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Programming IT Technology

TMDC5 100

Posted by michael from the say-it-five-times-fast dept.
TMDC Organizing writes "There's less than two weeks left to the fifth pseudoannual text mode demo compo submission deadline. The web-submission system is finally online, and you can also chat about TMDC5 on ircnet #tmdc5. Even if you haven't started on an entry yet, there's still time!"
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TMDC5 More

TMDC5

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  • ... are cool!

    They remind me of old days when the hardware was the limitation, not the IQ or skills of the coder.

  • Examples of text-mode demos (Score:5, Informative)

    by snillfisk ( 111062 ) <matsNO@SPAMlindh.no> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @04:42PM (#4785041) Homepage
    A few references for everyone wishing to see something created earlier or just for inspiration:

    (mostly win32, sorry)
    on pouet.net [pouet.net]

    <shameless plug>
    kvasigen.demoscene.no [demoscene.no] (80x25, Hangover in Halden, Textmode 3)
    </shameless plug>
    • You're missing the perhaps most obvious one, namely bb [sourceforge.net] (`apt-get install bb' on Debian). :-)

      /* Steinar */

    • I looked at one of the examples, and it looked like a VT100 animation (maybe with sound, but I had sound turned off). Is there more to these than just text bouncing around the screen? I'm sure there is... maybe I looked at the wrong example. Here's a bunch of vt100 animations [textfiles.com].
      --

      Efficient Quiz [tilegarden.com]
      • In case anyone wants to use it, I knocked this together to look at those vt100 animations:

        #include <stdio.h>

        #define BAUD 9600
        #define SLEEP_FUNCTION usleep
        #define SLEEP_SECOND 1000000
        #define BUF_SIZE 100

        int main (int argc, char **argv)
        {
        FILE *infile;
        unsigned long sleeptime=SLEEP_SECOND/BAUD;
        char buf[BUF_SIZE+1];
        int bpos, end;

        if (argc<2)
        {
        infile=stdin;
        }
        else
        {
        infile=fopen(argv[1],"r");
        if (!infile)
        {
        fprintf(stderr,"Can't open file %s.\n",argv[1]);
        exit(1);
        }
        }

        while (!feof(infile))
        {
        end=fread(buf, sizeof(char), BUF_SIZE, infile);
        buf[end]='\0';

        printf("%s",buf);
        SLEEP_FUNCTION(sleeptime*end);
        }

        exit(0);
        }
    • I'd love to see some of these turned into a screensaver of sorts... Definitely more my style than the fancy stuff that's out there now...
  • I've got this brand new game called "Hack" that I want to submit...

  • Not fair. (Score:2, Funny)

    by murat ( 262137 )
    Third guy gets more prizes than the second.

    ... an extra banana!

  • Call me stupid but ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by YahoKa ( 577942 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @04:43PM (#4785045)
    What on earth is a "text mode demo compo" ? Even after clicking the link i have not much more information than that.

    • Re:Call me stupid but ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by snillfisk ( 111062 ) <matsNO@SPAMlindh.no> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @04:48PM (#4785063) Homepage
      A text mode demo compo is a competition where people submit oldskool "demos" (ever heard of a thing called the 'demoscene'?) .. These are usually 3d rendered in software, raytracers, plasmas, cool 2d-effects .. simply doing something that looks good and make you think "how did they do that?" (like the first time someone draw something on the borders on the c64)..

      http://www.pouet.net/ and http://www.ojuice.net/ for further reference.
      • ever heard of a thing called the 'demoscene'?

        What happened to it? I remember back on the Amiga demos were a hot topic... they would be all over magazine coverdisks (disks, not CDs! Aaah...); some of them were extremely impressive - they did things you'd never thought possible with an Amiga 600.

        But now... you don't really see them any more. Pity, really; there were some truly impressive ones. /me goes to dig out the Amiga again...

        Phil, just me

        • Re:Where did it go? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Sesse ( 5616 )

          The demoscene is very much alive -- it has changed, yes (some would say to the worse, some claim it has changed so much it's dead), but it's alive.

          Try the viewing tips on scene.org [scene.org] for a taste of what it has to offer nowadays. If you're more interested in Amiga stuff, there are DivX captures of a lot of new and old Amiga stuff on Amidemos [amidemos.org] (most of it probably won't run on your A600 :-) ). There's a Unix-specific demoscene archive [kameli.net] out there, for those who want native Linux/*nix demos -- in any case, pouet [pouet.net] has a wide range of demos for almost every platform you can think of. :-) (The "top10" list is slightly debatable, though ;-) )

          /* Steinar */

    • Call me stupid too but this is the 1st time I see all these things.

