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Miloslav Ciz 2023-12-07 15:14:20 +01:00
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@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ Demoscene is a [hacker](hacking.md) [art](art.md) subculture revolving around ma
Demoscene is a bittersweet topic: on one side it's awesome, full of beautiful hacking, great ideas and minimalism, on the other side there are secretive people who don't share their source code (most demos are [proprietary](proprietary.md)) and ugly unportable programs that exploit quirks of specific platforms -- common ones are [DOS](dos.md), [Commodore 64](c64.md), [Amiga](amiga.md) or [Windows](windows.md). These guys simply try to make the coolest visuals and smallest programs, with all good and bad that comes with it. Try to take only the good of it.
Besides "digital graffiti" the scene is also perhaps a bit similar to the culture of street rap, except that there's less improvisation (obviously, making a program takes long) and competition happens between groups rather than individuals. Nevertheless the focus is on competition, originality, style etc. But demos should show off technological skills as the highest priority -- trying to "win by content" rather than programming skills is sometimes frowned upon. Individuals within a demogroup have roles such as a [programmer](programmer.md), visual artist, music artist, director, even [PR](pr.md) etc.
Besides "digital graffiti" the scene is also perhaps a bit similar to the culture of street rap in its underground nature, of course except that there's less improvisation (obviously, making a program takes long) and competition happens between groups rather than individuals. Nevertheless the focus is on competition, originality, style etc. But demos should show off technological skills as the highest priority -- trying to "win by content" rather than programming skills is sometimes frowned upon. Individuals within a demogroup have roles such as a [programmer](programmer.md), visual artist, music artist, director, even [PR](pr.md) etc. The whole mindset and relationship to technology within demoscene is much different from the mainstream; for example it's been stated that while mainstream sees computers just as a tool that should just make happen what we imagine, a demoscener puts technology first, he doesn't see computing platforms in terms of better or worse e.g. for its raw computational power, he rather sees a rich world of unique computing platforms, each one with specific personality and feel, kind of like a visual artist sees different painting styles.
A demo isn't a video, it is a non-[interactive](interactive.md) [real time](real_time.md) executable that produces the same output on every run (even though categories outside of this may also appear). [Viznut](viznut.md) has noted that this "static nature" of demos may be due to the established culture in which demos are made for a single show to the audience. Demos themselves aren't really limited by resource constraints (well, sometimes a limit such as 4 MB is imposed), it's where the programmers can show off all they have. However compos are often organized for **intros**, demos whose executable size is limited (i.e. NOT the size of the source code, like in [code golfing](golf.md), but the size of the compiled binary). The main categories are 4Kib intros and 64Kib intros, rarely also 256Kib intros (all sizes are in [kibibytes](memory_units.md)). Apparently even such categories as 256 [byte](byte.md) intro appear. Sometimes also platform may be specified (e.g. [Commodore 64](c64.md), [PC](pc.md) etc.). The winner of a compo is decided by voting.