teadrinker looked like a quite mysterious character to me.
In the demoscene, we started hearing of him in relatively recent times (2023).
He usually produces demos as a one-man-group, but each one of his prods leaves a mark in one way or another.
Let's try to solve part of the mystery with 10 questions.


1. How long have you been involved in the scene? Your first productions date back to 2023, but seem to be more mature than newcomer stuff.

In the 90s in Sweden, demos were copied around on floppies and I often enjoyed them with my friends.
I did not know any actual sceners, and I would have been too shy to attend demo parties alone anyway. But I became a big fan of the scene and I had ambitions of doing demos early on Amiga and PC. While I managed to do some mods (OctaMED/FT2), images (DP/3ds) and simpler effects (Amos/DOS), I failed to combine them into anything larger. My focus then shifted to game dev and work, but every now and then I'd check out the latest scene releases with great excitement. Sort of randomly, I joined the online-only Lovebyte in 2023, and after that I thought that I should really attend a party IRL...

2. I know pronouncing the acronym "LLM" could cause telluric waves in the demoscene, but you seem a lot less extreme than many people about this topic. Why do you say “the ethical choice in regards to LLMs is probably to limit your usage”? Do you refer to the datacenter impact or intellectual property or anything else?
What’s your feeling about this technology, including “having a less deeper state of flow” when programming and “less authorship” versus the code you produce, as you say?

LLMs are the biggest thing to happen to software in my lifetime, and I'm too curious to just ignore them.
It's all very overwhelming, it feels like a large part of the skills I acquired over the years might no longer be relevant, but I still value them. I grieve what has been lost, but I'm also excited about new possibilities.

Part of what I tried to express is that I don't know how unethical it is, but that I deem excessive resource use unethical by itself. I know this is a sensitive topic and that is why I tried to document the project and release the source of both the demo and the tool.

I see this new technology as an amalgam of compute and human culture. A technology based on the commons, that should belong to all of us. That is, under democratic control.

The reason AI is being shoved so forcefully into our throats is that the investor class has too much power in society. The pricing mechanism (which makes markets useful for resource allocation) is distorted because investors hope that they will be allowed to own another future monopoly.

When I read the Pro-Human AI Declaration statements like "AI monopolies that concentrate power, stifle innovation, and imperil entrepreneurship must be avoided," or "the benefits and economic prosperity created by AI should be shared broadly" I think, sure, but let's not limit this to AI. Unless the US and EU can come together and double down on democratic values and actually tax and regulate the investor class, I don't see this ending well.

3. I love your demo "PRINT". How was its idea born?

It rarely starts with a big idea for me, instead a few threads are separately spinning. I already had the font, the geometric tiles and a basic renderer when making Daydreamer (the very last thing I tried to add, and failed). I had also explored halftoning with different shapes and separately experimented with subtractive color mixing years earlier. So once I had the idea that the font would probably look quite nice with a print simulation, it seemed appropriate/clean to build the soundtrack from printer sounds. It's more like smaller ideas/pieces falling into place.

4. What's the technology/technique behind the "motion capture" on some of your productions ("This is Internet", "Human kaleidoscope", and so on)?

It's a Unity based implementation which makes use of Kinect / Femto Bolt depth cameras to record and playback stylized depth material. It does not use the Kinect body tracking, but instead the raw depth and infrared buffers. The infrared images are used to (optionally) influence the stroke width of the lines/dots.

It's designed so you can preview the stylization (Decimation levels, rendering tweaks etc) in real-time. After recording you can export to a custom compressed format (RLE, using 11 bits for depth and 5 for size)

It was open sourced as a part of another project if anyone is interested in trying it out or know more about the details. I really feel it needs a proper UI though, and I never got to that part...

5. In your opinion, how should a demo like "What time is it?" (for which btw you also created your own font) be experienced? On the real hardware, like while doing a queue at the supermarket or anything else?

The ideal for watching it on the watch is a very quiet outdoor/nature environment with sunlight. (similar to what you see at the start of the video)

The video is kind of its own production and works better for a party or casual viewing.

6. You developed specific tools (Mad Tea Lab/Synth) for prototyping. You even made a font (!). For example, you say your demo “What time is it?” was made with the tool. How do you use these tools in your workflow? Did you ever consider using already available tools like Notch or Cables, or you like more the demoscenic tradition of doing it all by yourself?