      I want to learn more but all these "demos" seem to run only on MS computers and I only have Linux machines. Is this a coincidence ? /* Before somebody asks, my first computer was a 6502-based machine (far more primitive than the C64) that had to be programmed in assembler. A floppy disk was a dream to me. */

  • AAlib :) (Score:5, Informative)

    by CoolVibe ( 11466 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @04:48PM (#4785065) Journal
    That's the library you'd want to use. Also, check out "bb", which is a very cool OPEN SOURCE text mode demo, with good music, and playable on any terminal out there.

    • Re:AAlib :) (Score:2, Interesting)

      by snillfisk ( 111062 )
      While AAlib is a very nice and cool thing, i'm not quite fond of it being used .. it kinda destroys the point of coding in text-mode (at least thats the way i feel) .. and it makes it (of course) feel aalibbish :) .. theres a whole bunch of neat tricks one can do in standard textmode (i remember someone changing the font to something self-defined (which then were modified like regular graphics) .. kinda took away the charm, however)

      • AFAIK at least "B800" (a 4kB intro by neon/nocturnal, Spetsnaz/Proxima at the time) did a lot of split-screen, scrolling and font tricks. They're not allowed on TMDC, though. :-)

        The intro can be downloaded here [scene.org], although you'll need DOS (or Windows, of course) to be able to view it.

        /* Steinar */

        • The sourcecode was included in some issue of Hugi [www.hugi.de] (can't remember which), but is also online here [darkside.no].

          Please also check out Text [planet-d.net] from The Gathering 97 by $volkraq/Gollum and me :)

    • MPlayer can use AAlib. You can watch DivX movies on your ASCII-text terminal. It's really cool!
      • I've just dowloaded aa, bb and recompiled Mplayer for aa suport. You can play everything in text mode.

        It's really cool, I agree. And, you'll agree, almost totally useless too.

        However, the point of open source is that there is no need to be practical, it can be done only for fun.

        • Re:MPlayer (Score:3, Funny)

          by CoolVibe ( 11466 )
          Useless? Useless my foot. Being able to play quake on my vt320 serial terminal is what I call usefull. Also, being able to play movies with it (with mplayer) is useful too. VGA cards are way to expensive for me :)

  • They've lost. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Trusty Penfold ( 615679 ) <jon_edwards@spanners4us.com> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @04:49PM (#4785068) Journal
    Maximum file size is 1440000 bytes in a ZIP file
    (approx 1.4 megs), and 3 (THREE) megs uncompressed.


    Their intro demo is a 2.3Mb zip

  • Back in the day... (for me 1992) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by httpamphibio.us ( 579491 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @04:58PM (#4785095)
    I remember seeing my first "loader" back in 1992, I had just started drawing ANSI for a local 206 art group called RaT. I remember it quite clearly, it had an ANSI logo that faded in and out and text that scrolled from right to left that faded from dark grey (or more accurately, bright black) to dark white to bright white then back again with really horrible fire effects at the bottom.

    I've always loved textmode demos, they bring me back to a world before the internet was the gargantuan beast it is now, when I called 64 BBS's a day (and would have called more except my modem program only supported 64 entries).

    It's great to see people still doing this.

  • Efficiency. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Trusty Penfold ( 615679 ) <jon_edwards@spanners4us.com> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:01PM (#4785103) Journal


    Okay, so I tried a few (the intro from the story and a couple from an earlier poster's link).

    I thought the demo scene was supposed to be about efficiency - doing amazing things in small space and with other limitations. It is depressing to see that decoding an audio stream and bouncing some characters around an 80x50 display can't be done with less than 100% processor.

    A proper MP3 player can decode an MP3 stream with about 1-2% of avaialable cycles (on my 600MHz athlon) - I can't believe it takes the rest to calculate 80x50 at 50-odd fps.

    There should be a catagory for algorithm efficiency - then I might vote.

    • Re:Efficiency. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by snillfisk ( 111062 )
      The demoscene is first of all about having fun, then about doing things that are impressing. If you're not having any fun while doing it, then its probably not the right thing to do :)

      Most textmode-intros these days are productions that are made just for that, fun.

    • Re:Efficiency. (Score:3, Informative)

      by bob_dinosaur ( 544930 )
      The reason your processor is pegged at 100% is that there's all sorts of fancy software raytracing and algorithmic generation going on in the background - the fact that no hardware acceleration can be used means more CPU cycles are consumed.
    • Well, have you seen these? [sh.cvut.cz] Especially check out the one called 'tube'
    • To get smooth real-time graphics, you always use 100% cpu. As soon as you're done with one frame, you start producing the next one. At textmode resolutions you might end up producing the exact same picture a few times though. And besides all that, making text show up on your screen also takes some time.
    • While I can't say I've torn these programs apart, alot of the programs used in "demos"(especially those who are attempting very small sizes (256 byte, 4k, 64k demos, etc) don't use the Windows API at all, and have no way of calling sleep(), and don't block on any input anywhere... So, when they're not drawing the next frame or decompressing music they're spinning in a do-nothing loop that's just burning CPU.

