The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden

Here is the official announcement (in Swedish): https://levandekulturarv.se/forteckningen/element/demoscenen

Hastily thrown together translation, because I thought it captured the hacker mindset so well:

> A fundamental driver of the demo scene is to make a machine, such as a computer, do something it has not done before. This could mean, for example, creating a tailor-made program for a particular type of machine. Technically, it is about exploiting the capabilities of the machine in an efficient and novel way.

It's sad to think that the computing devices our newer generations are growing up with are trying their best to shoot down this exact use case; making the device do things no one made it do before.

Instead, everything is locked down in the name of safety, and people loosing out on the ability of just having fun by modifying devices we already own.

I think the term "Use case" has done a fair bit of the shooting itself.

So many times I have seen people hold things up with "What's the use case" always transforming the problem at hand into convincing a person who doesn't comprehend that other people's experiences are also valid.

I think the demoscene is what it is: a treasure, a heritage.

I was/still a part of it, but essentially, every demo evolved into a video during the 90th.

A shift came with the more powerful machines, especially on PC.

C64, Amiga 500 - technical prowess was necessary for certain optical illusions; the video illusion stems from hacks. This reversed.

I think that this is ok. Device hacking is now the new old low-code hacking.

Today's demoscene is also totally meta. From fighting emulators to accepting to utilizing was quite a ride.

The massively impressive demos of today on C64 or Amiga are a testament to the heritage they capitalize on. Here and there, a minor tweak or final secret was finally totally understood; differences between serial numbers of C64 were a thing, too - and that's it.

I am impressed by what has been done and achieved in the early days by machine code on C64 during the 80th.

Massive influence was also time. The Scandinavians find a cool thing to do during the winter months and hack for days and nights - hardly anyone would do this today.

There was no harddisk, code revisioning. Compiling took time, and saving the stuff on disk was a tedious procedure during debugging. Printed Assembler code etc.

Today, you can dump the most elaborate code and data on emulators within seconds, all well compiled and checked - it is a wonder. IDEs, etc., are standard.

Even back then, some elite coders used cross-development platforms, such as Amiga and C64, to deal with the burden of memory and slow compile times on C64.

But the thing is that you had to develop the tools yourself. An advantage of this scale was earned.

Anyway, it was a fantastic time. Copy parties, puberty, trash talk - and, to be honest, a lot of doxxing and mobbing in retrospect.

I am glad I was part of the scene from 1987 to 1994 and attended Venlo and other infamous Copy parties.

Greetings from Beastie Boys/C64

I don’t know, real-time graphics programming is and has always been about hacks. Today it’s perhaps not often hardware-level hacks, but the ethos is still “cheat as much as you can, and then some more for good measure”.

Computers are mostly appliances, like dishwashers, now.

> It's sad to think that the computing devices our newer generations are growing up with are trying their best to shoot down this exact use case; making the device do things no one made it do before.

Buy a Steam Deck.

Not really - graphics cards are now powerful enough to ray-trace every pixel every frame, if you are doing it with a reasonable SDF instead of a huge bag of triangles.

> everything is locked down in the name of safety, and people loosing out on the ability of just having fun by modifying devices we already own.

Do you have any specific examples? I’m not convinced this problem exists for demoscene.

For other kinds of hacking, maybe yes, but demoscene was always about pushing graphics and sound limits of the device, and that is absolutely still possible and not being traded for security. If anything, the actual problem to lament is that GPUs are so damn good that no crazy hacking is required anymore, at least not to work around the hardware, though just using the hardware as designed these days can sometimes be categorized as crazy hacking. The hardware now does far more than everything we wished it could do thirty or forty years ago. We got what we wanted in the first place: programmable graphics hardware. Nonetheless, people are still pushing GPUs to do things it wasn’t quite designed for.

I’m not sure anyone’s fun is being hampered, demoscene graphics hacking is alive and well:

https://demozoo.org/parties/4813/

https://www.shadertoy.com/playlist/featured

Meh, real-time reflectance functions are still going to be all sorts of approximations. To say nothing about stuff like real global illumination. And SDFs are really nifty but a function that represents a complex, detailed, non-stylized/cartoony scene such as those in modern games is not going to be fast to evaluate.

Not to mention other aspects of the overall visual experience, eg, everything about scene dynamics, object interactions, etc. A bigger compute budget is always welcome.

But demomakers have a good track record of turning appliances into computers.

I am not aware of a demoscene production running on a dishwasher, but I wouldn't be surprised if one existed.

> Instead, everything is locked down...

There's an argument that that just raises the bar.

Does Doom on a dishwasher count? https://www.reddit.com/r/itrunsdoom/comments/1budbid/doom_on...

Which of today’s real-time demos or games are you thinking of? The trend over time toward physically based rendering over the last 40 years has been pretty clear and absolute, and your claim is failing to capture that fact. While it’s a little sus to frame all real time graphics programmers has having the same goals, whatever ‘ethos’ does exist in common across all graphics programmers, history demonstrates that it includes the goal to increase physical realism, which I would call reducing the hacking/cheating. Wouldn’t you? Today we have multiple AAA games on the market with path traced global illumination and physically based materials.