      Thank you
allenu 6mo ago
Beautiful. Masterfully done. I love all the BBS-era aesthetics and callouts. I hadn't seen FILE_ID.DIZ art in forever.
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  When I was learning to make games and just hack around the pc, I used to try to copy paste the characters from their nfos to make my own “releases” of mini mods. Didn’t know there were ascii drawing programs! Wonder if you did the same. I’m sure we all did but pre www era made it difficult!
  - Morromist 6mo ago
    I dabble in ASCII art and use Playscii these days. Its still pretty hard to make amazing looking art even with these great tools, which just shows how legendary the demoscene is.
  - allenu 6mo ago
    Copy-pasting is a clever way to do it! I used to use TheDraw for doing ANSI art, but I also ended up making my own ANSI drawing tool back then. It's stupid to think of now, but one reason I made it was because I had a monochrome monitor, so I couldn't "see" color. I wanted a feature where I could put the cursor over a character and it would tell me the color there when I was drawing so I could still use color in the work. I wasn't prolific, but did do a handful of ANSI art pieces for local BBS SysOps who liked them well enough. Only later on I realized when I got an actual color monitor that I had a few color mistakes in them and they never told me. lol
    - tetrisgm 6mo ago
      Damn, more OG than me. I must have looked up to you and your peers back then! It’s crazy how it was so common to just go in a hex editor and mess with files to see what would happen. Would love to see a submission of what you / group / other notables did.
  - california-og 6mo ago
dom96 6mo ago
Absolutely amazing. Nice to be reminded that Revision is still active, on my bucket list to visit at least once in my life.
pogue 6mo ago
That was amazing, really great song & visuals too. Takes me back to the days when you couldn't close the keygen because the midi playing was such a banger. https://keygenmusic.tk/ https://keygenmusic.tk/
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  Do you know if someone is hosting these in web radio format so I could stream in a car and such?
  - vrganj 6mo ago
    You might enjoy this: https://scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/ https://scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/
  - pogue 6mo ago
    I don't. I'm sure you could find an archive of just midi files out there though.
  - dither8 6mo ago
    qUAntUm RaDio https://radio.erb.pw/public/subspace https://radio.erb.pw/public/subspace
- vardump 6mo ago
  MIDI songs? I checked, I couldn't find any from the link you posted. Most were different module formats, like XM, Protracker, S3M, Impulse Tracker. Those have nothing to do with midi other than they also produce music.
  - pogue 6mo ago
    They've probably been converted over the years, just like you might convert an mp3 into flac or ogg or whatever.
    - vardump 6mo ago
Incipient 6mo ago
Demos used to have sizes - I can't see one for this, is it just an 'open' category? This thing is far too insane to be size limited, surely?
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  Edit: better answer below Idk what Revision actually enforces but that used to be the rule at Assembly. For the 1k, 4k, retro systems etc it’s specified!
  - skrebbel 6mo ago
    Revision had no maximum filesize in the demo compo.
    - SteltekOne 6mo ago
      Demos were limited to 2GiB. Size-coding competitions, like PC Intros, were of course limited to the size of their respective category (256 Byte, 4K, 8K, 64K).
- skrebbel 6mo ago
  In demoscene nomenclature, an "intro" is a demo with a sizelimit. This was entered in the demo compo, ergo "no size limit". With file size, most democoders go all the way, both ways. By that I mean that if they choose a sizelimit category, they squeeze out every last byte, and if they don't, most don't care about filesize at all. There's demos these days that are many times bigger than an acceptable video recording would be because nobody bothered to eg compress the assets, it includes an entire game engine, etc. Like 800MB for a 3 minute audiovisual show. Kinda ridiculous but it's just.. well, call it either laziness or focused pragmatism :-) Gotta get that prod out before the deadline! The Razor1911 zip[1] is 30MB, which actually is very much on the small side for a current-day demo. [1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 has a download link
  - whizzter 6mo ago
vintermann 6mo ago
There were many really nice demos on Revision this year. Hacker News favorite (and mine, too!) LFT put out another microcontroller demo, Sum Ergo Demonstro: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v8zKDotYh9A&is=xAbW7VZVGLn0986B https://youtube.com/watch?v=v8zKDotYh9A&is=xAbW7VZVGLn0986B But I think my favorite so far from the ones I've seen has to be Second Nature, an OCS Amiga demo by Desire & The Twitch Elite, and music by Hoffman.
- HellMood 6mo ago
  i second that. "Second Nature" is also my party favorite! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFVxntafsXM&t=1764s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFVxntafsXM&t=1764s
  - dark-star 6mo ago
    How they pulled that off on a stock A500 (okay, a stock A500 with 512kb RAM expansion, but still) is far beyond me. It's pretty awesome and really deserved the 1st place
    - emchammer 6mo ago
      It's a really uplifting break compared to all the other news coming out now.
- contingencies 6mo ago
  Classic first comment on the Youtube video: Hey lft, I designed the RISC-V core you're using, and I had a ton of fun watching and re-watching this video and trying to guess some of the tricks you used. Awesome work and I'm looking forward to a write-up!
masternight 6mo ago