      I wouldn't chalk it up to laziness, it's more an efficiency thing, and a bit of tradition... DOS demos weren't written to be multi-tasking friendly, why should these? :)

      These demos are much bigger than most (1.4MB zipped), but i'm guessing a large amount of that is going to mp3 music or something similar. Every byte still counts, and how much CPU it's using really doesn't matter to anyone running/judging these.
    • The reason such demos take so much processor time is that they are most likely doing some kind of polling.

      Some pallete tricks for text-mode VGA require programs to synch with the vertical trace of the card and quickly change palette RGB values. One effect that is achieved like this is a smooth gradient background in text-mode (only for VGA and MCGA though).

      The card does not ping you anytime the ray starts tracing a new horizontal line across the CRT, so you need to loop like crazy and read port 0x03DA (if memory serves me right, I haven't done such things in years).

      It is actually a great achievement to manage to synch such an effect with sound, because OPL2 and OPL3 compatible cards used to require a certain delay before some of their registers were written to (that's FM synthesised music for you), and that delay is usually close enough to the time it takes the ray to scan a single line.



      Of course, I have no clue which demo you are referring to, so I might be very, very wrong.

  • Oh, it's nerdy. Wormholes and stuff. Tell me when they animate ascii porn! [spacebarcowboy.com]

  • Slightly off topic, but I thought this might be a good place to mention TextNes, the text mode Nintendo emulator.

    Site [archive.org] seems to have disappeared, but is available from web.archive.org

    File is still available from Zophar [zophar.net].

    Try this with some old roms like Super Mario Bros!
    • Actually, that Emulator would be my doing. I developed it for a while, but nobody ever seemed interested, so I took the website down. :-)

      I have a much more up-to-date version I'm working on for Win32 Console actually. I'm sorely tempted to use it, and an NES ROM, to build a demo for this Compo now.

  • Wow, they get to reinvent the wheel (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Leeji ( 521631 ) <slashdot.leeholmes@com> on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:18PM (#4785153) Homepage

    Additionally the demo authors will not have any hardware-assisted rendering, forcing them to do their own rasterization methods

    Well, I can certainly imagine the thrill (not) of implementing all the fundamentals from scratch.

    There's certainly the point that this will make people write smart algorithms, but there are certain things that everybody will do anyways. Bresenham line drawing. Cohen-Sutherland Line-Clipping algorithm. Crack open your CG textbook and find many more.

    Doesn't the ascii demo scene have any libraries to put the emphasis on smart implementation of ART, rather than the art coming second to a smart implementation of pixel pushing?

    • Errm. Yet the invitation demo uses "TextFX4 and CFL3 libs," "Microsoft DirectX 8.1 SDK d3dx8 lib for math routines," "FMOD for sound." (Oops, I said Microsoft.)

      The rules don't seem to disallow libraries, but the main page makes it sound like that.

    • The compo organization gives you the invitation source code to have something to look into and use as a reference. The invitation source uses/includes also the TextFX4 library which is a simple image interpolation and text output library.

      PS. Port of the TextFX4 library for Linux would be nice.. any volunteers?

  • Very intriguing material (Score:4, Funny)

    by back@slash ( 176564 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:20PM (#4785160)
    Alright I was both interested and bored so I decided to download a couple [scene.org] of these demos [scene.org] and see what they are like.

    I have a couple questions.

    1) What kind of drugs are best when coming up with the ideas for these things. Specifically what were your influences when coming up with the idea to make a scene about a psychotic looking little girl who chases around a bunny rabbit with a meat cleaver and removes it's testicles?
    2) Where can I acquire said drugs.

    Thanks.

  • Source code to invite here... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Check out the invitation [taat.fi] text-mode 3d demo here; it comes with complete source code too.

    Squint a bit and it looks awesome!

  • the tmd (Score:2)

    by jki ( 624756 )
    is just as twisted as bondage play... imho :) Ok , it's 00:41 saturday night...what do you expect from me :)))
  • the sorcerers released the classic definitive text mode demo with pc speaker support... hmm i cant find it anymore! doh! this thing is old, and cool...

    • Do you mean Atom [pouet.net]?

      /* Steinar */

    • Re:sorcerers (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DrunkenPenguin ( 553473 )
      Sorcerers was the first PC demo group and the first group to create text mode demos ever. Those guys were from my hometown Turku, Finland. They (BCG, Ranger, Luke) formed their group in spring, 1989. BCG and Luke were 16 years old, Ranger had just turned 15.

