|1-PC Demo Scene By Kei of Carnage I own a PC as well as my Amiga. I originally got it to help with my university course work but because a few other members in Carnage switched to PC I decided to develop a PC division of the group. First off though I decided to investigate the PC "demo" scene if it existed. After all, a lot of Amiga groups quit to join this PC scene so it should be worth checking out. When you first get a PC however, you are occupied with operating systems, utilities etc and you spend most of your time in Windows (no substitute for Workbench believe me!). You may come across PC software traders but they are far from friendly. Maybe you should stick with your Amiga? I decided to press on and to my delight I found several references to the PC demo scene on the internet. From here I located some information web sites and a few ftp archives. I spent a couple of hours a day at university downloading these demo scene "warez" with the intention of reviewing them for The Word if they were any good. |1-Demos I had read an article some years ago with reference to the Amiga vs the PC. It mentioned that it's harder to do certain coding routines on a PC because of the Amiga's custom hardware (such as the blitter). The PC uses pages instead of screens like The Amiga and it uses a variety of soundcards which are not always compatible with each other, wheras the Amiga's sound is taken care of already by the custom chip set. The only worries an amiga scener has is memory and chipset (no-AGA/AGA), unlike the PC user who has to check his XMS/EMS, base mem, soundcard and memory. I did not know all of this yet so I took home my disks full of PC demo scene warez and dumped them on my HD. The PC scene runs from DOS. It is full of slagging's off against Windows so don't even bother loading Win95 to view a demo! Make sure your machine can boot to DOS if you want to watch demos. The first demo I ran on my 486 was a 64k intro. I was stunned! It was better than any Amiga 64k intro I had seen! This could be due to my monitor and the fact that my PC runs at 80MHz wheras my Amiga only runs at 28Mhz. The demo featured smooth scrolling backgrounds and spinning 3D objects. The larger the demo the more quality you get. Especially demos by Complex. These tend to be 1 - 4MBs and of an amazing quality! Dope is my favourite as you travel through a weird but wonderful 3D world at a fast frame rate! Like many PC owners, I have a SoundBlaster Pro compatible sound card. However, the standard within the PC demo scene is the GUS, "Gravis Ultrasound Soundcard". This is due to the onboard RAM it has so it can sample faster into it's own memory without bothering the CPU hence no loss of overall speed. Some demos support SoundBlaster though but most don't. Usually a demo will be listed as either GUS or SB compat or GUS/SB meaning both. You may come across the following upon typing a demo name at the DOS prompt: 1 - Gravis Ultrasound 2 - Sound Blaster 3 - No Sound The PC demo scene tends to favour 12-18 channel music modules in the format .XM (fastTracker) or .S3M (ScreamTracker). However there are a lot of acknowledgements throughout the PC scene to the Amiga scene and this is because of the ceation of the MOD module format which they stole from us. Upon unarcing your demo's ZIP file you may notice one of these three module formats. The ascii art in the PC demo scene is known as "ANSI ART". This is because the PC has a different character set than the amiga and it can produce lines and squares amongst other characters. It can also use colour without all those ESC[3m type escape codes. This enables ansi artists to produce texts and pictures which are visually smart. The earliest reference I have found on the internet to the PC demo scene is 1987 and the earliest for the Amiga is 1985 so we know who came first. However it wasn't until 1992 when the PC demo scene got it's act together and created disk magazines. This brought more scene group names together in order to release a production many could enjoy. This had a great deal to do with a lot of Amiga and Atari sceners crossing over to the PC demo scene at this point in time. More would follow and if you look through the PC demo scene today you will come across a lot of references to long dead Amiga groups such as Anarchy and Majic 12 which are still alive on the PC. Most groups on the Amiga scene have a PC division and on the PC