Ah wow. I really enjoyed the demoscene back in the 90s. Was never a part of it but I was always fascinated by the effects and music and ascii art that these guys created. A BBS in my city always had the latest e-zines like Reality Check Network and Affinity, and others I forget. Reading up on the scene and about groups like Razor1911 was something I spent a lot of time on when I was younger. Amazing demo and homage to the era.
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago
  > I really enjoyed the demoscene back in the 90s. Was never a part of it but I was always fascinated by the effects and music and ascii art that these guys created. It was quite something... I take it there are quite a few hotshots on HN who used to be in the top groups. I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends and then we'd get infinite leech/upload ratio on those BBSes. Best memory was driving through Belgium / the Netherlands / Denmark / putting the car on the boat / Sweden (Uppsala) with our computers (Amiga, Atari ST and PCs) to participate at a demo compo. Forgot its name but in the PC category we tied first place with Future Crew (we would have been first had I not screwed the sound playback routine which crashed half-way the demo), before they had their big breakthrough on the PC demoscene. I think that was in 1991. Cops/customs stopped us as the boat arrived in Sweden and thought we were dealing drugs: they tore the car apart and had no idea what we were talking about when we were explaining them in broken english that we were going to participate in a demo compo :-/ I still have a few effects as executables but I don't have the code anymore for these. Thankfully I still have the entire source code of a game I made in assembly (for PC / 386+) in 1991 (never published but it's how my career started, long story) and lately I've been having a huge lot of fun trying to compile it again with Claude Code CLI / Sonnet. I'm using UASM, which is compatible with MASM which I used to use. I managed to have all the utilities I wrote back then (picture converters / sprites extractor / etc.) compiling and running (in DOSBox) but haven't managed to compile the main game yet. A few more hours with Claude Code CLI and I should get it running. FWIW it's hilarious to go back to code from 1991 and see comments in my code talking about this and that bug and asking the LLM: "Find where that bug could be" and the LLM manages to find it. It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories. Copy/pasta code everywhere. And then 10 000 lines of code per source code file. What an era. Diving in that old code of mine brings me back: the decades they've been flying. P.S: funnily enough by lack of luck a macro I had used back then happen to become a reserved keyword/macro in assemblers later on. I had named back then a macro "incbin" and that was preventing my code from compiling in UASM: Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 found that issue instantly. P.P.S: 0x777 in hex gives 1911. RZR, legendary: probably the most legendary of them all. Probably still have a few 5"1/4 floppies (both C64 and Amiga for I had an Amiga with a little software mod to read 5"1/4 floppies as if they were 3"1/2 for the 5"1/4 were way cheaper) with Razor 1911 "cracktros" (even if they weren't called that yet) still working (back in 2020 quite a few of my floppies were still reading: maybe half to 2/3rd of them). I know it won't last, nothing will.
tomaytotomato 6mo ago
Wow, a real throwback to my earlier years exploring the Warez scene as cash poor teenager, which meant you had to get creative to find what you wanted. Looking back in my 30s, I think part of my brain has atrophied because I can now purchase and download games and content with a few clicks on Steam and £40, which will be ready to play after dinner. Before you had to think and search forums (both public and private) for DDL links, CD keys, cracks, passwords to unzip files. Then once you had downloaded these multiple RAR/Zip files you then had to check and verify them for corruption or viruses. After that it was reading the sacred README.nfo file included in the crack zip. Which if you didn't specify to open in Notepad or Notepad++, it would open the Windows System information window. The last stage before firing up a game was the patching/cracking phase; that could involved things like editing hosts files, unplugging or disconnecting from the internet, or modifying your firewall to prevent network requests for anti-piracy software. Then you ran your crack or copied a patched .exe file over into the game directory. Aye presto, you're ready to fire up (hopefully it didn't have a virus or rootkit) ...but wait there is no loading videos or splash screen (panic). Well that's because the pirates were saving storage space and removed unnecessary game videos and music assets. <Play game> Bioshock Ah, that was a nice nostalgia trip. Also for any other nostalgia trippers, do you remember the first thing you always installed was a cracked version of WinRar (before 7zip became cool), running on a fresh install of Windows_7_SP3_BLACK_EDITION_XXX.iso
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  Such a throwback. If you were doing floppies there was the whole sing and dance you’d do with pkzip or arj to split your files across many disks!
NKosmatos 6mo ago
I upvote every post related to the demoscene due to my age, so I couldn't let this one, especially when it's coming from RZR. Imagine if we could get a new release from FC as well in 2026 (40 years since their founding)!!! More about Razor 1911 and Future Crew for the young readers of HN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Crew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Crew P.S. Too many groups to mention, but these two hold a special place in my mind ;-) P.S.2. Extra mention to the most famous Greek demo group - ASD (Andromeda Software Development) - https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1317 https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1317