      Someone probably says that Atom was their first text-mode demo. That wasn't. They had released at least 2 text mode demos before Atom. First one was released on March, 1989.

      BCG - one of the members who formed Sorcerers can be reached through his BBS. You can also find the old Sorcerers demos there on the download section. BCG's box can be reached HERE! [bbbs.net]

      ----

      • Sorcerers was the first PC demo group and the first group to create text mode demos ever.

        Well, at least the first one that did demoscene stuff on the PC textmode. What Sorcerers are more famous (or at least SHOULD be, goddamnit!) for is the fact that they were the first PC demo group to have sampled music on their demos. The quality was horrible, but it was there. The reason people remember Atom is because of the sampled tune that played in the background (it was actually composed by Fox of Sorcerers (who now is a comparatively famous Finnish piano player, btw)). The text-mode-demo-with-sampled-music series from Sorcerers included (at least) Atom, Nope, Argh! and probably some others that I forget.

        IIRC, the music used in these demos was actually sampled using a cassette deck of a VIC-20 plugged into the PC. Great stuff.

        Oh man, this brings back memories of the Good Old Days. Maybe someday I'll get back into creating the Sorcerers webpage to properly document all this. I do know that BCG does have all the demos stored away somewhere...

        But then again, almost nobody has the hardware required to run that stuff anymore (good luck trying under any incarnation of Windows!)...
        • You seem to know a lot about the great old days. Please do them a favour and create that webpage if you feel like it! A lot of people would probably like to know what these guys are doing nowadays.

          ----
      • The first demos I saw on PC were two scrollers which were, if I remember correctly, made by Sorcerers and named INTRO and INTRO2. Both had a big red scroller on black background; the first one had a plain one on the middle of the screen and the second one bounced the text between the bottom and the middle of the screen with a sinetable. Are these the two earlier demos you're referring to or is my memory playing games with me?

        I think I downloaded those two demos from BCG-Box (running MBBS back then) with my spiffy new 1200bps modem. :)

        Atom, yes. It played some very nice digitized music through the PC speaker - a clip sampled from 'Say A Little Prayer' by Bomb The Bass.

        • Yeah! You are one of the few people who is "oldschool" enough to know about these Sorcerers intros. They were indeed the very first ones. I believe they can still be obtained from BCG's box.

          Sorcerers released a CGA-gfx demo called "Summer Holiday" in May, 1989. Atom was released in October, 1990 - so there's a big gap between the first intros and Atom.

          ----

  • TMDC4 "Super Killer" is a super annoying XP killer (Score:3, Informative)

    by ortholattice ( 175065 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @05:54PM (#4785241)
    I tried the TMDC4 "Super Killer" on a Windows XP (Pro) machine. I pressed alt+enter as instructed, and the thing took over in full-screen mode. Well, not exactly my taste. Fine. So, I assumed the following rule (according to the contest site) was implemented: "User must be able to quit the demo at any moment by pressing ESC". I pressed ESC. Nothing, it just kept running. I pressed ALT+F4. Nothing, it just keep running. I pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL and nothing! It just keep running, taking over the entire computer. Finally I just got p.o.'ed and killed it with the power switch. After rebooting, thankfully, it was no longer running. (BTW the CTRL+ALT+DEL problem seems to be common on this XP with other runaway apps too. It seems if an app uses 100% CPU time, the lame multitasking model never lets the Task Manager start, or maybe it will if you wait an hour.)
  • Now here I am, after staying up more than twenty six hours working on a distributed computing project intended to break the MD5 algorithm, and at first glance of this article I think someone has beaten me.

    Blegh.
  • ...can be found here:

    http://tmda.planet-d.net/list.html

    (Note: these are nearly 100% DOS/Windows files.)

  • The demoscene (Score:2, Informative)

    by kliment ( 627259 )
    The demoscene is actually a pretty fascinating thing, and this is not really the way to present it to the slashdot crowd. I'd suggest you people go over to Scene.org [scene.org] and see for yourself what real demos are like. I go to Assembly [assembly.org] every year and I have to say some of the stuff is quite impressive. See for yourselves. Text-mode demos are really a small part of the scene.

  • Wave sound? Not fair! (Score:3, Funny)

    by mike449 ( 238450 ) on Saturday November 30, 2002 @08:00PM (#4785730)
    They should limit sound in these demos to carefully timed sequences of 0x07 character only. The demo should be fully playable on a dumb terminal!
  • ..attached

    begin 666 demo.doc
  • LOGO for the Dead

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    your body be hardwired to an analog-to-digital converter, which is then
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    LOGO for the Dead is available for 10 percent of your estate
    from NecroSoft inc., 6502 Charnelhouse Blvd., Cleveland, OH 44101.
    -- '80 Microcomputing

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...

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