scene these groups say they have an Amiga division. The fact however is that they have coders for the Amiga and the PC and the rest of the group work for both formats even if they only have one type of machine because the software they produce such as pictures, ascii, music and articles is transferable between both platforms. That is why famous Amiga artists like Peachy, Danny and Facet are well known on the PC demo scene as are musicians Aquafresh and Moby. With this knowledge you will feel instantly at home in the PC scene. It's links to the Amiga scene are so great that if you don't load Windows for a week you'll swear you were on the Amiga scene still! The demo scene on the PC scene is more defined than that of the Amiga though. The main reason is that the Amiga scene's traders trade "anything" from demos to games and full blown comercial utilities. This is not so on the PC demo scene. Due to the large size of the PC's software releases, you often require a CDROM to port the utility/game between machines. This is not practical hence scene traders trade demo warez mainly. They do trade small warez that will fit onto a disk but they are usually coded in asm by sceners and are not commercial. Piracy, however is not reduced either. Cracking groups are still around and provide pirate CDROMs as well as smaller games in ZIP format so the scene boards do a lot of trading. Most Amiga scene boards have a PC section but these mainly contain small PD warez for ease of downloading and disk storage. What I have written here of course is an overview or "first impression" of the PC demo scene from my point of view. I have written it with the intention of informing you Amiga "die-hard" sceners that there is a scene similar to ours on the PC and to increase your knowledge so you know a bit more about it. As I probe deeper into this "other" scene I'll write more articles for future editions of The Word to let you know what I find. You can email me if you wish to know any URL's for the PC demo scene. Before I finish this article here's a quick review of some PC demo scene disk magazines... |1-Disk Magazine Reviews PAIN Issue reviewed: March 1997 Pain seems to be a regularly released scene mag as there is an issue out every few months. As soon as it loads it reminds you a bit of The Word as it has a small top bar displaying the current article being viewed and a menu bar at the bottom of the screen. There is no mouse control only CURSOR and ENTER controls for selecting articles and ESC for going backwards and quitting. The gfx are colourful but blocky. This is largely due to the over-use of PC ansi. After reading Pain you get the feeling that you have seen this type of mag before and you'd be right if you ever read Grapevine 9 - 15 as the layout and article types are just the same. It has a good section for coders as well as the usual scene news and advert sections. A good feature is the clock on the menu bar. Upon loading, Pain reads your system clock and uses it to display the time on the menu. 6/10 - Informative, useful and very colourfull Grapevine clone. IMPHOBIA Issue reviewed: 12 (July 1996) After running the executable from DOS you are given a soundcard configuration and asked if it is correct. If not you can enter your soundcard setup from a series of questions. Mine is SoundBlaster compat, 220h, IRQ 7, DMA 3. The loading gfx is f'ing amazing! On my PC monitor it looks virtually stunning. So far, the diskmags I have seen from the PC scene did not compare to ROM or RAW or any of the high quality looking diskmags the Amiga scene is known for. The menu is just as good with high quality art work. The menu is split into sections such as MAIN, EDITORIAL, CHARTS, ARTICLES, INTERVIEWS and CREDITS. Once you click on them (Amiga like mouse pointer) you are presented with a two column article format with a font that looks like it came from the RAW team. As you move through the article there is a bar which shows the amount you have gone through. This diskmag screams quality at you and if it were on the Amiga it would be No.1 in the diskmag charts. Full credits to Orange for producing such a virtually stunning piece of work! A few more articles would be nicer though but it's great for chart info. 9/10 - Great gfx, easy to use and a cool charts section. SCENIAL Issue reviewed: 2 Just like Imphobia, Scenial has a soundcard setup at startup. It also has a cool loading picture