I've tried many of the available tools. I went a bit deeper into TiXL than the others, and I started modifying it before I even had a finished scene. I like the tradition of DIY, but I don't really feel I'm practicing it (many of my demos use a framework I built on top of Unity, I access Kinect through a MIT Licensed library by Rumen Filkov, and I'm happy to use iq's sdf-primitives most of the time).

But some things draw me towards making tools:

• I'm a big fan of tight sync, and part of my quest to build custom tools is to bring music creation and demo creation closer together, ideally into a single composition workflow.
• The tools you use will color your work. So tool creation can make your work more personal. I feel it both gives a kind of expanded creative freedom, and at the same time very hard limitations (as the WIP-tools are often quite bad in many ways).
• I like to work visually, but I still think code is often more efficient at expressing detailed intent than nodes. So ideally, I want the code to be bidirectional/two-way - if I make a visual adjustment, the change should be able to flow back into the code. I've not managed to pull this off yet for any real production...

([NdFriol]:Teadrinker says that we will soon have an high quality version of the soundtrack of "What time is it?")
7. What's exactly your relationship with tea? Are you capable of appreciating the infinite varieties of tea and/or you have a giant set of equipment to prepare and serve a cup of tea?

I appreciate a pure Keemun black tea or Longjing, but I'm also fine with an Earl Grey tea bag and milk. I also like Lapsang, Jasmine, or Assam Chai boiled with whole spices and ginger.

8. What was your initial idea for “The musicians”? I mean, you were looking at a classic painting and you imagined: “what if we make a demo about it” or such? 🙂

I really love these paintings of musicians with expressive faces, but I think a stronger influence is a prior project. Me and a friend did a VR-experience where you can go inside famous paintings, and after years of trying to be authentic and serious reproducing classical paintings, I kind of longed to do something very silly instead.

9. I know it’s hard, but what if you had to choose four milestone demos, even not the most known, one for each “era” of the demoscene (the 90s/software rendering, 2000-2010/hardware acceleration, 2010-2020/the sdf era, after 2020) basing on your taste. Which ones would you choose and why?

Very hard indeed, and I know I have probably missed many great demos during the years. I will give a timeline of some favorite hits: State of the Art, Stars: Wonders of the World, Intrinsic Gravity, Eon and The Legend of Sisyphus.
But then I want to highlight:

• Transformer 3 - Limp Ninja: An amazing audiovisual journey with impeccable timing and finish. Manages to feel both otherworldly and familiar, timeless and retro.
• Litterae Finis - Trauma: When it comes to textmode rendering, this is my nr.1. Mesmerizing! Features a wonderful soundtrack by !Cube and sparse but well executed sync.
• Then and Before - Altair: Fantastic mood for 4k. Very cinematic and high polish in regards to both sound and visuals.
• Wrecklamation - Logicoma: A great track as well as a great encapsulation of the demoscene, abusing the module playback to turn the tracked music compo into a demo compo.

10. I have to ask this: what do you think will happen in the scene 20, 30 years from now? Will there still be C64 or Amiga productions? Will a scene still exist?

I think there will definitely be a scene with C64 and Amiga prods! Maybe not like today, but I think new generations will always watch the classics, and some will be curious enough to explore these platforms for themselves.

posted by friol at 10/17/2026 08:53:00 PM - under: demo, demoscene, hacking, interviews - comments? here (0)

I was asked to join the ROMA.EXE organizing team around November 2025.


At the time, there was little more than a landing page that looked something like this and also the general idea of what the party was supposed to become.

Also, it seemed that a never overwelmed LRNZ was already creating the party's visual identity, while the organizers were looking for someone to build the actual website (apparently that landing page wasn't meant to be the final version).

Overall, it all felt like something very far away. But in the end, I said yes because it sounded fun. I figured I could bring my usual ironic perspective to the table. Besides that, what else are you going to do during the coldest months of the year, other than staying home and idling on Discord?

Around mid-December, LRNZ delivered the complete visual identity package. Little did we know (or perhaps we did) that we'd be staring at those images for many months to come - including on giant 6-by-3 billboards (spoiler: meters, not pixels).

We started studying other demoparties. The bar had clearly been raised compared to my memories of TiG and Trip, the Italian parties of the late '90s. Nowadays every party seemed to have multi-camera streaming, a sophisticated party system to satisfy even the pickiest sofa scener, and much more.

