Revision Demoparty 2026: Razor1911 [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
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 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.
It was quite something... I take it there are quite a few hotshots on HN who used to be in the top groups. I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends and then we'd get infinite leech/upload ratio on those BBSes. Best memory was driving through Belgium / the Netherlands / Denmark / putting the car on the boat / Sweden (Uppsala) with our computers (Amiga, Atari ST and PCs) to participate at a demo compo. Forgot its name but in the PC category we tied first place with Future Crew (we would have been first had I not screwed the sound playback routine which crashed half-way the demo), before they had their big breakthrough on the PC demoscene. I think that was in 1991.
Cops/customs stopped us as the boat arrived in Sweden and thought we were dealing drugs: they tore the car apart and had no idea what we were talking about when we were explaining them in broken english that we were going to participate in a demo compo :-/
I still have a few effects as executables but I don't have the code anymore for these.
Thankfully I still have the entire source code of a game I made in assembly (for PC / 386+) in 1991 (never published but it's how my career started, long story) and lately I've been having a huge lot of fun trying to compile it again with Claude Code CLI / Sonnet. I'm using UASM, which is compatible with MASM which I used to use. I managed to have all the utilities I wrote back then (picture converters / sprites extractor / etc.) compiling and running (in DOSBox) but haven't managed to compile the main game yet. A few more hours with Claude Code CLI and I should get it running.
FWIW it's hilarious to go back to code from 1991 and see comments in my code talking about this and that bug and asking the LLM: "Find where that bug could be" and the LLM manages to find it. It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories. Copy/pasta code everywhere. And then 10 000 lines of code per source code file.
What an era. Diving in that old code of mine brings me back: the decades they've been flying.
P.S: funnily enough by lack of luck a macro I had used back then happen to become a reserved keyword/macro in assemblers later on. I had named back then a macro "incbin" and that was preventing my code from compiling in UASM: Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 found that issue instantly.
P.P.S: 0x777 in hex gives 1911. RZR, legendary: probably the most legendary of them all. Probably still have a few 5"1/4 floppies (both C64 and Amiga for I had an Amiga with a little software mod to read 5"1/4 floppies as if they were 3"1/2 for the 5"1/4 were way cheaper) with Razor 1911 "cracktros" (even if they weren't called that yet) still working (back in 2020 quite a few of my floppies were still reading: maybe half to 2/3rd of them). I know it won't last, nothing will.
It requires a VGA card and those were more common in 386 IIRC and, anyway, performance-wise to run at 60 Hz it needs a 386. I never tried to run it on a 286 with a VGA card: don't know if that was a thing.
It's funny looking at that old assembly code and see ax, bx, cx, dx registers and not the eax, etc. ones.
The utilities I've compiled to .EXE so far are self-contained in one file and I just use UASM to create directly the .EXE:
uasm -mz myutil.asm
https://www.terraspace.co.uk/uasm.html
I haven't tried yet to compile the entire game yet: that one is more involved as it implies many files.
Oh that's intriguing. Well I still have one, so now I'll have to find a VGA card and see if my code even works on a 286!
I can understand that - under dos - but as I recall quite a lot of gnu/nix tooling was workable on the Amiga - RCS harks back to 1984...
Ah that would have been such an awesome time. Thanks for sharing!
[0]: Soundtracker, the tracker that started this all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Soundtracker
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.
The same behavior could be (also was) teased out of a MOD player if you choose samples with a handful of sample points, like 12. You could also draw up a sawtooth in paint and use that as a sample. These are down-to-earth honest true Scotsman chiptunes.
Original release video (probably running on Stella)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEJ0A8Wvdxs
And a video of it running on Gopher2600.
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.
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)
I also really like Eyegabo0om[1] by Legend and Yolk, though perhaps I'm colored by being awed by the demo (Inside) when I saw it presented at TG'96.
I play these regularly. Good times!
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
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.
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
Should out to TheBlackLotus, Fairlight, Orange, CNCD also for those of you who want to look up epic demos.
Along with Skidrow and Paradox crews
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).
Funniest thing perhaps is that Smash was a musician back then for 2 things where I did the code (one musicdisc and one joke intro), Smash then went on to become a damn accomplished coder of quite a few famous Fairlight demos, Sony tools and made the commercial Notch visual toolset/editor/player that has roots in the Fairlight demoeditor codebase (Notch startup logo often pops up in democompos for those that haven't followed the scene).
Idk what Revision actually enforces but that used to be the rule at Assembly.
For the 1k, 4k, retro systems etc it’s specified!
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
> and music is probably a significant fraction?
For the Razor1911.exe in the ZIP which ends up being 31MB on disk, which is almost entirely made out of a compressed 145MB executable, whose size is mostly 48 PNG files (11MB), 69MB of zeros (nice?), 329 compiled DirectX shader blobs (DXBC) totaling 6MB, One large MP3 of about 17MB and finally like 34MB of what seems to be other types of runtime data like asset tables, font and UI data,
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
https://hlnet.notion.site/text-art-tools
I recommend Moebius for traditional ASCII and ANSI art.
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.
I recall my friend describing Nico being randomly drunk, or vehicles suddenly accelerating. Razor eventually nailed it iirc
such a nice way to remember their fallen teammates at the end there.
PS: I never knew Westbam (of Love Parade fame?!) was involved.
Nice to be reminded that Revision is still active, on my bucket list to visit at least once in my life.
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.
https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=9424
More info: https://www.flipcode.com/archives/08-04-2003.shtml
Not really, there's tons of info and source code out there, but fairly scattered and disorganized. It just may not be easy to know how to search for it when coming from outside. But if you can strike a conversation with a demoscener, I never saw anyone wanting to hold back secrets, on the contrary, everyone has always been excited to talk about the magic to another enthusiast like themselves (ourselves).
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.
- Movement Mina Omistan (1994): https://youtu.be/Ryq8fz_XAhI
- TBL Tint (1996) second part: https://youtu.be/KcSV4qAG-xk?t=459
Release is here: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=105954
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
Bright White Lightning, but didn’t see a track name.
Overall, wow.
Amazing artistry and skills.
There's a lot of push back against AI-generated graphics and music. For code, it's more difficult to know. AI is used by some people to automate the boring tasks, so that they can focus more on the artistic side.
It makes sense that a creative medium with a long tradition of pushing boundaries of what people can create, frowns on use of generative tech unless you have created it yourself. Back in the day the pushback was against using AMOS, or a PC, or programming in C, or using a GPU, or using MP3, or using Photoshop, or using another group's demo engine, or using a commercial game engine, or... AI is just the latest. And like its predecessors, it will gain legitimacy if people create genuinely interesting experiences with it.
Demos are now often using Unreal engine Unity Godot