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  ASD - Spin lives rent free in my head. I remember a colleague explaining how the morphing between meshes was really just random noise but the proximity and speed made it look like a real transformation. So cool. Should out to TheBlackLotus, Fairlight, Orange, CNCD also for those of you who want to look up epic demos.
  - bananaboy 6mo ago
    CNCD and Orange are two of my most favorite groups! Inside, Secret Life of Mr Black, Megablast are some of my favorites of all time.
  - ErneX 6mo ago
    I also liked Triton. They made great demos and also FastTracker 2!
    - xyproto 6mo ago
      FT2 was written in Borland Pascal 7 and TASM, btw.
      - ErneX 6mo ago
        Shout out also to Cubic Team, I spent countless hours using Cubic Player, they also made some cool demos/intros.
andrepd 6mo ago
My first time hearing the name RAZOR1911 was on the cracktro for GTA IV, which had this banger of a music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy4-9PsZHqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy4-9PsZHqI
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  The game was notoriously hard to crack too. Rockstar had a lot of former demosceners, so they put all sorts of protection that would mess with the game. I recall my friend describing Nico being randomly drunk, or vehicles suddenly accelerating. Razor eventually nailed it iirc
keyle 6mo ago
I like that you linked the live show instead of the video of the demo alone, as the crowd noise adds to the experience.
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  This demo is a salute to everyone in the scene. And it’s emotional. Had to be this version!
igleria 6mo ago
as a broke kid from the third world, the amount of coping Razor1911 enabled for me with gaming got me through high school during the 2000s (edit due to not finishing a sentence originally) cannot be understated.
ptype 6mo ago
not sure I've experienced goosebumps like this before
tetrisgm 6mo ago
The song can be gotten for free / pay what you want at: https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto80-master-boot-record https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto8...
- dark-star 6mo ago
  or you can unpack the executable (it's packed with UPX) and extract the MP3 from that ;-) You can also get high-res PNGs of some of the scenes that way (e.g. the floppy disk pan, or the fake Windows desktops)
- ninjin 6mo ago
  In addition, here is the Bright White Lightning discography: https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/bad-teeth-data024 https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/bad-teeth-data024 https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/dirty-nails-data038 https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/dirty-nails-data038 Having not seen anything from them since 2014, so I am very happy for another track.
appstorelottery 6mo ago
OMG. Thanks so much for posting this - completely awesome! Such a nostalgic roller coaster ride, from Qmodem to Xcopy and everything in between... brought back so many memories... - thanks again!
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
jansan 6mo ago
That Dynamic Duo disk at the beginning reminded me of my friend who got his house raided in 1987 for exchanging (not selling) cracked computer games for the C64 at the age of 18 in super rural Germany. He still managed to get into the army as an officer.
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  Somebody needed to hack the Soviets! CCC were beasts
dist-epoch 6mo ago
Did they state if/how much AI agents they used in creating this demo?
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  None. That would defeat the entire purpose
- unkeen 6mo ago
  Of course they used none.
- vrganj 6mo ago
  How many inkjet printers did Da Vinci use for the Mona Lisa?
- leptons 6mo ago
  Tell us you don't understand the demoscene without telling us you don't understand the demoscene.
  - bcjdjsndon 6mo ago
    Aren't you in your 70s? What's with the juvenile parlance?
    - leptons 6mo ago
      70s? Where did you pull that out of, your ass?
ttoinou 6mo ago
Wow, and this is their “mid career retrospective”. Wait for the end of caree retrospective…
JetSetIlly 6mo ago
Superb demos this year at Revision. Triplet by Otomata Labs for the Atari 2600 is exceptional Original release video (probably running on Stella) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJ0A8Wvdxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJ0A8Wvdxs And a video of it running on Gopher2600. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixFH22MxqEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixFH22MxqEg
ttoinou 6mo ago
Anyone understand why multiple demos have voices singing now.. how do they do it ?
- rustyhancock 6mo ago
  I wish there was more info about how they're made but I suppose part of the demo scene has always been secretive and reverse engineer it if you want to know. The first one said made with Godot and blender so is it using premade assets? (Which I thought was not allowed) Edit: #22 Heart of Glass says 144kB of WebGL + audio. I assume this means the audio is separate.
  - ErneX 6mo ago
    This 64kb intro has speech synthesis to generate the voice of the song. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9424 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9424 More info: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/08-04-2003.shtml https://www.flipcode.com/archives/08-04-2003.shtml
  - Jare 6mo ago
    > I suppose part of the demo scene has always been secretive and reverse engineer it if you want to know. Not really, there's tons of info and source code out there, but fairly scattered and disorganized. It just may not be easy to know how to search for it when coming from outside. But if you can strike a conversation with a demoscener, I never saw anyone wanting to hold back secrets, on the contrary, everyone has always been excited to talk about the magic to another enthusiast like themselves (ourselves).