of a high quality. The menu is similar to RAWs and the articles are 2 columns wide. The menu bar has no buttons as everything is keyboard or mouse orientated within the article window. The progress indicator is in the form "1/1" where you are at page one of one. This is located at the bottom of the screen along with the article name. There are a wide range of articles grouped together in a style similar to the ROM teams. Articles about the mag such as editorial and credits are listed under "Home Base" then there's "Scene Hall", about the scene in general, "The Lobby", which is general chit chat, "Serious Computainment", about computers in general (mentions the Amiga), "Fun Computainment", which would be listed under "Bollox" if it was in The Word, "Culture", life in the PC scene, "Pure Entertainment", humour, jokes etc, "Music Corner", guess. Also there is "Technical Warp", "Interview Torturing", "Charts", "Anarchy Class" and "Greetings & Sites". Scenial has cool music and stunning demo graphics for the header and background. A quality diskmag let down by the use of a bright yellow TOPAZ type font. 7/10 - Quality gfx & sound, a good read, crap font, cool exit ansi. WHAT!? Issue reviewed: 1 (Dec 1995) This mag starts by saying "Windows 95 required... NOT!!! ;-)" when run from DOS. It uses the MIDAS sound system to configure the soundcard. This is a piece of code which I've come across on lot's of scene productions like disk magazines and demos. It allows the user to choose his soundcard preferences from a series of menus before the main code is run. Once completed the program tests for a mouse etc. A screen then pops up warning the user of the possible inclusion of obscenties inside this magazine. A rendered image or two later and you are presented with the menu screen which appears to be of a LOWRES quality. The article content is sparse and the mouse interface is jerky. The menu is designed to look like a HiFi facia but the colours are wrong. 3/10 - Blocky, limited Gfx, sparse articles, crap exit ansi. YAHOO Issue reviewed: 5 "The Party Issue" Yahoo starts off with a quickset menu from DOS whereby you select your soundcard. Although I typed in my soundcard prefs correctly it still freezes. This is annoying, I miss the Amiga's guru as at least you know the thing's bloody well crashed! After selecting "No Sound" You are presented with a short bland intro telling you what is in this issue. The menu bar is in a graffiti style with the article menu as a text file with PC ansi as section headers. Control is by mouse at first but once you get into the mag it lets you use the cursor keys. The format of the articles are a white background with black text. Sort of an inverse DOS. The only colour to be found is the main menu bar at the bottom of the screen. There are a lot of articles which include a good charts section. Overall it's ok for content but the lack of colour makes it look 2D and very boring. 5/10 - good content but not much to look at. UNREAL Issue reviewed: 3 Unreal seems to be an ansi artists dream. The whole thing is put together with ansi. You are presented with an option of choosing the font at the start and once you enter the mag, the borders, menu and backdrop image are all done in PC ansi art. There is some code present as the ansi art attempts to do some short colour cycling. The menu is very much like Tools deamon in that you select one of the headers UNREAL, ARTICLES BY, INTERVIEWS/INFO, GROUPS, ANSI and SYSTEM. Once you enter an artcle (by using cursors and enter), you are presented with the article displayed on an "EDIT" type backdrop with more ansi art of a blue/grey colouring. There is a percentage bar to indicate the amount of article read. The ANSI header is a list of ansi art in this feature. This ranges from words to pictures and is pretty impressive. I'm hoping to port my Amiga ascii skills over to the PC to produce some Carnage Ansi art and I hope I can do some as good as these guys. 6/10 - Cool ansi art, mainly for ansi artists though. NEW WORLD ORDER Issue reviewed: 7 (Aug 1995) After entering the exe name at the DOS prompt it informs you that it is messing with your soundcard, then a kick-ass music module starts at MAX volume! It's a sorta cool carib jive with some technical background thrown in. The menu is pretty smart and reminds me of early GENERATION issues on the Amiga. The article page counter is in the format ?