User Interfaces of the Demo Scene(www.datagubbe.se)
137 pointsby zdw4 hours ago13 comments
  • p2detar44 minutes ago
    I swear music trackers had the most impressive UI back then. FastTracker and ImpulseTracker were to me the highest piece of art and engineering at the time. They kind of hold up even to this day. Especially ImpulseTracker's instruments and sample editor.
  • userbinator3 hours ago
    I first thought "Elite Sinus Producer" and "The Sinus Creator" were trackers specifically designed for creating nasal-sounding music; but of course the explanation for why the term "sinus" came to be used instead of "sine" is likely because many demosceners were from a native European background, and their language retained the Latin origin word instead of deprecating its usage in favour of "sine", as happened in English.
    • vidarh2 hours ago
      Can confirm it's sinus in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French.
  • momocowcow29 minutes ago
    Doesn't mention ScreamTracker. A good example of demo group dogfooding. Unique text based UI too. As far as I can remember this was the first dos tracker.
  • krige2 hours ago
    A nice, somewhat nostalgic read. I had X-Copy and D-Copy both, although I'm more familiar with the later X-Copy editions that were quite purple [0] [1]. It was also my first contact with the concept of disk defrag.

    [0] https://jope.fi/xcopy/releases.html

    [1] https://jope.fi/xcopy/img/xcopy/xcopyapr93en.png

  • noduerme2 hours ago
    ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts were as complicated as vim.
    • wartywhoa2336 minutes ago
      For me, Fasttracker II still remains the most nostalgic, intuitive, immersive DAW ever made. Aslo, one of the best thought-out pieces of software in general.

      I wrote so many tracks on it, some of which played on local FM radio and in clubs. Fondest memories circa 1996-2001.

      Only many years later, Ableton managed to create another DAW that got close to FT in spirit, which is don't impede the creative flow. A DAW written by actual musicians for musicians (hail Robert Henke aka Monolake!).

      And recently, Bitwig pulled another stunt and married Ableton Live's simplicity with feature richness more typical of a heavyweight DAW league, without all the inherent clutter.

      P.S. This seemingly turned into some kind of advertisement, but it's just gratitude from a devoted user :)

    • bitwize44 minutes ago
      Fasttracker was coded by demoscene people though, namely members of the group Triton (later Starbreeze Studios). It has a couple of demoeffects in its about screen, and even a version of Nibbles (qbasic snake game) you can play.

      And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...

  • meerita25 minutes ago
    I remember FastTracker II pretty well from the gatherings we had with our demoscene friends in Buenos Aires. Many of them worked exclusively with it for our demos.
  • weinzierl3 hours ago
    Oh, the memories!

    My favourite one was on a C64 disk mag called "Input". It looked roughly like this:

                  menu entry 1
              
    <->   *   menu entry 2

              menu entry 3


    -----------------------------
    with

        <->   a little space ship
     *    a projectile
    ----- the ground
    You had to move the spaceship up and down and then fire at the menu entries to select them.

    Since the menu entries had gaps between them you could miss. You likely missed by accident even, because control on home-computers was not what we are used to today.

    When you missed the projectile was reflected from the opposite wall and if you didn't dodge, it hit your own ship.

    The little ship crashed to the ground and a tiny, just a couple of pixels, figure appeared complaining and dragging his broken ship off the screen.

    • apples_oranges44 minutes ago
      This reminds me why I studied CS. I planned to do something else but one day in school we got the assignment to write a computer program and I wrote an ascii scroller game instead and I realized how fun that is and changed my plans to become a programmer.
  • Tepixan hour ago
    The screenshot of "The Virus Protector 1.0" brings back ancient memories. If I remember right, it played a short jingle from the Queen song "A kind of magic" whenever it had removed a virus. It sure felt very magic at the time.
  • truemotive3 hours ago
    Yes! The details about trackers in this post are something I've needed straight away for a chiptune-related project. Thanks for sharing
  • jsonc2 hours ago
    Oh wow, great read! I was an amiga demo scene coder down here in Australia, spent many long nights in asm-one :)

    I had no idea there were tools for pre-calc lookup tables back then! Instead I just generated my own from code as I assumed everyone else was :D

    Using pre-calc sine tables freed up so many clock cycles.

    Big shout to all the sceners on here! I really do miss coding 68k asm sigh :)

    • vidarh2 hours ago
      I mostly just wrote mine by hand unless I needed something complex. E.g. just halving the y delta until 1, then doubling the x delta for however long, then the reverse.
  • madhu_ghalame3 hours ago
    Performance is important, but developer productivity matters just as much. I'm curious how this balances both.
    • vidarh2 hours ago
      As should be clear from the screenshots, in the 80's and 90's we were entirely unable to perform without gradients everywhere. Even my school notebooks where full of pencil- and pen-drawn logos full of gradients. At least one submitted essay had a heavily gradient-laden front page.

      More seriously, most of the scene were teenage boys who were playing, not doing serious work. While some of the tools were mostly productivity focused (e.g. the assemblers, trackers), perceived cool-factor outweighed productivity for a huge proportion of them.

      For the trackers in particular, while there were still the embossed metallic look and sometimes gradients, the dense UI is largely a factor of small screens (often down to 14" monitors) and very low resolutions giving you very little to play with. And the thing is, while it's messy, everything is there on one screen, and almost every tracker followed almost exactly the same principles and layout, so you learnt quickly enough.

    • flohofwoe29 minutes ago
      Productivity was usually excellent once you discovered and learned all the little details of the UI, which could take a while (think of vim versus regular text editors). Most of those tools were basically 'single-page-apps', e.g. all features crammed into a single UI page, but it also meant that all features were only one mouse click away.
    • noufalibrahim3 hours ago
      Yes but going really far down that path has given us sterilized UIs that have no character and no personality. Every website and app looks more or less the same. I, for one, enjoy a thriving baroque culture of weird interfaces with different levels of usability. Given the nature of the people who write these (usually for themselves or their teams), I'm sure usability was important and good atleast for their own audiences.
  • shevy-java41 minutes ago
    I like that the demo scene is quite creative. It seems as if the non-demo scene kind of abandoned creativity to a large extent here, at the least with regards to the User Interface. I noticed almost the same with regards to menuet OS. Personally I would not use Assembly, but creativity is still leading to changes: https://menuetos.net/
  • Haley_0762 hours ago
    [flagged]