  - z303 6mo ago
    As Jare said. Lots of info around https://github.com/psenough/teach_yourself_demoscene_in_14_days https://github.com/psenough/teach_yourself_demoscene_in_14_d... https://gargaj.github.io/demos-for-dummies/#intro/1 https://gargaj.github.io/demos-for-dummies/#intro/1 https://demobasics.pixienop.net/ https://demobasics.pixienop.net/ https://github.com/psykon/awesome-demoscene https://github.com/psykon/awesome-demoscene http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Main_Page http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Main_Page https://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html https://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html
uzyn 6mo ago
This is so sick! Revision faded out the credits part, which is still really cool on its own. The full version (10m 16s) can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Sadly, that full version isn't in 4K, unlike the submission. But this is Hacker News, we can do much better! Here is the actual binary: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 Sadly I couldn't get it to work on Linux with Wine/Proton, like a lot of demos they seem to really be using less common paths, so of course it crashes.
  - SteltekOne 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - crtasm 6mo ago
    the nfo notes >This demo will not run on intel iris gpus and only in 1080p
  - pocksuppet 6mo ago
    Just install pirated Windows in a VM (really the only valid way to run Windows these days). Razor would approve.
magicalhippo 6mo ago
Really cool retro-mix, and some slick transitions. Most of that was before my time though, so 1995 by Kewlers[1] hit harder for me, since that was when I really got into the demo scene and with it my drive to learn programming. Glad the demo scene is alive and kicking, though I get why a lot is oriented around old hardware, modern hardware makes things too easy almost. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mtctbodNXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mtctbodNXY (20 years old this year, now I feel really old)
- tetrisgm 6mo ago
  Great demo. My favorite of theirs is MF Real. Nothing crazy but so stylish https://youtu.be/rvhGp9NGwos https://youtu.be/rvhGp9NGwos
- Klaster_1 6mo ago
  Wow that's the demo that featured Little Bitchard's "Choose Zero Polys"! That and Jupiter Sound [0] are one of my favourite demo tunes. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjy4Ptzze10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjy4Ptzze10
  - magicalhippo 6mo ago
    Yea love both very much as well, awesome tracks. I also really like Eyegabo0om[1] by Legend and Yolk, though perhaps I'm colored by being awed by the demo (Inside) when I saw it presented at TG'96. I play these regularly. Good times! [1]: https://demozoo.org/music/18075/ https://demozoo.org/music/18075/
    - windenntw 6mo ago
      For me https://demozoo.org/music/249024/ https://demozoo.org/music/249024/ from the Deep Remix is their best coop.
rast1234 6mo ago
Executable here: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954
WhitneyLand 6mo ago
Great music. Bright White Lightning, but didn’t see a track name. Overall, wow.
- SteltekOne 6mo ago
  Fighting Words. Available on Dubmood's Bandcamp: https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto80-master-boot-record https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto8...
Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
Awesome, I remember some of these from back when, mostly from the 90's and early 2000's I believe.
conceptme 6mo ago
absolute banger :D
- unixhero 6mo ago
  I know. I must have replayed it 20 times already
pierrec 6mo ago
The parts where it exits fullscreen and starts messing around with separate windows is really well done. In a way it's playing with the limits of what defines a demo (ie. the user's desktop is part of the performance), which is something I love to see. Same with the notepad animation part. I wonder if they implemented their own notepad-alike from scratch or it they used something like this: https://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html https://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Note...
hugodan 6mo ago
Isn’t AI affecting the demoscene as it is affecting other programming hobbies? Why?
- laurentlb 6mo ago
  There have been lots of discussions around AI in the demoscene. Revision limits how you can use AI (https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/general-rules/ https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/general-rules/), even if it's not always enforceable. There's a lot of push back against AI-generated graphics and music. For code, it's more difficult to know. AI is used by some people to automate the boring tasks, so that they can focus more on the artistic side.
- Jare 6mo ago
  At revision there was a cool seminar about the author of a music synth who used AI to modernize it. He begun his talk with words for the audience along the lines of "Please don't do a Life of Brian, I am not here saying Jehova". It makes sense that a creative medium with a long tradition of pushing boundaries of what people can create, frowns on use of generative tech unless you have created it yourself. Back in the day the pushback was against using AMOS, or a PC, or programming in C, or using a GPU, or using MP3, or using Photoshop, or using another group's demo engine, or using a commercial game engine, or... AI is just the latest. And like its predecessors, it will gain legitimacy if people create genuinely interesting experiences with it.
- unixhero 6mo ago
  Game engines and their useage hit harder Demos are now often using Unreal engine Unity Godot
stego-tech 6mo ago
Damn, this made my entire week. Absolute legends. Release is here: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954
time4tea 6mo ago
One of the most uplifting things I've seen for a long while. Amazing artistry and skills.