/? and there are 4 music modules you can select by pressing F1-F4. There are tonnes of articles which is just as well as the magazine comes as a ZIP that barely fits on a HD floppy! The menu format is like VISUAL INTENSITY on the Amiga. However there seems to be a problem running on my machine as the scren flickers when you change pages and the resolution is only about 600x400. 8/10 - good content, gfx and sound. Nostalgic Amiga-type interface. GENETIC DREAMS Issue reviewed: 1 (Sept 1994) Hmm.. no sound and no on-line help features in the mag. There were a few articles but the interface was too small and clumsy to use. completly keyboard controlled. 1/10 - Boring yellow text, not much to read or look at. ALT-1 Issue reviewed: 14 (1994) This uses cool ansi art animation to prompt you as to your hardware config before the magazine loads. However it uses an automatic MIDAS soundcard detection routine which fails to detect my soundcard so I have to load with no sound. The menu is crap and of a low-grade ansi quality. Selecting and reading the articles seems to involve a long process of code and ansi art. In fact it seems to be another ansi art magazine. Looking at the advert section in most of these magazine I've reviewed here you notice that the graphics artists of the PC scene are split into 2 groups, ANSI & VGA. The ansi artists create all the fancy ascii/ansi art which includes text, full colour and animations and the VGA artists create the stunning pictures of the pixelised variety. 1/10 - clumsy, jerky, ugly interface but has some good ansi at start & end. Taken from Imphobia 12, here's an idea of the PC demo scene's charts. Recognise any names? |1-CHARTS Popular... |1-GROUPS Nooon Orange Complex Valhalla EMF CNCD Jamm Halcyon Future Crew Plant Impact Studios Pulse Realtech Triton Oxygene |1-DEMOS Stars, Wonders../Nooon Caero/EMF & Plant Dope/Complex X14/Orange Inside/CNCD Second Reality/Future Crew No!/Nooon Verses/EMF Solstice/Valhalla Reve/Pulse Dream/Jamm Project Angel/Impact Studios X-Tal/Complex Contrast/Oxygene Television/Orange |1-INTROS Bill G Force/Complex Drift/Wild Light Cyboman 2/Complex Fluid Motion/Valhalla Nation Zero/Jamm Lasse Reinbong/Cubic & $een Magic Carpet/K.L.F. Sea Robot of Love/Orange You am I you am the../Orange Airframe/Prime Dawn/Jamm Who else can upgrade../Orange Believe/Valhalla Transgression 2/MFX Detour/Halcyon |1-CODERS Jmagic/Complex Barti!/Nooon Hoplite/Orange Karl/Nooon Tran/Tran Sandman/Valhalla PSI/Future Crew Walken/Impact Studios Saracen/EMF Galvados/Jamm Mik Sair/Plant Maxwood/Majic 12 Mr. H/Triton Blitz/Halcyon Vogue/Triton |1-GFX ARTISTS Ra/Nooon Der Piipo/Orange Zebig/Speed Visualize/Jamm Peachy/Masque Danny/The Black Lotus Suny/Speed Marvel/Future Crew Made Pixel/Future Crew Lazur/Pulse Pack/Majic 12 Ukko/Live! Antony/Pulse Haplo/Zuul Desing |1-MUSICIANS Dune/Orange Necros/Legend Design Skaven/Future Crew Purple Motion/Future Crew Zodiak/Cascada & Complex Scorpik/Pulse Lizardking/Triton Big Jim/Valhalla Moby/Nooon Jugi/Complex Basehead/FM Shad/Pulse & Live! Clawz/Oxygene Groo/Coma XTD/Pulse |1-SWAPPERS Akira/Pulse Medicus/K.L.F. Lemming/Orange Diskhawk/N-Factor Unreal/Pulse Taskmaster/Fascination Cortez/Absence Climax/Amable Yarpen/Exmortis Thorin/Melon & Scoopex Rommel Goofy/Taste Zenial/The Grid Fortune/Fascination Kwazior/Slaughter House |1-MUSIC DISKS Progression/Five Musicians Epidemic/iCE Chaotic Mind/Future Crew Go for the record 2/Majic 12 Journey 1/Future Crew Journey 2/Future Crew Winter Melodies/Anarchy Peek a boo/Acme Inferno/Pentagon EGG 3/KFMF 2nd Difference/Orange Lotus Position/Five Musicians Assidge/Orange 3rd Punk/Orange Nothing on Tv/Renaissance I'll leave you with this thought. Although the Amiga's future is uncertain due to the business side of the Amiga, the PC has become a global standard platform and therefore the demo scene has secured itself a home which has a bright future. The Amiga scene is limited to those countries which the Amiga was exported to but the PC is everywhere from Russia and China to Alaska as can be seen by the amount of productions out there. The average amount of votes in the PC scene charts is from 10 to 20 times greater than any Amiga scene mags. I'm not saying sell your Amiga and buy a PC, more "get the best of both worlds". If you can't afford a PC, stick with your Amiga and check out my PC scene articles to stay up-to-date on the going's on over the wall. End