Not that we were particularly worried. After all, we were a whopping 5 people organizing the party.
A few days after LRNZ's delivery, the website was online, thanks to Astaroth, who basically built it overnight, while FRK handled all the hosting infrastructure. The website even featured a countdown timer, although it would only become really intimidating several months later.

Now all we had to do was fill the party hall with people, and avoid ending up with zero productions.
Looking at other events, we found parties comparable to ours in terms of size and duration, such as Rsync and Mountainbytes. The difference was that those weren't first editions. So I gradually convinced myself that having 30 to 40 participants would already be realistic. 50 would have been a huge success.
After all, Italy hadn't had a demoparty in 19 years.

At the beginning of 2026, we started developing the three invitation intros: C64, Amiga, and PC. Soon after, we also started producing physical promotional material: iridescent stickers, Roberta's toroids, and various other goodies.
Then came Revision, which, together with X, would become the main place to promote our event.

Personally, I spent a good portion of Revision rewriting our 64k intro so it would actually fit into 64 kilobytes, eventually submitting it 15 hours after the deadline (thanks again, Chaos).
If you watch the Revision timelapse from this point onward, you can actually see me coding non-stop in order to finish the 64k and do justice to the rest of the organizing team.


Overall, Revision turned out to be a fantastic amplifier for the party. Mainly because we annoyed pretty much every scener we could find.

By May we had already passed my well known mental threshold of 50 tickets sold, but I still couldn't quite believe it. I finally started believing it towards the end of May, when ticket sales suddenly stopped looking like a straight line and turned into an exponential curve.


What surprised - and honestly moved - me the most was seeing so many people buying Supporter tickets (€100). That's an incredible gesture, and it's exactly why our supporters have a dedicated section on our website.

Along the way, local communities such as Spazio Chirale and Roma Gamedev joined forces with us. The demoscene can sometimes be a rather closed and self-referential circle, so collaborating with neighboring communities can only be healthy. It's a bit like finally leaving the house and going for a walk.

And then, completely unprepared as ever, the party day arrived. Turning the party into a real event after months of existing only virtually takes an incredible amount of energy. In fact, I'm only now catching up on enough sleep to be able to sleep less and actually do something else.

But it was a mesmerizing experience.
We had releases ranging from the (not so) obvious PC, C64 and Amiga, to something more exotic like the Atari Lynx or the MSX. I barely had time to look away from my PC, especially during the final moments, when entries kept arriving non-stop. Yet every time I looked up, I saw a hall packed with hundreds of people. I was still convinced we'd end up with about 50 participants - 60 at the absolute most - but by Saturday I had to admit I had been spectacularly wrong. From the stage, I even asked whether the people who had bought tickets from Canada and the United States were actually there.
They answered.


If there will be another edition of ROMA.EXE, there are countless things I'd do differently. Like adding those extra 16 pixels to the graphics competition rules. Or actually plugging in that microphone for the ambient audio. Or organizing it next to Pellicu$'s house, on a weekend when Pellicu$ is actually available.

I'd like to believe that, with this party, we managed to restart something in Italy. Maybe we helped wake up a scene that had been asleep for years, excluding the sporadic comeback of some groups and individuals. Maybe. Then again, that brings us back to the eternal question: will there still be a demoscene twenty years from now? What I do know is that I saw plenty of oldschool sceners who still have something to say, and plenty of younger people who may soon learn how to say it.

posted by friol at 6/29/2026 09:27:00 PM - under: demoscene, Italy, organizing, party - comments? here (0)

I was idling on IRC... I mean on Discord last night, and we started talking about the Italian demoscene with an old friend and scener (Pellicu$/Japotek). We listed the productions of Japotek at the old demoparties (despite the years, our memory was not that bad), and we came to a party called "The Italian Gathering", back in 1998.

At that party, Japotek won the democompo with "Dual Soul" (beautiful demo, go watch it), and another Italian group, d0d (Day Zero Deflection) came second with a demo called "0trunk". I wanted to see that demo again, and quickly went to pouet, but immediately discovered that that demo was missing. Same thing on demozoo. A Google search returned no results.
Seemed that that demo belonged to the nefarious category of the "lost" demos.

So I wrote on Facebook to an old member of d0d, to see if someone still had that executable. Very quickly, a couple of people responded and shared the missing .zip, which I immediately uploaded on pouet. But then, the discussion continued on Facebook, and some people expressed the desire to have an "archive" of all the Italian productions.