384 points by tetrisgm 6mo ago

esafak 6mo ago

I think a modern equivalent might be WebGPU. Anybody doing cool stuff that? I'd like to see the code.

unixhero 6mo ago
Web shaders? Ues check out shadertoy
SteltekOne 6mo ago
[dead]

tetrisgm 6mo ago

Legendary demo group Razor 1911 submitted this beautiful demo as the closer for the Revision 2026 demo competition. It is an homage to 40 years of hacking from the group. For context, they were pioneers in both the demoscene and in the warez scene in the 80s-00s.

SteltekOne 6mo ago
[dead]
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

moodiverse 6mo ago

[flagged]

MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago

Direct link with the correct timecode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw4W9V57SKs&t=5716s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw4W9V57SKs&t=5716s

tetrisgm 6mo ago
Ty. I pinged the mods and they updated it

0xbs0d 6mo ago

This is awesome!

tetrisgm 6mo ago
A lot of old school demo enthusiasts cried. These guys cracked all the games we couldn’t afford as kids/teens and did the coolest demos and cracktros to show off how cool they were. I saw them as high tech Robin Hoods. Hope you were around for that!

amatecha 6mo ago

Oh man, I watched "non-live" earlier today but hearing the live vers with the crowd audio is amazing. So damn good <3

krige 6mo ago

Excellent demo and good music to go with it. My favorite part was probably the X-Copy sector map transitioning into a 3D cube with a running sprite.

tetrisgm 6mo ago
The tunnel going from ascii to RT gave me chills and made me teary. It was 40 years of progress in seconds.
richrichardsson 6mo ago
Same! Beautiful nod to this amazing demo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMFBAOjuMWw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMFBAOjuMWw

bowmessage 6mo ago

incredible work! such a nice way to remember their fallen teammates at the end there.

tetrisgm 6mo ago
First time the shout outs weren’t just respect or cheese. RIP, til Valhalla. PS: I never knew Westbam (of Love Parade fame?!) was involved.
- janfoeh 6mo ago
  Different Westbam. The DJ you're thinking of is still alive.
  - tetrisgm 6mo ago
    Thank you

allenu 6mo ago

Beautiful. Masterfully done. I love all the BBS-era aesthetics and callouts. I hadn't seen FILE_ID.DIZ art in forever.

tetrisgm 6mo ago
When I was learning to make games and just hack around the pc, I used to try to copy paste the characters from their nfos to make my own “releases” of mini mods. Didn’t know there were ascii drawing programs! Wonder if you did the same. I’m sure we all did but pre www era made it difficult!
- Morromist 6mo ago
  I dabble in ASCII art and use Playscii these days. Its still pretty hard to make amazing looking art even with these great tools, which just shows how legendary the demoscene is.
- allenu 6mo ago
  Copy-pasting is a clever way to do it! I used to use TheDraw for doing ANSI art, but I also ended up making my own ANSI drawing tool back then. It's stupid to think of now, but one reason I made it was because I had a monochrome monitor, so I couldn't "see" color. I wanted a feature where I could put the cursor over a character and it would tell me the color there when I was drawing so I could still use color in the work. I wasn't prolific, but did do a handful of ANSI art pieces for local BBS SysOps who liked them well enough. Only later on I realized when I got an actual color monitor that I had a few color mistakes in them and they never told me. lol
  - tetrisgm 6mo ago
    Damn, more OG than me. I must have looked up to you and your peers back then! It’s crazy how it was so common to just go in a hex editor and mess with files to see what would happen. Would love to see a submission of what you / group / other notables did.
- california-og 6mo ago

dom96 6mo ago

Absolutely amazing. Nice to be reminded that Revision is still active, on my bucket list to visit at least once in my life.

pogue 6mo ago

That was amazing, really great song & visuals too. Takes me back to the days when you couldn't close the keygen because the midi playing was such a banger. https://keygenmusic.tk/ https://keygenmusic.tk/

tetrisgm 6mo ago
Do you know if someone is hosting these in web radio format so I could stream in a car and such?
- vrganj 6mo ago
  You might enjoy this: https://scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/ https://scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/
- pogue 6mo ago
  I don't. I'm sure you could find an archive of just midi files out there though.
- dither8 6mo ago
  qUAntUm RaDio https://radio.erb.pw/public/subspace https://radio.erb.pw/public/subspace
vardump 6mo ago
MIDI songs? I checked, I couldn't find any from the link you posted. Most were different module formats, like XM, Protracker, S3M, Impulse Tracker. Those have nothing to do with midi other than they also produce music.
- pogue 6mo ago
  They've probably been converted over the years, just like you might convert an mp3 into flac or ogg or whatever.
  - vardump 6mo ago

Incipient 6mo ago

Demos used to have sizes - I can't see one for this, is it just an 'open' category? This thing is far too insane to be size limited, surely?

tetrisgm 6mo ago
Edit: better answer below Idk what Revision actually enforces but that used to be the rule at Assembly. For the 1k, 4k, retro systems etc it’s specified!
- skrebbel 6mo ago
  Revision had no maximum filesize in the demo compo.
  - SteltekOne 6mo ago
    Demos were limited to 2GiB. Size-coding competitions, like PC Intros, were of course limited to the size of their respective category (256 Byte, 4K, 8K, 64K).
skrebbel 6mo ago
In demoscene nomenclature, an "intro" is a demo with a sizelimit. This was entered in the demo compo, ergo "no size limit". With file size, most democoders go all the way, both ways. By that I mean that if they choose a sizelimit category, they squeeze out every last byte, and if they don't, most don't care about filesize at all. There's demos these days that are many times bigger than an acceptable video recording would be because nobody bothered to eg compress the assets, it includes an entire game engine, etc. Like 800MB for a 3 minute audiovisual show. Kinda ridiculous but it's just.. well, call it either laziness or focused pragmatism :-) Gotta get that prod out before the deadline! The Razor1911 zip[1] is 30MB, which actually is very much on the small side for a current-day demo. [1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 has a download link
- whizzter 6mo ago

vintermann 6mo ago

There were many really nice demos on Revision this year. Hacker News favorite (and mine, too!) LFT put out another microcontroller demo, Sum Ergo Demonstro: https://youtube.com/watch?v=v8zKDotYh9A&is=xAbW7VZVGLn0986B https://youtube.com/watch?v=v8zKDotYh9A&is=xAbW7VZVGLn0986B But I think my favorite so far from the ones I've seen has to be Second Nature, an OCS Amiga demo by Desire & The Twitch Elite, and music by Hoffman.

