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Comment by Martin_Silenus | Hacker News Reader

The days I gave up with demoscene. When PC killed Atari ST and Amiga scene (sorry to put you after amiguys, but life was always easier for you ;) ), all the magic of fixed hardware without tons of Mhz and RAM, when we were running after that cathode ray which wouldn't wait, exploiting hardware bugs to break those damn borders above, below and sideways, spending hours turning my head upside-down to read unreadable scrolltexts, looking at psychedelic plasma effects with bazillions colors...

Then I betrayed you all: I bought my first ugly machine because of Doom. I was so ashamed...

Now, only 4KB demos can at least impress me a bit.

Feeling old.

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Running Crystal Dream 2 on a 386 was just as impressive as running those border-removing, cycle-counting C64 demos. Hardware was not fixed on the PC, but upgrades were mostly about improving quality without losing any of the original charm (Gravis Ultrasound FTW!), like a 40MHz 386 was only marginally faster than a 33MHz, and that just allowed you a few more FPS in Doom.

The standard VGA resolution fit a full screen in a single 64KB segment nicely, you had many colors but not limitless, so I would argue that this was really the golden era of the demoscene. Partly because almost anyone could do some kind of a short demo that was still enjoyable to watch, and did not require the insane amount of cycle-counting and optimization and planning that the C64 does.

I gave up once full screen video playback was possible from CD-ROM. After that, doing (typically worse) non-interactive animations in real-time, seemed a bit pointless.

But watching Crystal Dreams II on my phone actually made me feel young again :)

Man, demoscene has always been pointless. That's one of the beauties of the thing, you cannot sell that. I call it love.

The Amiga scene is still popular, probably for the reason you said.

To be specific, the Amiga scene for a good while chased "coolness" with accelerated "monster"-Amigas.

But the focus shifted in recent years to treating "OCS" (ie "standard" Amiga500 with original chipset and 1mb,etc) more like a fixed platform like the C64 instead and imho has seen a bit of a revival since is mostly in the interesting part of pushing the OCS HW.

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