HOW THINGS CHANGE
¾How things change.. (Again..)
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¢By²:¾ Magic / Nah-kolor

¹"How  things change.." I remember this
sentence as headline in a diskmagazine
a  couple  of  years  ago.   The scene
around  us  changed  again,  this time
more  rapidly  than  2 years ago.  And
every  time  articles appear about the
most  remarkable changes in the scene.
Like recent examples talked about "how
swapping  transformed"  or `How Lemon.
has  survived his premature death from
the  party  3"  And now in August 1995
even  scene  productions  have changed
into  a big extravaganza, when will it
stop?
"Have  you  seen  the  demos  from the
Assembly  1995  ??"  Was  a question I
asked  Roban  of Act, when I came back
from    my    summer    holidays    in
Mallorca/Spain.    No,   not   yet  he
replied.   Well  let's  download them.
And  so  we  called a bbs and searched
for all the new demos.  And there they
were,           Parallax,Silents,Pygmy
Projects,Stellar   this   couldn't  be
better.  But when we came to the point
of   downloading   all  the  demos  we
noticed  that  almost  every  demo was
over 1 megabyte crunched as a LHA file
!!   That  is really big.  How can you
spread such a production by mail.  Now
you  really  have to send 3-4 disks to
spread  a  single  demo.   If the demo
isn't  in  one file that is.  And what
about  the  packdisks  swappers make ?
Are  they  now  only  ment for the 40k
intros  ??   In the old days you could
pack  some  quality releases like Mind
Riot  or Substance, the packdisks will
loose there quality this way for sure.
Now  every routine takes about 200/300
kilobytes.  I wonder how long it takes
when  demogroups starts using a CD-ROM
to   store  their  productions  on  !!
Ofcourse  the  demos from the Assembly
were  nice,  but with a size like that
they can only be spreaded by modem.

The  same  goes  for the modules these
days.   I  remember  some modules from
the  Gathering  1995,  some  were more
than 1 megabyte, how far can you go ??
The  Assembly  had  the  rule  that  a
module  can't be bigger than 800 kb (=
1 disk)

At   The   Party   4   the  orginizers
surprised   most   musicians  with  an
improvised   rule!    The   orginizers
hastely  put  in  a rule that a module
can't   be   bigger  than  392  kb  !!
Otherwise  you would be disqualified!!
That's  why alot of welknown musicians
didn't  compete  in the music compo at
The    Party    4.     For    example,
Lizard/Spaceballs got disqualified for
this  reason.  His first reaction was:
"I  think  this  was  a stupid rule to
surprise us with."

Lizard had made a module that was over
1   megabytes   with  lots  of  guitar
samples  and  stuff in it.  Anyway the
demos  released  in  the scene nowdays
are  really  bigger  than  in  the old
days,     they    also    look    more
proffesional,  with  loads  of complex
gourade  objects and raytraced objects
and  tunnels,  not  forgetting all the
doom  like  routines.   On  the  other
hand, I don't want to be a swapper any
longer,  to spread such demos, since I
used  to send 2 disks anyway, and this
was  just  the  perfect  way for me to
swap.   As  it also was a standart for
most  swappers  to send two disks at a
time,   also   because   of  financial
reasons.

How  will  the  future  look  like  ??
Demos   from   2   maybe  3  megabytes
crunched  into  an  lha  file  ??  One
thing  is for sure, demos can only get
better..    Maybe   it  is  time  that
demogroups   start   using   a   video
cassette  again, like "The Silents DK"
did way back in 1991 with their Global
Trash II video demo.

           Ç6











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