HellMood 6mo ago
i second that. "Second Nature" is also my party favorite! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFVxntafsXM&t=1764s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFVxntafsXM&t=1764s
- dark-star 6mo ago
  How they pulled that off on a stock A500 (okay, a stock A500 with 512kb RAM expansion, but still) is far beyond me. It's pretty awesome and really deserved the 1st place
  - emchammer 6mo ago
    It's a really uplifting break compared to all the other news coming out now.
contingencies 6mo ago
Classic first comment on the Youtube video: Hey lft, I designed the RISC-V core you're using, and I had a ton of fun watching and re-watching this video and trying to guess some of the tricks you used. Awesome work and I'm looking forward to a write-up!

masternight 6mo ago

Ah wow. I really enjoyed the demoscene back in the 90s. Was never a part of it but I was always fascinated by the effects and music and ascii art that these guys created. A BBS in my city always had the latest e-zines like Reality Check Network and Affinity, and others I forget. Reading up on the scene and about groups like Razor1911 was something I spent a lot of time on when I was younger. Amazing demo and homage to the era.

TacticalCoder 6mo ago
> I really enjoyed the demoscene back in the 90s. Was never a part of it but I was always fascinated by the effects and music and ascii art that these guys created. It was quite something... I take it there are quite a few hotshots on HN who used to be in the top groups. I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends and then we'd get infinite leech/upload ratio on those BBSes. Best memory was driving through Belgium / the Netherlands / Denmark / putting the car on the boat / Sweden (Uppsala) with our computers (Amiga, Atari ST and PCs) to participate at a demo compo. Forgot its name but in the PC category we tied first place with Future Crew (we would have been first had I not screwed the sound playback routine which crashed half-way the demo), before they had their big breakthrough on the PC demoscene. I think that was in 1991. Cops/customs stopped us as the boat arrived in Sweden and thought we were dealing drugs: they tore the car apart and had no idea what we were talking about when we were explaining them in broken english that we were going to participate in a demo compo :-/ I still have a few effects as executables but I don't have the code anymore for these. Thankfully I still have the entire source code of a game I made in assembly (for PC / 386+) in 1991 (never published but it's how my career started, long story) and lately I've been having a huge lot of fun trying to compile it again with Claude Code CLI / Sonnet. I'm using UASM, which is compatible with MASM which I used to use. I managed to have all the utilities I wrote back then (picture converters / sprites extractor / etc.) compiling and running (in DOSBox) but haven't managed to compile the main game yet. A few more hours with Claude Code CLI and I should get it running. FWIW it's hilarious to go back to code from 1991 and see comments in my code talking about this and that bug and asking the LLM: "Find where that bug could be" and the LLM manages to find it. It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories. Copy/pasta code everywhere. And then 10 000 lines of code per source code file. What an era. Diving in that old code of mine brings me back: the decades they've been flying. P.S: funnily enough by lack of luck a macro I had used back then happen to become a reserved keyword/macro in assemblers later on. I had named back then a macro "incbin" and that was preventing my code from compiling in UASM: Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 found that issue instantly. P.P.S: 0x777 in hex gives 1911. RZR, legendary: probably the most legendary of them all. Probably still have a few 5"1/4 floppies (both C64 and Amiga for I had an Amiga with a little software mod to read 5"1/4 floppies as if they were 3"1/2 for the 5"1/4 were way cheaper) with Razor 1911 "cracktros" (even if they weren't called that yet) still working (back in 2020 quite a few of my floppies were still reading: maybe half to 2/3rd of them). I know it won't last, nothing will.

tomaytotomato 6mo ago

Wow, a real throwback to my earlier years exploring the Warez scene as cash poor teenager, which meant you had to get creative to find what you wanted. Looking back in my 30s, I think part of my brain has atrophied because I can now purchase and download games and content with a few clicks on Steam and £40, which will be ready to play after dinner. Before you had to think and search forums (both public and private) for DDL links, CD keys, cracks, passwords to unzip files. Then once you had downloaded these multiple RAR/Zip files you then had to check and verify them for corruption or viruses. After that it was reading the sacred README.nfo file included in the crack zip. Which if you didn't specify to open in Notepad or Notepad++, it would open the Windows System information window. The last stage before firing up a game was the patching/cracking phase; that could involved things like editing hosts files, unplugging or disconnecting from the internet, or modifying your firewall to prevent network requests for anti-piracy software. Then you ran your crack or copied a patched .exe file over into the game directory. Aye presto, you're ready to fire up (hopefully it didn't have a virus or rootkit) ...but wait there is no loading videos or splash screen (panic). Well that's because the pirates were saving storage space and removed unnecessary game videos and music assets. <Play game> Bioshock Ah, that was a nice nostalgia trip. Also for any other nostalgia trippers, do you remember the first thing you always installed was a cracked version of WinRar (before 7zip became cool), running on a fresh install of Windows_7_SP3_BLACK_EDITION_XXX.iso

tetrisgm 6mo ago
Such a throwback. If you were doing floppies there was the whole sing and dance you’d do with pkzip or arj to split your files across many disks!

