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:
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
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.
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.
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.
At one point in time, (I think maybe in connection with some mobile phone being able to play .midi files?) MIDI songs was (incorrectly) referring to a style/type of music rather than the transport/protocol we use for sending notes between instruments/devices, or the file format.
I'm still since then always assuming the above when someone says "MIDI music"; they really mean "really basic/simple music" or just straight up "chiptune" sometimes.
It has nothing to do with MIDI really, just a misnomer.
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.
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.
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)!!!
Razor 1911 and FC are different in that FC was one of those team/friend-groups that depended more on a constellation of people working together and producing until life took them away to other things.
Razor, Fairlight and some others became more of continious groups with evolving memberships (I was briefly a member of the demoteam back in 1999 and did one production in association with the people that moved over to Fairlight).
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.
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)
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.
This came up in the Discord party chat, basically there isn't a size limit in the rules[1], but going beyond 2GB would be concerning that it's not a real-time demo but instead just playback of animation.
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!
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
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.
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.
Most full demo (no tech or sizelimit) soundtracks since the early 00s are just mp3 streams or alike, size-coded that have soft-synths or retro categories were singing is an issue due to datasize or hardware power often don't (sometimes they do as a technical demonstration).
But I did notice some 64k's and small synths-executables had singing this year, I've added small voice-samples (compressed) but that's just seconds whilst these entries had longer sequences so I'm a tad curious as well.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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
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.
i second that. "Second Nature" is also my party favorite! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFVxntafsXM&t=1764s
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
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.
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
And a video of it running on Gopher2600.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixFH22MxqEg
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/
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.
At one point in time, (I think maybe in connection with some mobile phone being able to play .midi files?) MIDI songs was (incorrectly) referring to a style/type of music rather than the transport/protocol we use for sending notes between instruments/devices, or the file format.
I'm still since then always assuming the above when someone says "MIDI music"; they really mean "really basic/simple music" or just straight up "chiptune" sometimes.
It has nothing to do with MIDI really, just a misnomer.
A more appropriate term is "chiptunes". I also heard people refer to it as keygen music.
They've probably been converted over the years, just like you might convert an mp3 into flac or ogg or whatever.
Do you know if someone is hosting these in web radio format so I could stream in a car and such?
You might enjoy this: https://scenestream.net/demovibes/streams/
qUAntUm RaDio
https://radio.erb.pw/public/subspace
I don't. I'm sure you could find an archive of just midi files out there though.
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
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
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.
Executable here: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954
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.
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 (20 years old this year, now I feel really old)
Great demo. My favorite of theirs is MF Real. Nothing crazy but so stylish https://youtu.be/rvhGp9NGwos
Oh man, I watched "non-live" earlier today but hearing the live vers with the crowd audio is amazing. So damn good <3
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/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
Razor 1911 and FC are different in that FC was one of those team/friend-groups that depended more on a constellation of people working together and producing until life took them away to other things.
Razor, Fairlight and some others became more of continious groups with evolving memberships (I was briefly a member of the demoteam back in 1999 and did one production in association with the people that moved over to Fairlight).
Damn, that’s awesome. Any memory to share?
Also hope y’all weren’t affected when there was the crackdown back around that time. Though it wasn’t for demos
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.
I also liked Triton. They made great demos and also FastTracker 2!
FT2 was written in Borland Pascal 7 and TASM, btw.
Shout out also to Cubic Team, I spent countless hours using Cubic Player, they also made some cool demos/intros.
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.
Future Crew's "Second Reality" was my introduction to demos, back in the 486 PC days.
Yes - Razor 1911 was a core memory unlocked.
Along with Skidrow and Paradox crews
The song can be gotten for free / pay what you want at: https://dubmood.bandcamp.com/track/fighting-words-feat-goto8...
In addition, here is the Bright White Lightning discography:
https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/bad-teeth-data024
https://dataairlines.bandcamp.com/album/dirty-nails-data038
Having not seen anything from them since 2014, so I am very happy for another track.
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)
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?
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 has a download link
30 megs is like 2005 era size :D , obvious that it's realtime stuff (and music is probably a significant fraction?).
This came up in the Discord party chat, basically there isn't a size limit in the rules[1], but going beyond 2GB would be concerning that it's not a real-time demo but instead just playback of animation.
[1] https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/pc/
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!
Revision had no maximum filesize in the demo compo.
Beautiful. Masterfully done. I love all the BBS-era aesthetics and callouts. I hadn't seen FILE_ID.DIZ art in forever.
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!
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
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.
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.
Absolutely amazing.
Nice to be reminded that Revision is still active, on my bucket list to visit at least once in my life.
Wow, and this is their “mid career retrospective”. Wait for the end of caree retrospective…
Anyone understand why multiple demos have voices singing now.. how do they do it ?
Most full demo (no tech or sizelimit) soundtracks since the early 00s are just mp3 streams or alike, size-coded that have soft-synths or retro categories were singing is an issue due to datasize or hardware power often don't (sometimes they do as a technical demonstration).
But I did notice some 64k's and small synths-executables had singing this year, I've added small voice-samples (compressed) but that's just seconds whilst these entries had longer sequences so I'm a tad curious as well.
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.
This 64kb intro has speech synthesis to generate the voice of the song.
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9424
More info: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/08-04-2003.shtml
Literally just singing! It’s an mp3 :)
incredible work!
such a nice way to remember their fallen teammates at the end there.
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.
Different Westbam. The DJ you're thinking of is still alive.
Thank you
I like that you linked the live show instead of the video of the demo alone, as the crowd noise adds to the experience.
This demo is a salute to everyone in the scene. And it’s emotional. Had to be this version!
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!
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.
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
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!
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.
Same! Beautiful nod to this amazing demo : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMFBAOjuMWw
The tunnel going from ascii to RT gave me chills and made me teary. It was 40 years of progress in seconds.
not sure I've experienced goosebumps like this before
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.
Somebody needed to hack the Soviets! CCC were beasts
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
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
This is awesome!
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!
Did they state if/how much AI agents they used in creating this demo?
How many inkjet printers did Da Vinci use for the Mona Lisa?
Of course they used none.
None. That would defeat the entire purpose
Nice!
Direct link with the correct timecode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw4W9V57SKs&t=5716s
Ty. I pinged the mods and they updated it