Article URL: https://www.datagubbe.se/scenegui/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49093434 Points: 78 # Comments: 10

Ahh, the demo scene - a digital art subculture, a motley gang of creative nerds, and a favourite pastime of mine. So much amazing art, music and code has been produced by sceners, and anyone who comes into contact with the scene might start to wonder exactly how - apart from hours of dedicated grind, of course. The scene has a long and storied tradition of building its own tools. Sometimes from scratch, sometimes by stealing ideas or even code from existing offerings. In a combination of teenage inexperience, old habits, a penchant for experimenting and a desire to make things look cool, this has resulted in some rather peculiar user interfaces. A few of them are presented below. Most of them are for the Amiga, but several other platforms are represented as well. Not wanting to be accused of clickbaiting, let's start off with one of the main attractions: Elite Sinus Producer, made by Ipec Elite for the Amiga. Demos are usually described as "real time", which is true in the sense that they're (almost never) just animation players, and that demo effects are produced, frame by frame, from code. However, to achieve seemingly impossible technical feats, extensive "cheating" is employed. The most common cheat is probably the so called precalc, meaning that instead of doing complex maths on a 7 MHz (or even slower) CPU, lookup tables are utilized. A plethora of tools for creating such lookup tables exist. This is one of them. When first starting Elite Sinus Producer, the user is met with this menu. Upon pressing an F-key to make a selection, the corresponding menu option is highlighted and a sample of a cuckoo clock is played. Loudly. Here I've selected the "Flower" option. Pretty, no? This can then be saved to disk as (presumably) assembly source code. Any sprite would look nice when moving along this path! There's also a handy help screen, which is so outlandish I had to grab a short film clip of it: Part of the background consists of moving blue raster bars, and the other part flashes between red and cyan. This obviously helps immensely when reading the text, displayed ina font designed with nothing but legibility in mind. Plenty of scene related tools are either command line utilities or predominantly text based. First out, we have the assemblers. There was a wide variety of assemblers for the Amiga, but the scene always favoured Seka, Asm-One and other derivatives of the same concept. There were so many different versions and hacks (Trash'm-one, for example) that the sprawling family tree rivals that of Unix systems.