At tUM, I received a Freax Art Album book and a Mindcandy Volume 2 DVD as prizes for the vector graphics compo. The book isn’t as interesting as the first volume (which I loved) – it’s a picture book after all, not a text book. The DVD, on the other hand, immediately got my interest. It is a selection of 30 representative Amiga demos: Technological breakthroughs and trend-setters from 1989 to 2004. While the Amiga was still alive, it somehow went past me and never caught my attention. But one year ago, I started to read a lot about old computer platforms – mainly out of technical interest, and to be able to judge demos better. During this process, I realized how great the Amiga was and started to feel sad that I wasn’t part of this hype back then. So the DVD fills exactly this emotional gap: Without buying an expensive A1200 from eBay and/or fiddling around with the intricacies of WinUAE, I could watch at least some of the masterpieces I missed.
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From December 27th to 29th, I’ve been in Karlsruhe-Durlach and attended The Ultimate Meeting 2006. It was again an awesome (and quite successful :) party, although the number and quality of the entries was somewhat below expectations. Read more …

In the last two months, there has been a fair (but not overwhelming) amount of media awareness around the Evoke Alternative Platform winner demo, »nano«. I’ve been interviewed for a minor German internet portal and for a major German Mac magazine and received almost exclusively good ratings on pouët.net. Finally, a few weeks ago, Gasman (a well-respected scener) started a thread about it in the iPodLinux forums. There were numerous people wondering about how it’s possible to do real-time 3D graphics on the iPod nano. To answer these questions once and for all, I’ve taken much time to write this very long post that really should contain all relevant information.
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Summer is the traditional demoscene party time: Assembly, Evoke, Buenzli and over half a dozen others take place in only about two months of time. While I only watched Assembly on AssemblyTV last weekend, I’ll attend Evoke 2006 in person. Instead of writing a lame post-party report as usual, I’m going to do a live report and write about stuff as it happens (given that the Internet connection works). So stay tuned and watch this post grow over time …
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What does a geek do with his newest high-tech gadget? Exactly – he’s hacking and/or putting Linux on it! This weekend was the time for my trusty iPod nano to become modded, with the intention to run some self-written homebrew on it.
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As promised in my post about writing 4k intros, I’m now digging a bit deeper how my 4k (actually 3.5k) intro Origami 3.5K was made. I’ll start with a »end-user« FAQ that covers some of the artistic and organizational aspects. The rest of this article will be very technical. Maybe the information isn’t directly useable in other projects, or maybe my solutions aren’t the optimal ones, but I hope that anyone who is going to do a 4k intro soon finds at least part of the information useful. YMMV.
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It’s the day after Breakpoint, so it’s party report time :)
This year we had a great party again, although the weather was bad so we couldn’t do the traditional Kakiarts/Deranged barbecue. The organizers did a great job at keeping everything running without major problems. Compo delays were minimal and even though there were problems during the compos itself, these weren’t tragedies either. (A WordPad-driven PC Demo compo is actually quite a funny thing.) I didn’t notice any major issues with drunken sceners, and the toilets were acceptably clean throughout the whole party. The only thing we missed really badly was a fast competition, because we had several quite good ideas, but no use for them. Hanging around the whole time, doing nothing but waiting for the next compo to start, isn’t exactly what we wanted.
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Now I’m almost done with the functional part of my 4k intro (read: all the tricky stuff is working, and there’s still lots of space to add new stuff). I’ll use this occasion to summarize some of my findings. Maybe someone else will find it useful (but I doubt that :) – I surely do, so this is also some kind of reference for myself. So here is KeyJ’s little TinyDemoWritingGuide. It’s targeted towards experienced C programmers. Not everything here may be completely true as I’m a beginner in the 4k field for myself.
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From the programmer’s point of view, 4k and 64k size limited demos are particularly interesting, because these types of demos rely much more on code than on data. And of course, there’s the sheer fascination of really cool graphics and excellent music in such a tiny amount of space. Programmers appreciate size limited demos the most, because they know how hard it is to get the code so small.
I’m no exception: When I first saw major 64k masterpieces like Heaven 7 or the product, my jaws dropped considerably further than those of my non-programmer friends, because I knew that 64k is really not much space.
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