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)

The first time I saw FBY, he was sleeping on the stands of the arena where The Italian Gathering 1997 was taking place. The party was almost finished, and they were announcing the winner of the 4 channel music compo (which was FBY himself). Someone started yelling at him, but he continued sleeping, until they threw him his prize and he awoke.

FBY is a great musician. The parties he won speak for themselves: 1st at The Party 1995, 1st at Saturne 1996, 1st at The Italian Gathering 1997 and 1998, 1st at Outline 2006, and so on. But more than looking at placements, you should experience his mods in first person. If you haven't heard of him, well, lucky you: you have a world to discover today. I suggest (but it's just my personal opinion) to start with Apache, Strange flower and Sambing to have a quick glance of his art, and then dig deeper if you like his style (you will).

So I reached FBY and asked him to talk about his musical origins, tracked music and music in general.


I've read that you started with a guitar and that your sisters carried you (or forced you to go) to music lessons. Is your family a family of musicians? Did you study classical music?

Yes. I began to sing when I was young, and then my sisters and I started to take private guitar lessons with maestro Carlo Mascilli. It was really fun: our teacher gave us pieces to study at home, and then we had to replay them during the lesson. At the end of each lesson, the teacher played for us... he was fantastic. Ivana [his sister, Ed.] quit first, while Sandra continued studying really hard. I was not studying that much, but still managed to keep up with the lessons, and after a while I started to bring to the lesson my own pieces (I was starting to show the traits of a composer, more than a performer). At our first recital, I played music from Leo Brouwer, Dionisio Aguado and three preludes written by me :)

So yes, I had a classical education that influenced my first compositions, like the "Piano Sound" I-V and "FBY Studio" I-IV series. By the way, the first music program I used wasn't a tracker, but a pentagram-based composing software, "Aegis Sonix".

In 1998 you said: "I like travelling a lot, so I don't think I will stay in Florence much more or in a stable way; I'd like to spend quite some time in America, maybe near a big lake with big trouts inside". How did it go then? Did you catch some big trout in America? :)

No, but my father went there :)
I've been in New York and for some time in the flat-ish Florida. I was at Delray Beach and often went to Miami and the beaches near there. I travelled a lot, across Europe in the 90s and then also in Asia. In the last few years, I really dug into Tiziano Terzani's books on the subject. 
Tell us something about the "acid" period of FBY's music, the one that brought pieces like "Acido Puro". Too many hours spent at the disco or just a consequence of the 90s?

Both things, I would say :)
At that time, with my friends Francesco and Demetrio we were listening to "a martello" music [an Italian expression to identify music similar to gabber or with a pumping bass drum, Ed.] every evening. If you like Acido Puro, you should also like Tetriade and Klassica.

Did you ever compose that kind of modules where notes make drawings in the patterns or the pattens go backwards?

No, never. But I appreciate Audiomonster and other musicians that did this kind of stuff. Really ingenious!

Apache. What's the title about? The public release of the .xm dates to 1998, but there are two other versions in different keys. Can you tell us something about the birth of this module?

The title comes from the American Indian tribe... not from the open source web server :) The first version was made in 1988 with Aegis Sonix (4 channels), the second version was made with 2 Amigas playing simultaneously in Soundtracker (8 channels), and the third and final version was made with Fast Tracker and rendered with Deliplayer (with additional stereo sound and reverb).

How did I track one module on 2 Amigas, you may ask... My friend Bernie [Bernardo Innocenti, Ed.] invented an interface that duplicated the mouse movements on the 2 Amigas, when needed, and created a home-made mixer for sound output. He also wrote an Amiga utility called "XModule", that was able to merge two 4ch modules into an 8ch one, and to convert Oktalyzer modules [Oktalyzer is a tracker often used by FBY, Ed.] into .mods.

Another piece I really like is the soundtrack for "Mille e non più mille", a 64k by Spyral that was presented at Mekka/Symposium 1997. Did you have problems staying within the 64k limit (the mod is 20k)?

Not really. I was used to write chip music. For example, I produced other small mods, like "Lucky day" (43k), "Amiga monkey shine" (63k), and the more well known "Superjazz" (aka "Oh yes, Jazz!", 86k compressed), that won the chiptune compo at DiHALT 2007 in Russia.