In the past, people made entire websites dedicated to the Italian scene, with archives and lists of various types. But you know, those websites disappear as fast as they were born.
Also, on pouet there are a couple of lists, "Scene .it" and "Italian Productions", but they are far from being complete (let's say we are at less than 10% for each one). But I didn't want to do another list or another website (remember this comic).
I thought a more forward-looking tactic would be better.

So, I decided that my approach on building an Italian demoscene archive would be based on those principles:

- Rely on trustable websites. Don't buy another domain or start from scratch; there are scene.org, demozoo and pouet, just base the work on those foundations
- Make the list reproducible with the appropriate tools

I also started asking myself: what is an "Italian" production? I mean, groups can be composed of people from different countries. When do you consider a group (an so its productions) as "Italian"? I began coding a Python script that would start from the Pouet data dumps (the one with groups, in particular) and check on demozoo the nationality of its members (pouet doesn't have that info, unfortunately).

Just a couple of hours (I hope the demozoo admins didn't see my script scraping their site) and I had a nice Google Sheet with around 13029 groups, their member count and how many members were flagged as "Italian" on demozoo. After that, I excluded the groups that have less than 30% of their members coming from Italy. 30% seems like a nice tradeoff, and gives a list of 74 groups. Wow, all the 74 Italian groups in history!

Or better, after a cross-check with this page, we are at 93 groups.

Some more search with the fellows on Discord, and we hit 97 groups. Some *more* search, and we are at 101 (mainly a lot of Amiga history started to surface at this point). After a more depthly search, we are at 103 groups. Oh, I just added *myself* and we are at 104. I meant 106. 107 if we consider also groups like Charlie Brown Records, that released mainly music but also a musicdisk (Note: the final-final list is made of 133 groups/sceners - I think).

7 of those groups are not present on demozoo. A bunch of more groups are not present on pouet. How many productions are we missing, how many demos in the nefarious "lost" category? I don't want to know. I'm just reporting the missing info we need to be *100% complete* at the end of this article, just in case someone with an old hard disk or a "phantom link" comes up and finds that material.

So, a little more of automatic HTML generation and fighting with CSS later, and this is the final result. The entire thing should be rebuildable, as I'm dropping the source of the tools used to generate the final page on github. demozoo.org is the "master" and you just need a list of demozoo URLs to generate the page.

The missing or "lost" groups:

• Ecstasy Brothers
• Fortezza Delle Scienze (it was a half-serious group, at least it's on demozoo now)
• Glamour
• Kids out of standard (they produced only a small <512b intro that's already on demozoo)
• Neural Activity
• Nightstar
• Swap

So, is this the complete list of all the Italian groups/sceners/productions? I don't think so. As I go deep down there, I find solo productions by Italian people, groups that are so forgotten that even the Internet doesn't remember them.

I will try to reconstruct this, but, I fear, just to find something more hidden.

posted by friol at 9/15/2024 08:40:00 PM - under: - comments? here (0)

Life is good when you have a nickname with a number in it.

Mod3m of Darkage nickname's was originally "Modem", but at some point he changed it and surrendered to the dark side of eliteness. Some days ago I noticed a production from Darkage at Revision 2023. Yes, Mod3m and Darkage were making a comeback after more than 20 years.

So, I quickly wrote to Paolo (Mod3m) and asked him a bunch of questions.



First of all, cheers for seeing you back at Revision 2023; more or less, about 20 years have passed from the last demo by Darkage. What sparked your reunion and the will to release something at a party?

Mod3m: there must be something in the air that made coming back in business a lot of Amiga sceners from the nineties. I'm talking about Melon, Lemon., Andromeda, Haujobb, Ephidrena, just to cite a bunch. It has been, for me, about one year since I felt the desire to return back to the scene and make a new Amiga demo, and slowly, I started to remove the dust from AsmOne and write some new routines. I have to admit I didn't remember anything, in the beginning! Luckyly, the memories started to come to surface, and now I feel fresh as in the nineties :) Seems that the scene can live without Mod3m, but Mod3m can't live without the demoscene. It's a small part of my life that gives me a lot of joy and satisfaction.

Where does the name "Neocolora" come from? Is it linked to Darkage's old demos (neo, neo 2, etc.)?

Partly, yes. One of the reasons that pushed me back to programming on the Amiga was completing "neo 3", that I started coding back in 2001, but that I didn't finish. Actually, only two effects where ready, effects that I kept in Neocolora, but the rest was produced between 2022 and 2023. When I proposed the name "Neo 3", Virgill (one of the authors of the soundtrack) shared some alternative names, and everyone liked "Neocolora".