NKosmatos 6mo ago

I upvote every post related to the demoscene due to my age, so I couldn't let this one, especially when it's coming from RZR. Imagine if we could get a new release from FC as well in 2026 (40 years since their founding)!!! More about Razor 1911 and Future Crew for the young readers of HN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_1911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Crew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Crew P.S. Too many groups to mention, but these two hold a special place in my mind ;-) P.S.2. Extra mention to the most famous Greek demo group - ASD (Andromeda Software Development) - https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1317 https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1317

tetrisgm 6mo ago
ASD - Spin lives rent free in my head. I remember a colleague explaining how the morphing between meshes was really just random noise but the proximity and speed made it look like a real transformation. So cool. Should out to TheBlackLotus, Fairlight, Orange, CNCD also for those of you who want to look up epic demos.
- bananaboy 6mo ago
  CNCD and Orange are two of my most favorite groups! Inside, Secret Life of Mr Black, Megablast are some of my favorites of all time.
- ErneX 6mo ago
  I also liked Triton. They made great demos and also FastTracker 2!
  - xyproto 6mo ago
    FT2 was written in Borland Pascal 7 and TASM, btw.
    - ErneX 6mo ago
      Shout out also to Cubic Team, I spent countless hours using Cubic Player, they also made some cool demos/intros.

andrepd 6mo ago

My first time hearing the name RAZOR1911 was on the cracktro for GTA IV, which had this banger of a music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy4-9PsZHqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy4-9PsZHqI

tetrisgm 6mo ago
The game was notoriously hard to crack too. Rockstar had a lot of former demosceners, so they put all sorts of protection that would mess with the game. I recall my friend describing Nico being randomly drunk, or vehicles suddenly accelerating. Razor eventually nailed it iirc

keyle 6mo ago

I like that you linked the live show instead of the video of the demo alone, as the crowd noise adds to the experience.

tetrisgm 6mo ago
This demo is a salute to everyone in the scene. And it’s emotional. Had to be this version!

igleria 6mo ago

as a broke kid from the third world, the amount of coping Razor1911 enabled for me with gaming got me through high school during the 2000s (edit due to not finishing a sentence originally) cannot be understated.

ptype 6mo ago

not sure I've experienced goosebumps like this before

tetrisgm 6mo ago

The song can be gotten for free / pay what you want at: https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto80-master-boot-record https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto8...

dark-star 6mo ago
or you can unpack the executable (it's packed with UPX) and extract the MP3 from that ;-) You can also get high-res PNGs of some of the scenes that way (e.g. the floppy disk pan, or the fake Windows desktops)
ninjin 6mo ago
In addition, here is the Bright White Lightning discography: https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/bad-teeth-data024 https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/bad-teeth-data024 https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/dirty-nails-data038 https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/dirty-nails-data038 Having not seen anything from them since 2014, so I am very happy for another track.

appstorelottery 6mo ago

OMG. Thanks so much for posting this - completely awesome! Such a nostalgic roller coaster ride, from Qmodem to Xcopy and everything in between... brought back so many memories... - thanks again!

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

jansan 6mo ago

That Dynamic Duo disk at the beginning reminded me of my friend who got his house raided in 1987 for exchanging (not selling) cracked computer games for the C64 at the age of 18 in super rural Germany. He still managed to get into the army as an officer.

tetrisgm 6mo ago
Somebody needed to hack the Soviets! CCC were beasts

dist-epoch 6mo ago

Did they state if/how much AI agents they used in creating this demo?

tetrisgm 6mo ago
None. That would defeat the entire purpose
unkeen 6mo ago
Of course they used none.
vrganj 6mo ago
How many inkjet printers did Da Vinci use for the Mona Lisa?
leptons 6mo ago
Tell us you don't understand the demoscene without telling us you don't understand the demoscene.
- bcjdjsndon 6mo ago
  Aren't you in your 70s? What's with the juvenile parlance?
  - leptons 6mo ago
    70s? Where did you pull that out of, your ass?

ttoinou 6mo ago

Wow, and this is their “mid career retrospective”. Wait for the end of caree retrospective…

JetSetIlly 6mo ago

Superb demos this year at Revision. Triplet by Otomata Labs for the Atari 2600 is exceptional Original release video (probably running on Stella) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJ0A8Wvdxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJ0A8Wvdxs And a video of it running on Gopher2600. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixFH22MxqEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixFH22MxqEg

ttoinou 6mo ago

Anyone understand why multiple demos have voices singing now.. how do they do it ?