A question on "inspiration". Talking about non-commissioned music, how does inspiration come for you? You just stand in front of the tracker and start composing, or you imagine a melody when you're walking, or you play an instrument or all of the above?

The first option. I regularly opened the tracker, every afternoon, and started composing what came to my mind. As you can see in the page that collects all my mods (FBY ALL MUSIC), I really covered a lot of genres. I liked to experiment and I enjoyed composing music in every style and genre. For example Andalusia, that recalls Spanish/Andalusian music (I've also been there on vacation) and Paco de Lucia's one.

Is there a relationship between your mood when you are tracking and the quality of the music you produce, or this is really randomic? Where does quality, the thing that makes a piece stand as a masterpiece that is remembered, come from, in your opinion?

Yes, there is a relationship. But there is also a random, experimental factor. For me, the quality of a musical piece comes from its originality (that's why I love Pink Floyd, a band that experimented a lot) and then from its tracking and musical technique.

In another interview, you said: "In the future, more than affirming myself, I hope to create a series of skills, working practices, and a commercial system that would put in the spotlight artists, creators and not the usual merchants". Do you think that with Youtube, Soundcloud, and all the platforms to share music we are near to your idea of 20 years ago?

Yes, that's true: the "new" Internet gave to everybody the chance to put their music online, and for sure this is a good thing. At the time of that interview, anyway, I was starting the company "Nayma Software", in 1998, so in my mind there was the idea to establish a more open and free way of working to create software and electronic art. Nowadays, some companies, like Google, are near to that ideal, giving their employees that kind of freedom and flexibility.

Music in the demoscene has always been free, but very good, nonetheless.
Do you think that music should have a price? Or do you think that there can be a system that would give free music to the listener without letting the artist starve [maybe called Patreon or Spotify, Ed.]?

In my opinion, music should be free. In fact, my motto has always been "Fby's music is free music". Musicians have always been starving, little exceptions apart.

Last question: after all these years, you can tell us: F=Fabio, B=Barzagli... and Y=?

Sorry, it's a secret I will take to my grave :)


It has been a pleasure speaking with FBY and discovering his tracking secrets (but not the secret of his nickname, unfortunately). He's also involved in social themes (he mantains a portal on divorced fathers and paternity, www.paternita.info) and he writes thoughts and aphorisms (www.FabioBarzagli.net - in Italian).

We hope to hear more music from him soon!

posted by friol at 8/12/2020 04:53:00 PM - under: demoscene, history, interviews, intro, Italy, nineties, parties, tracking - comments? here (0)

Mixing my need to code with different tools and on different platforms (as of today, counting among the others, GW-Basic, the Nintendo DS, Arduino, iPaq OS and a lot of other forgettable shit) and the prison where a pig that ate a bat confined us, I ended up building a demoscene skill for Amazon Echo.

The skill can do many unnecessary things, like spitting out a demoscene fun fact and listing the upcoming parties or the top prods of the month, without you leaving your sofa. It will be available on the Amazon skill store when the Amazon testers think we are all dead it's time (they are saying on 24/4, at the moment) (UPDATE 17/04: the skill is now LIVE in English or Italian).

But anyway, the excess of spare time makes its victims too, and I decided to produce a video (!) about it (never edited a video in my life). If you can stand the loudish ambient noise, the lack of a microphone and my primitive English skills, you can watch it here (it's only 4 minutes long, after all):


Hope everybody survived this. This video, I mean.
Gosh, if this quarantine continues, I will start singing and playing the ukulele.

posted by friol at 4/13/2020 11:49:00 AM - under: alexa, demoscene, skill - comments? here (1)

I've recently switched jobs. The new job is boring as hell. The previous one was heavy and boring as hell.
So, things are getting better, uh?

During the last month or so, I've been assembling a website from scratch (but shhh, don't tell that to my company).

The website is this one. It's called "sceneþoetry" (yes, it is. With a 'þ', yes).

