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)

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)

Bulletin Board Systems: something everybody already forgot.

Something nobody will remember in 50 years, except for Wikipedia.

To your nephews you'll tell: 'Yes, we used those, like photographic film or books'. BBSes were the grannys of the Internets, most of the time used in a serial-way, accepting just one user at time.
And sometimes, the sysop (yeah, maybe Wikipedia will keep memory of him too) came out of nowhere, breaking your intimate and private feeling of leeching files or, badly, some early porn pics, and greeted you or talked to you when the last thing you wanted was to talk.

So next time you logged in, you were like a thief with your paranoid eyes spinning around, fearing the sysop would appear from nowhere, again.

But demoscene, which is everywhere there is shortage of space, bytes, screen resolution or bandwidth, soon started to sponsor BBSes, basically for the selfish need to advertise its productions, or just to spread, well, you know, good old 'stuff' (legal and illegal). Laws were really slow to realize what was happening, so there was a short timelapse where 'hackers' lived in an happy limbo of anarchy.

So, 'bbstros' were born. What are those? Well, take a demo. Make it 3 or 4 kilobytes long. Add music. Add some text talking about telephone numbers, forums and warez and one or two demoscenic effects. There you are. This kind of productions sneaked easily into the 'big' zipfiles containing warez legal software, just like a sort of benign virus.

Even well known groups of the demoscene made bbstros.

Maybe the most well known BBS ad is 'Starport 2' by the Future Crew. Yeah, that mythical group that made the original Second Reality (not the C64 remake).

I remember reading the (printed) source code of STARPORT.COM in my uncle's bathroom. You could find many coding tricks there, not only size related ones, and I couldn't agree more upon the quote by Psi 'Making a small intro is not hard. Making a small intro with a nice feel is very hard'. Because you know, Starport 2 was made in 1993, and was 1993 bytes long. Yeah, things like that counted in 1993.

bbstros showed off cryptic and mysterious acronyms like 'V32bis', 'DGI',' GSN' or talked about forgotten places like 'The Asylum', 'The Lounge', 'Blastersound', 'Digital Nightmare', 'The One', 'Virtual Light', 'Equalizer' and so on. And exotic international prefixes you would be afraid (or not so) to call. But at the end you would make that call, attracted by that '3 Gigabytes' of downloadable software or by the luxurious 'free email'.

There is another couple of mythical intros made for the (as much as mythical) french A.C.E. BBS. Both are productions of Karl/Nooon.

One (ACE2.COM) is 2.221 bytes and shows a 3d voxel rotating 'ACE' logo. The second falls in the 'things that ran fine on a 386sx' category (I should write a post just on that concept, someday). It's only 2.465 bytes long, and has a nice big scrolling font and a background rotozoomer with the then famous 'Intel Outside' motto.

If you wanted 'the latest warez' for (no less than) HP48, you had to call 'The One', back in 1994. 'The One' had a nice ad, made by Eclipse, that is very Amiga-ish in its colours, effects and in the font. Pointless to say, this ran fine on a 386 too.

Italy had BBSes as well.
Many were demo-related (it's 1995, remember). Something of them still exists, if you look closer. Somewhere on this page you can find old vestiges of that time appearing as modern-day .png files. If launching again those reliquiae makes your DosBox sound strange and metallic, you should be aware that many DOS BBS intros exploited the old 'Adlib' (or OPL2, integrated into the SoundBlasters) chip/soundcard, because an Adlib player routine is much more simple and small than a full digital replayer. Some BBS intros have ASCII graphics also, because that's tiny (and colorful).

Oh well, that was just the tip of the iceberg for bbstros.

There were sub-scenes of BBS intros on Amiga, C64 and Atari too. Still, someone in a moment of nostalgia makes a bbstro for Windows.

That makes no sense, you may say. But what is this if not an expression of something measured in kilobytes, reduced to 32 colours, four channels and with BBS telephone numbers that start with "+", called demoscene?


Edit: apparently, BBS-fever infected Pouet too:

posted by friol at 2/08/2015 08:07:00 PM - under: BBS, demoscene, intro, Italy - comments? here (0)

Page 109 of "Freax", the only book* (I'm aware of) on the demoscene, reads:

"There was some C64 scene in Italy but it was the weakest of all European countries. The only group worth mentioning was F4CG's Italian section but they were mainly importers, rarely releasing a few cracks".

That's all the book has to say about Italian scene (C64 and Amiga**).

I don't know, or better, I didn't know C64 Italian demoscene before (my activity in the scene starts around 1997), but that sentence triggered some serious doubts in my mind. Italians are usually full of ideas and a resourceful kind of population, so it seemed strange to me that all that remains of C64 Italian scene is a group that was made mainly of "importers". So I started to delve into that years (somewhere between 1984 and 1992), speaking with Italian sceners that lived that era in first person, watching all the material that is on CSDb, staring at hypnotic scrolls on black backgrounds that last for ages.
The result isn't so far from Tomcat's sentence, but this post may be seen as an "addendum" to what isn't written in "Freax".
And, trust me: 8 years of C64 scene deserve more than 2 rows in a 300-pages book.