But... what did you really do in those 20 years? (easy question 😁)

When my "career" on Amiga finished, both as a scener and as a commercial programmer, I switched to music. In 20 years, I published a lot of Cds and played in more than 1200 concerts around the world. If you are curious about what I did, you can visit the website www.pabloraster.com, where you can find a lot of info. I also wrote two biographies, one related to the Amiga period ("Darkage Software, la storia") and one that tells about the 20 years I spent making music ("Pablo Raster, 20 anni in Dub") (editor's note: the books are in Italian, but this is a good opportunity to learn it).

Which platform do you use to write code? Do you use an emulator or an original Amiga?

Mod3m: I still have my A1200 Tower with a 68060 CPU, PPC and Bvision, but for practical reasons I mainly use WinUAE. A friend (and Amiga scener) dumped my Amiga hard disk, so when I use the emulator I have exactly the software and configurations that I used in the nineties. Also, I configured WinUAE to show the typical scanlines of CRT monitors, and I use a Waffle drive for the floppy disks, so the "sensation" is similar to the one a real Amiga gives.

Did you ever thought of producing something on PC?

Oh, in real life I program on PC (I stopped playing music in 2020 and I switched jobs), but I'm not attracted from the idea of doing a PC demo.


How is the screen "bounce" effect, from many Darkage demos, and even in Neocolora, done? Any trick in particular?

Amiga equals multitasking, and that bounce effect is executed in an interrupt regardless of how much the CPU is loaded; so, if I'm for example drawing a texture mapped object that takes several frames to be drawn, I can always bounce the screen at 50fps independently. Moreover, I can also fade the screen, move sprites, and do many other things.

Is there any PC production that impressed you in those years (or to the Amiga people is still forbidden to watch PC productions 😁)?

Mod3m: ahaha, no, from 2017, even we Amigahns can use the PC :-D There are some recent PC demos that I liked in particular: Ziphead and Number One by CNCD and Fairlight (Finland a go-go, incredible design), Return by Rebels& Calodox (especially for the soundtrack by Alkama) and, from the latest Revision, Mechasm by Fairlight; however, I consider the latter a "half demo", because the excessive weight (1GB!) makes it more suitable as a wild demo.

What do you think of the shortage of 64k intros on the PC platform? Seems that Amiga hasn't the same problem; for example at Revision there were 10 64k Amiga intros...

Mod3m: I'm a bit sorry for this situation, because I think that the 40k and 64k formats are ideal and very well calibrated. Anyway, I've seen some 4k intros on PC (like the one by LJ and Virgill) that make your jaw drop!

Is there a coder or a group (even not well known) that inspires you in the Amiga or PC scene, even from the past, and why? And in the (quite dead) Italian demoscene?

Ram Jam were always an inspiration, for me, particularly Randy/RJ. I owe a lot to him; I would haven't been able to write 680x0 asm code without him.

When is the next issue of Showtime coming out?

Mod3m: tomorrow morning! Eheh, I'm joking. I would really like to set up an editorial staff and release new issues (I also picked up the source code and compiled it; everything works), but considering the short time I have, I don't think it will be possible. However, in the paper magazine Passione Amiga I am curating a large section dedicated to the Amiga demoscene.


You hinted at a new comeback, with a new production. What can you tell us about that?

Mod3m: Yes, there is the desire and the commitment to make a new demo this year, and thanks to the collaboration with Dip (who is much, much better than me at writing code) I think we will be able to complete it. I'm looking at Xenium 2023 in Poland as a possible release party, but we'll see. Also, I've started writing a musicdisk engine that I hope to finish this spring; the goal is to release the musicdisk (which is still unnamed) at regular intervals, perhaps every 3-4 months.

Do you think that AI image generators (Midjourney, etc.) and pre-baked 3D engines (see the Unreal engine) will bring value to the scene or definitely corrupt it?

Mod3m: As I said before, I prefer the demoscene to remain on well-defined platforms, where all coders have the same features available; if it has been decided that on PC it is fine to integrate ready-made AI and 3D engines, I think that it would be necessary to regulate common specifications, beyond which we no longer speak of demos but of wild demos.


Thanks to Mod3m for his time. I think that the Amiga scene won't stop surprising us in the future.

posted by friol at 4/23/2023 05:43:00 PM - under: - comments? here (0)

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