Basically, it's a repository of scene poetry and demo lyrics. Goals for it are easy searchability, easy visualization on all devices, making the data linkable and easily aggregatable. For sure my current work influenced it in some way (I'm working on Elasticsearch, at the moment. No, nothing demoscenic, sorry. Well, wait. How long for a demo on Kibana?).

Your contribution is really needed and appreciated.
On the website, there is a contact form that allows you to submit a missing lyric or missing poetry. And many of those are missing. Just compare with this list (I think a good 50% of the lyrics are missing). You'll find a list of demos also on the contact form.

So, let's build together the definitive list of scene poetry.
Evah.

P.S.: now I must find another project to do at work.

posted by friol at 3/07/2019 09:20:00 PM - under: - comments? here (0)

As promised before I am obliged very happy to present you the 2nd part in our decennal review of 4k intros.
(Wow, it seemed more the statement of some retirement club...)

This time I won't reveal you how many 4ks could fit your 1.44Mb disk, but, to make you understand 4ks, I would just use an easy concept: as someone said, "4k intros are like 4096 1-byte intros glued together".

Anyway. I have mixed thoughts about this second span of 4k history. I'm quite confident we exited from the "wobbly raymarched thingie" or "infinite fractal" trend we've seen starting around 2010, but the general feeling is that the way to find a new direction is still long and painful, and that new ideas are just starting to emerge.

Also, looking over this new decade, some black spots, or "black years" like 2014 come up, years that seem to show a general emptiness in terms of ideas and new releases. In general, we also saw a massive increment of 4ks that use the same synth (4klang), unfortunately often with the same presets, flattening the soundscape variety.
But, regardless of that, and confident that the scene is NOT dead, let's dive in.

2008 - Texas by keyboarders

The best 4k of 2008 couldn't be anything different from 'the best 4k intro so far', by definition.
I've seen people on Youtube asking if this intro really plays that music.
Yes, it does. On Windows Vista, at least. Understanding how (even if everybody in the scene knows that) is left as an exercise to the reader in the long, winter days.


By the way, I personally like the visuals more than the music in this one.

2009 - Elevated by Rgba

And, by definition, the best 4k intro of 2009 couldn't be different from Elevated.


2010 - Cdak by Quite & Orange

The music and the atmosphere in this one is spacey.
If you read the comments on Pouet, people even like this 4k's music more than the one in "Texas".


Historically, this intro places itself at the dawn of the "infinite fractal" trend that plagued pervaded the demoscene in the early 2010s. But come on, this is *the* infinite fractal demo.

2011 - D-Four by Ctrl-Alt-Test

The best 4k of 2011, according to pouet's "top of the trumpets" is "Code is my pron", but I consider that one, as the title says, just coder's porn. Even if I'm I've been a coder too.


Instead, Ctrl-Alt-Test manages to create something really unique/rare in the scene with this one: an intro based on a flow of words, with a solid and catchy tune. By the way, it's funny reading the source code and the names of the background colours in French (Fondu noir de début, Nuit, Jour, etc.).

2012 - Reionization by mfx

The best 4k from 2012 is this one. Not this one. Not even this one.
Why? Because it's from mfx, because muzik rules and because Youtube can't compress it and you have to run it on real hardware.
(Youtube screenshot follows)


2013 - HBC-00013: Highway 4k by HBC and Tekotuotanto

The clear winner for 2013 is "Highway".


I bet anyone likes camera-distorted tron-esque motorbikes with pumping music in the background.
Interestingly enough, this 4k is written in javascript and then compressed. It's one of the few 4ks using this approach (maybe the only one? there are 55 according to pouet.net, there was even a dedicated party, called DemoJS, seems everybody forgot about this).

2014 - Dismantlement by BluFlame

As said, 2014 was a pretty poor year.
BluFlame, experts in 4k, come to us and save the princess with their "dental mirrors".


In general, the techniques used in this intro are not so new, but the "torus factory" scene is enjoyable, at least.
Nobody knows, still, why some toruses are missing.

2015 - hydrokinetics by Prismbeings

Prismbeings debut at an already very high level with their first 4k.


Some nice touches make this intro stand from the other "normal" raymarched productions: the moody music, that has nice and trippy echoes, the camera distorsions, the dust effect, the *hexagonal* *lens* *flares*.
Wait a sec, they don't have hexagonal lens flares...