rustyhancock 6mo ago
I wish there was more info about how they're made but I suppose part of the demo scene has always been secretive and reverse engineer it if you want to know. The first one said made with Godot and blender so is it using premade assets? (Which I thought was not allowed) Edit: #22 Heart of Glass says 144kB of WebGL + audio. I assume this means the audio is separate.
- ErneX 6mo ago
  This 64kb intro has speech synthesis to generate the voice of the song. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9424 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9424 More info: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/08-04-2003.shtml https://www.flipcode.com/archives/08-04-2003.shtml
- Jare 6mo ago
  > I suppose part of the demo scene has always been secretive and reverse engineer it if you want to know. Not really, there's tons of info and source code out there, but fairly scattered and disorganized. It just may not be easy to know how to search for it when coming from outside. But if you can strike a conversation with a demoscener, I never saw anyone wanting to hold back secrets, on the contrary, everyone has always been excited to talk about the magic to another enthusiast like themselves (ourselves).
- z303 6mo ago
  As Jare said. Lots of info around https://github.com/psenough/teach_yourself_demoscene_in_14_days https://github.com/psenough/teach_yourself_demoscene_in_14_d... https://gargaj.github.io/demos-for-dummies/#intro/1 https://gargaj.github.io/demos-for-dummies/#intro/1 https://demobasics.pixienop.net/ https://demobasics.pixienop.net/ https://github.com/psykon/awesome-demoscene https://github.com/psykon/awesome-demoscene http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Main_Page http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Main_Page https://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html https://www.lofibucket.com/articles/64k_intro.html

uzyn 6mo ago

This is so sick! Revision faded out the credits part, which is still really cool on its own. The full version (10m 16s) can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AnbYNudAyM

embedding-shape 6mo ago
Sadly, that full version isn't in 4K, unlike the submission. But this is Hacker News, we can do much better! Here is the actual binary: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 Sadly I couldn't get it to work on Linux with Wine/Proton, like a lot of demos they seem to really be using less common paths, so of course it crashes.
- SteltekOne 6mo ago
  [dead]
- crtasm 6mo ago
  the nfo notes >This demo will not run on intel iris gpus and only in 1080p
- pocksuppet 6mo ago
  Just install pirated Windows in a VM (really the only valid way to run Windows these days). Razor would approve.

magicalhippo 6mo ago

Really cool retro-mix, and some slick transitions. Most of that was before my time though, so 1995 by Kewlers[1] hit harder for me, since that was when I really got into the demo scene and with it my drive to learn programming. Glad the demo scene is alive and kicking, though I get why a lot is oriented around old hardware, modern hardware makes things too easy almost. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mtctbodNXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mtctbodNXY (20 years old this year, now I feel really old)

tetrisgm 6mo ago
Great demo. My favorite of theirs is MF Real. Nothing crazy but so stylish https://youtu.be/rvhGp9NGwos https://youtu.be/rvhGp9NGwos
Klaster_1 6mo ago
Wow that's the demo that featured Little Bitchard's "Choose Zero Polys"! That and Jupiter Sound [0] are one of my favourite demo tunes. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjy4Ptzze10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjy4Ptzze10
- magicalhippo 6mo ago
  Yea love both very much as well, awesome tracks. I also really like Eyegabo0om[1] by Legend and Yolk, though perhaps I'm colored by being awed by the demo (Inside) when I saw it presented at TG'96. I play these regularly. Good times! [1]: https://demozoo.org/music/18075/ https://demozoo.org/music/18075/
  - windenntw 6mo ago
    For me https://demozoo.org/music/249024/ https://demozoo.org/music/249024/ from the Deep Remix is their best coop.

rast1234 6mo ago

Executable here: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954

WhitneyLand 6mo ago

Great music. Bright White Lightning, but didn’t see a track name. Overall, wow.

SteltekOne 6mo ago
Fighting Words. Available on Dubmood's Bandcamp: https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto80-master-boot-record https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto8...

Cthulhu_ 6mo ago

Awesome, I remember some of these from back when, mostly from the 90's and early 2000's I believe.

conceptme 6mo ago

absolute banger :D

unixhero 6mo ago
I know. I must have replayed it 20 times already

pierrec 6mo ago

The parts where it exits fullscreen and starts messing around with separate windows is really well done. In a way it's playing with the limits of what defines a demo (ie. the user's desktop is part of the performance), which is something I love to see. Same with the notepad animation part. I wonder if they implemented their own notepad-alike from scratch or it they used something like this: https://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Notepad.html https://kylehalladay.com/blog/2020/05/20/Rendering-With-Note...

hugodan 6mo ago

Isn’t AI affecting the demoscene as it is affecting other programming hobbies? Why?

laurentlb 6mo ago
There have been lots of discussions around AI in the demoscene. Revision limits how you can use AI (https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/general-rules/ https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/general-rules/), even if it's not always enforceable. There's a lot of push back against AI-generated graphics and music. For code, it's more difficult to know. AI is used by some people to automate the boring tasks, so that they can focus more on the artistic side.
Jare 6mo ago
At revision there was a cool seminar about the author of a music synth who used AI to modernize it. He begun his talk with words for the audience along the lines of "Please don't do a Life of Brian, I am not here saying Jehova". It makes sense that a creative medium with a long tradition of pushing boundaries of what people can create, frowns on use of generative tech unless you have created it yourself. Back in the day the pushback was against using AMOS, or a PC, or programming in C, or using a GPU, or using MP3, or using Photoshop, or using another group's demo engine, or using a commercial game engine, or... AI is just the latest. And like its predecessors, it will gain legitimacy if people create genuinely interesting experiences with it.
unixhero 6mo ago
Game engines and their useage hit harder Demos are now often using Unreal engine Unity Godot

stego-tech 6mo ago

Damn, this made my entire week. Absolute legends. Release is here: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954

time4tea 6mo ago

One of the most uplifting things I've seen for a long while. Amazing artistry and skills.