Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum
markround.com
markround.com
That said, Sergey Bulba's WWW site is still around and the relevant stuff can be found today at https://ay.strangled.net/progr_e.htm . But the continued existences of things like this are not the sort of things to take for granted.
One of the uncomfortable realities I've encountered being involved in the retro scene is that so many of the resources are slowly disappearing, either because the original authors age out of the scene or loose interest (or sadly, many are approaching that age where natural causes are taking them from us), old companies are long since defunct and resources slowly disappear into a legal quagmire or no-one ever thought to archive them in the first place.
Too many of these resources are gone already, or require particular combinations of old operating systems and libraries to run at all. And in many cases, blog posts, articles, even books, are becoming hard to find. I decided to try to collate as much information as possible in one place.
Caveat: I've used AI extensively to do the research and writing, but I've attempted to cite all material from primary sources and every code sample gets tested not just in my own tooling but in existing third-party tooling too (just in case I made a mistake).
The way the Internet should be.
(Love the project, though.)
This is one of the areas where I'm actually pretty okay with getting LLMs to do the "junior dev" work. Here, take this, look up what that compiler error means, change the thing it's bitching about to be written the modern way please.
I love the crowd reaction. Would have loved to have been there. There's some great behind the scenes details here: https://iquilezles.org/articles/function2009/
I have the opposite memory of the C64 demo coders, they were masters at optimizing and pushing hardware well beyond what anyone thought it could do. Generally though they would be very focussed on writing a great demo, but they couldn't/wouldn't spend the time putting together a full game - the flashy demo was their goal.
I was a Spectrum games programmer and yes we were pushing the hardware but what I was seeing from the C64 demo scene was on a different level. There were a lot of demo writers pushing the known boundaries with things like multi layer bas-relief scrolling and playing with colours & music. I can't remember their being much of a demo scene for the Spectrum at the time here in the UK.
Hence why I find so interesting ESP32 projects, folks these days don't seem to grasp how much we can actually fit into something like that.
Check out this one though: https://demozoo.org/productions/13188/
The dithering on the voxel demo there had me truly stumped, watching as I am on a phone. Colours I never saw in my Speccy days!
https://syntaxparty.org/ is on in a couple of weeks if you happen to be in Melbourne.
The time-shifty nature of demoscene is really interesting to me. The community seems small but influential, so general awareness of it moves more like word-of-mouth, even in the internet age; people make incidental contact and pick up some small but incomplete aspect of it, often years after the initial release. People in 2026 enjoying work made in 1992; people making new demos in 2026 that look like they're from 1992.
Hits harder than the same dynamic in pop culture because these things are so little-known, but they find their way to your eyes and ears across the gulf of time all the same.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it is exactly about the Amiga that captures me in a way that no other computer ever did. Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head.
It was complex, true, but with enough studying and time you could know pretty much everything about every single bit of the Amiga’s memory space, workbench, the custom chips and so on. That’s what makes it so special and endearing.
That simply doesn’t exist on other platforms. I mean modern systems are amazing - and I’ve worked on some serious big-iron hardware in my time - but you could spend an entire lifetime now simply becoming an expert in one tiny piece of the whole system. Modern computers just don’t have the accessibility that the Amiga had, and it straddled the divide perfectly between being simple enough to know it and love it, yet powerful enough to do things you’d never dreamed possible.
A warm time travel back to 1980's, high school and coding partings at friend's houses.
When I said "stock" I really meant a basic 128K/+2/+3 machine and not one of the interesting Soviet/Eastern European clones with advanced capabilities that some portions of the demoscene adopted.
In the Iberian Peninsula, 128K models were all over the place.
Not really in UK or other European countries (besides the Amstrad almost-knockoff).
It is strange that on UK, Speccy birthplace they were apparently rare, given all the Crash and Your Sinclair magazines I owned at the time, and related content.
Amstrad bought Sinclair in spring 1986 and they ran down the remaining 128K+ stock, meanwhile the grey +2 was already ready to manufacture - they'd already designed the case and reversed engineered the 128K+ to get a head start. It was in the shops by that autumn.