2016 - 2nd stage boss by 0x4015 and YET11

What Gargaj said. Really.
If you sum up a size limited intro, a story, spaceships, lasers and explosions, you won't find a demoscener unpleased by this.
Since Lithium by Vista.


2017 - Unprogress by Fairlight

And we end this walkthrough with one of my favourite (to say the less) groups, that seem to have passed through all the ages of demoscene and still being able to be great, even if now they have probably 389 years each one.


This 4k could easily be mismatched for a movie trailer. And it's the first 4k with "statues", I think, or the first 4k with scene titles. But I may be wrong. Disprove me in the comments.

P.S.: by definition, this list should include "the best intro ever" by Razor 1911, but it doesn't. Sorry about that.

posted by friol at 9/07/2018 10:29:00 PM - under: 4k, flares, hexagonal, history, lens - comments? here (0)

Watching 4k intros at Revision 2017 made most people say that 4k is the new 64k.
Well, that's hard to prove, but at least we've seen one revision 8k that was a nearly 1:1 remake of an old 64k ("rise" by mindforce and park).

So maybe 4k is half the new 64k.

Jokes apart, let's see how modern 4ks and 64ks compare.

4ks and 64ks share some limitations. Both have to use generated music, both rarely use stored textures. They are both not using precalculated video, even if some groups, starting from Complex, did this in the past.
64ks can use some stored samples, but just one or two may fit the 65536 bytes limit - so using them doesn't give a clear advantage to 64ks anyway.
Finally, the use of shaders everywhere made 64ks and 4ks even more similar than before.


Still, 64ks have elements that are not present in 4ks (for now).
For example, Conspiracy's intro from Revision 2016 had some evocative black silhouettes recalling human figures. "Gubernyia" from Macau Exports had some of these too, far in the background. 64ks can have a longer and better "story" inside. Just think of "eidolon" by Poo-brain or of (the unfortunately a bit cheesy) "h-immersion" by Ctrl-Alt-Test. Some 64ks can use gm.dls with a bit of trickery. In general, 64ks can have some additional content inside that makes them more complex and various.

But despite of this, having 60 additional whopping kilobytes often acts like a psychologically inverse mechanism that makes coders waste them.
Take "Off" by Mercury. No matter if they say "we have this new shining engine", "we have the bestest synth in the world", "we have a lot of dust on the camera" ("and hexagonal lens flares too") - their 64k seems a lot more like a 4k (at the point that somebody called it "a screensaver"). The same, unfortunately, goes for the latest intro from Conspiracy.

So, does a modern 4k intro look like an older 64k one?

Let me examine some very good candidates.
For example, "absolute territory" by prismbeings reminded me a lot of old intros like "Fresnel 2" by Kolor or "Transgression 3" by mfx. But if you watch them carefully, you see that "absolute territory" looks more like *one* single scene of Fresnel 2, leaving apart the visual quality of the two productions.


Let's take the one I consider the "state of the art" 4k in 2017, "horizon machine" by Eos and Alcatraz, and compare it to the winner 64k of Revision 2012, "gaia machina". Even if you can visually see the gap in those 5 years (the first "machine" is way better for rendering quality), content-wise, or looking at the camera paths and cuts, or even for the quality of the content and objects in the latter one, "gaia machina" still stands higher than the 2017 4k.
The same thing happens if you compare it to more recent winners of Revision: there is almost no competition there.

It seems clear that a middle placed 64k intro like "Off" or "Vessel" can be compared (and maybe lose) to a top-notch 4k like "horizon machine" or "Joia" by Collapse. But 64k clearly win if we take a better designed, packed and polished intro like "eidolon" or "guberniya".


Now we can ask the final questions.

Has the gap between 4k and 64k reduced?
Maybe. Maybe now 64ks and 4ks have the same shaders, the same synths, the same effects, and they are so close that you can't distinguish a mediocre 64k from a brilliant 4k (but still you can distinguish "Chaos Theory 4k" from "Chaos Theory", I suppose).

Is 4k the new 64k?
Not really. Maybe modern 4ks surpassed the average 64k, but still 4ks are runner-ups compared to a jaw-dropping 64k of 2017 or previous years. And probably they will always be.