Maybe what I'll write may not be 100% accurate (since almost 30 years have passed from that days, and traces are fragmented and unclear sometimes). Maybe some works (intros) could be just reuse of international material (I'm no C64 expert, after all). Also, 1985s were the years when it was not unusual to pick a .sid from some game and put it straight into a cracktro. Copyright laws were fuzzy at that time, and pouet threads on "ripped commercial music in demos" were still years to come.

Italian C64 scene shows mainly two phases (that merge into each other):

1) A "cracking/swapping/trading" phase, from around 1984 to 1989

2) A "maturity" phase, from 1989 to 1992, when we start to see typical products of the demoscene: demos, intros, music disks, diskmags and so on - and, consequently, the demoscene becomes also self-aware (yep, as Skynet does in Terminator)

"Happy" nature of the Italian people and fuzzy laws on copyright of digital material were fertile ground for a bunch of crack groups born around 1984-1985. Memories of that period speak of coders with "incredible skills", like the people behind 2703, NIWA, PM and so on. Mystery and funny anecdotes remind of mythical figures, like Piersoft "the hairdresser" that (legend says) had a swapping/trading-base in the back of his barber shop. Or Wildcat, the "cracker" of ICS that is flagged as a lamer, a "re-cracker" and a ripper by almost every group of that period.

Those were the days of "the Wizard", a copy-protection mechanism for floppies that, if forced, made your 1541 vibrate so badly that, after five or six unsuccessful tentatives, you had to buy another disk drive.

Cracker groups spread in the whole "boot" (Italy is a big boot, did you know?). Crackers were so fearless that put shamelessly their private phone numbers in their crack-intros, sometimes asking to "call them call them call them" to get the latest and freshest software. Naples was the homeland of "software collections", big compilations of 10-15 commercial games on a single cassette, each game often dubbed with strange Italian names. Importing games and cracking them became a real business, with people organizing trips to London or other european cities to catch the latest warez. Yep, we would see a "serious" law (as an Italian law can be) for copyright only in 1993, but for that date crackers were already far away.

With the decline of C64 in favour of Amiga and other computers, the C64 cracking scene went disappearing (even if there are trainer/cracker "nostalgia" groups even at the time I'm writing this, in 2013!); what remained was the beginning of the "real" C64 Italian demoscene. This scene was, indeed, a prologue to the Amiga Italian demoscene.

Some interesting groups started to walk the scene, like Gax777, Demons, ARM, The Force (an italian-hungaro-israelian-australian collaboration) and Air Design. As said, groups started to produce more serious demos, not only one-screen intros, but charts, original music compilations, graphic packs and disk magazines. One for all: the funny-named (funny just for the few among us that understand Italian) "Coolface" (a beautiful joke on a word that sounds like "cool" in Italian). This C64 diskmag reached even 5 editions, mainly composed of flames towards (yep, again) Wildcat/ICS and reviews of Italian cars.

Relevant coders and graphicians emerge, like gi 909 of the Force and Zagor and Zoris of Gax777. Graphicians are now capable of drawing nice logos and pictures, and coders can open the borders of a C64 like a child opens his presents at Christmas time. At the same time, some (unfortunately not long-lived) game companies were starting to produce software, and some demosceners worked there as coders or artists.

And then, the Italian C64 scene starts to fade away.

The first "real" Italian party, in 1994, and some early "crackdowns" by the police mark the end of an era. F4CG and a few other groups still produce intros and scene-related material, but after 1993 the main targets of Italian scene will be PCs and Amigas.

(The Italian Amiga&PC scene produced, in particular, world-class demos and sceners, winning international parties and writing pages of demoscene history)


Italo-sceners on C64 gave us hundreds of cracks/trainer intros, kilometers of cassette tape and tons of insults towards Wildcat/ICS. And still, survivors of that strange and obscure period are proud of what your imagination and will could produce in a world that still had no Internet, wi-fi or broadband, where the only way to swap software ("swap", a term that lost its significance, today) was sending a real paper mail into the void and waiting for an answer.

* People pointed out that there is at least another printed book (in English) on the demoscene: Demoscene: the art of real-time. I haven't read it, but since it has only 72 pages, I hardly think it talks about Italian demoscene.

** At page 327 "Freax" dedicates 9 lines (yes, nine) to the Italian Amiga scene of the 90s. That's all.

posted by friol at 6/05/2013 10:46:00 PM - under: C64, history, Italy - comments? here (4)

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