P.S.: oh well, I didn't notice but 10 years have passed from this post here.
Seems like I "already" have the task to write the second chapter of 4k history (2007-2017).
Stay tuned for more.

posted by friol at 4/21/2017 01:03:00 AM - under: 4k, 64k, comparison - comments? here (2)

Revision 2016 was the definitive proof that 64k intros have still something to say.

Conspiracy is one of those demogroups that made 64ks the main reason of their existence.
In fact, they are in activity back from 2003, and released mostly 64k intros, a pair of 4ks and a couple of demos (one of them could have been a 64k too).

I asked for an interview to Gargaj, musician/coder/demoscene-myth of Conspiracy, shortly after their return from Revision, where Conspiracy placed 2nd right after Mercury (see the results here), and he extended the questions to the rest of the group.

Warning: if you are among the 3 demo freaks that have been on the moon recently and haven't seen "Darkness lay your eyes upon me" (DLYEUM from here after), stop reading this and go watch the intro (this interview contains spoilers and tool screenshots that would ruin the experience).
Then come here again (if you remember the address).




1) Almost 13 years have passed since "project genesis". That intro amazed for the incredible amount of content and for the general cleanness of the scenes. What has changed between the tool used to build "project genesis" (a.d.d.i.c.t. 0.9) and the tool used to create DLYEUM? In which way is the tool used to build DLYEUM "better" than the first one?

A lot has changed, and a lot hasn't.
For one, we learned to code and not just mess around. The tools became pretty sophisticated compared to the first iteration. They are faster, stable, easier to work with and can do a lot more. We overcame several limitations that seemed impossible back then, and not just because of the increase in processing power or the advent of shaders. The tools we used until 2006 had no notion of pixel or vertex shaders, they used fixed pipeline GPU acceleration. Our current generation tool has ditched CPU based texture generation for a GPU based one, and has a proper material system for utilizing the GPU.


Other than these two changes, the rest is basically the same as originally: the mesh generation, animation and especially the timeline concept has stood the test of time.

One thing that had the largest impact was the reduction in the turnaround time when creating visuals, and the evolution of our tool was partly driven by this. The fact that we can go back to a scene and modify a texture or a model and immediately see the result in all its post-processed glory helps immensely in achieving the quality that we'd like to put on the screen. In short: the concepts are the same but more refined, and built into a tool that is "production ready".

2) Same question for the synth used in both intros.

For the first two intros ("project genesis" and "a place called universe") we used a rudimentary tracker+sample generator combo that we knew wouldn't last, but it did the job at the time.
Since "Beyond" we've been using the same modular framework for audio, which allows us to do incremental upgrades without losing any of the familiarity or having to worry about the actual audio engine. It also allows us to deprecate modules that we no longer want to use.
In this particular intro we've tried a few techniques that we felt were needed to match the subtlety of the imagery, and the relatively small (initial) scope of the intro allowed us to experiment without the responsibility of having something that is a permanent solution.

3) Is there a "story" behind DLYEUM?

There is, albeit a loose one.
The initial concept was to create something dark and looming as a sequel (or spinoff) to our other intro called "One of these days the sky's gonna break", but there was no story or storyboard, just a bunch of scenes that we thought would fit together. The narrative created by the final intro is open to interpretation, and that was kinda our goal too: let the viewer fill in the holes, and make up a story of their own if they want to, which we've been happy to see that people have been doing.

4) The silhouettes in DLYEUM are great and original. Are those 3D models? Can you tell a bit more on the tech used to build them?

There were plans to create the human figures in 3D using primitives, but ultimately we imported small vector images and processed them a bit further in the tool to add more detail.


5) Did you have to do some size-fighting to stay under 65535 bytes for DLYEUM or you managed to include everything you wanted in the intro?

We ran out of time before we ran out of space, but just barely. We had 53 bytes left when the deadline came - we have never been so close before. The final version is going to be a challenge to do, because with the lack of time and sleep came the loss of quality in some scenes, which we want to remedy with a proper release. We have no definite timeframe for when that's gonna happen, but we hope to have it released by next week [4th to 8th of april 2016 for who's reading].

6) Did the result of the party (you came 2nd by 2 points, 1890 to 1888) disappoint you, or you think Mercury deserves the 1st place? Has "fermi paradox" something "more" than DLYEUM in your opinion? Be honest.

At this point the results don't matter, this is how it was meant to be.
The Mercury guys are very good friends, and having seen how much work they put into their release, we're happy either way. The two point difference just shows that the audience couldn't decide between the two intros either, and neither could we - like we said at the prize ceremony, "I guess we're even now".


We're happy with the way our intro turned out, we're very happy that the competition was tough again, and most importantly that 64k is back with a vengeance.
We still think it's the perfect demo platform.

7) I asked the same question to IQ some years ago for 4k intros: where are 64k intros headed from here to 10 years in the future? In my opinion, with 4k intros the scene hit something like an "hard edge", so someone had to "invent" 8k intros to go ahead. 64k seem still capable of impressing the audience.

If 4k (and especially recent 8k) intros are any indication, 64k still has a lot left to offer, although we don't think this is fundamentally about size limits.

We're not using any special technology in our intro, it's simply about how you present your content with the help of proper composition, framing, and coloring. This is what usually makes an impression in demos too, and if you do it in 64k, it's an added bonus.


4k seemed to hit a "hard edge" mostly because everyone and their mother started using distance fields/raymarching, which resulted in very similar-looking intros and a lot of people got bored of that.

We have already passed the point in the evolution of the demoscene where putting random flashy imagery one after the other doesn't cut it anymore, or let's say it doesn't really stand out. A few people commented on Pouet that finally they are starting to see inspiration being pulled from outside the demoscene, and that's where we can still improve, or at least it's one direction. The old demoscene conventions and "bring back the only demo art" have their place and we must know where our roots are, but from time to time it's worthwhile to take a look around in the world of film and other artistic media as well.

We definitely don't mean to stop trying to push the limits, but they have to be pushed both technically and artistically.

P.S.: for the maniacal guys out there or for those who want to spy the secret technology behind Conspiracy's intros, I've put two additional *BONUS* *EXCLUSIVE* *SCREENSHOTS* of their demotool here and here. Rip... errr... enjoy!!!

posted by friol at 4/02/2016 10:39:00 PM - under: 64k, mercury, sucks - comments? here (1)

Modern sceners don't have time.

They are quickly grown-up sons of the 80s, that now work for the same banks they hacked or for the same game companies which users they called "gamers".

Moderns sceners don't have time for a 10-12 minutes long demo.

How can we cope with this in modern life? Hey, we've found the solution. And, surprisingly, the solution is not to impose a 15-second production limit in demoparties. The solution is called: demo .GIFs (yes, it's the first name we came up with, I know).

Want to watch "2nd reality" again (for the 279585th time) but don't have time for that black-screen infinite introduction? Skip directly to the "Star Wars" part:


You always thought that "paper" starts too slowly? No problem:


And that's it.
The demo .GIFs almost say it all. Everybody knows that the "oooooh-moment" in "paper" is that scene. No need to watch the full thing.

Maybe you always wanted to know what's so subliminal in "Stash". It's presto-chango (whatever that means):


The GIF's natural looping nature lets us admire parts of well known demos that slip away too fast, instead:


And it loops nicely, too.
The only limit is your need to scroll this web page. Phew.

It's although nice to see how a 3 second long GIF summarizes perfectly "State of Mind", the breakthrough demo of 1998:


Yes, life really is consume-die. Maybe 'work' and 'buy' too.

Missed that end-of-the-century Haujobb intro? This one sums it up nicely:


Want more "oooooh-moments"?


And you're all set, as they would say in America.
We all love toruses, after all.

Enough said.
In 1990 you downloaded the full thing with 56k modems.
In the 2000s you watched the demo on Youtube.
In the 2010s you finally have the demo .GIFs, what else.



'Bjoooooooo ooo ooooo oer'.
Please post more demo .GIFs in the comments.
Thank-you.

posted by friol at 2/24/2016 07:54:00 PM - under: 90s, demo, demoscene, gif - comments? here (0)

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