Demos

A long time ago, I used to be a demomaker... This is my story. If you're like me, you certainly had one pretty similar.

At the time, we didn't care about being popular or successful. We just loved what we did, discovering a new world, failing exams because of a demo deadline, moving to coding parties, meeting people who had a common passion. Most of my friends come from that time, you could call me a geek I suppose but I don't feel like one and I don't care anyway : I had the most wonderful time in the era of the early personal computers and I don't regret anything ! That was awesome all along and in the end, I'm a happy and hopefully quite realistic person in these troubled times.

Peace and demomaking !

The beginning

I fell in love with computers at an early age, I was about 6 or 7 I believe and already the computer science club in my small town near Nancy caught my interest. It was 1982 and there were only early Thomson computers and Commodore Pet's. That was AWESOME !

I dreamt about great computer hackers I could see in movies like Tron, WarGames or even Short Circuit. Now I realize they were total crap but I still watch them with emotion as I remember these days .

At the age of 9, my parents finally managed to gather enough money to buy me a computer for Christmas, it was a Matra Alice 90. I believe it's something that existed only in France, as many other computers at that time : small companies could build entire brands that only a hundred of people would buy worldwide. Some brands had more success than others like Amstrad, Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sinclair but many were forgotten. Anyway, the Alice 90 was sold in a nice big red plastic suitcase so you could take it anywhere. The package design was (I realized later, to my great surprise) made by the famous artist Jean Giraud a.k.a. Moëbius.

You would't believe it if I told you that computer had a cassette recorder to load and save programs for which you had to set the volume level to the exact right value or else, the data would get completely scrambled and the loading/saving would fail ! Yes ! You actually had to spend about 10 minutes tweaking the recording/playing level of the cassette recorder to manage to load a program ! It was a real cassette recorder, the guys at Matra didn't even bother to build a special purpose recorder and just used a normal one painted red so it matches the central unit.

So I started to learn Basic (as written on the box ) which was hardcoded in ROM and my first program ever (discarding the obvious "Hello World !") was already something graphical : I made a frame by frame animation of a dog walking on a scrolling sidewalk, getting by a lamppost, stopping, raising its back leg and... well... pissing on the lamppost. Come on ! Cut me some slack here ! I was only 9 ! Huhu. Anyway, I still remember the notebook with the little squares I drew to make the dog sprite. Now I would probably ask an artist to model the dog, and I would either ask an animator to rig and animate the dog mesh or I would code a procedural dog animation so I don't bother to animate the thing myself !

Evolving to the Amstrad CPC

I think I kept programming the Alice until I was 12 but I was also closely monitoring what other computers could do and I was drooling on the ever growing amount of colors of the Amstrad 6128 (16 colors among 26 guys!), its fine pixel graphics and... it had a floppy disk drive ! File:S13.jpg (although the 3" disks were not normalized and awfully expensive)

I sold my Alice 90 to a friend and bought an Amstrad. Basic was also in ROM so it was quite easy to continue my Alice trips, except I had so many more colors and RAM and speed. Can you imagine ? 128Kb of RAM and a 4MHz processor ! Wooohooo !

There, with the Amstrad I started to copy a bunch of alphanumeric codes that were listed in some magazines and at the end, if you hadn't made any mistake, that would make a program ! I didn't quite understand that was assembly code and it appeared like some kind of magic. But I started to realize there was quite a difference between my small and slow Basic programs and these programs that displayed sharper graphics at a much higher speed... Something was very wrong !

Evolving again : the Atari ST

When I was 13, I went to a trip to Paris with my parents and met the new Atari 520 ST for the first time in a FNAC franchise. My jaws litterally dropped to the ground. That was IT ! I had to get one but it was sooo expensive !

I finally managed to convince my parents 1 year later and if you had ever needed the perfect symbol picture for happiness, that would be me coming back home with my brand new ST !

Basic was no longer integrated to the machine. You had to get a software to start programming : that was the famous GFA Basic ! It's the first time I ever came across the concept of "compiling some code". I could see that compiled GFA Basic code would run slightly faster compared to interpreted code but I didn't understand the reason until many years later when I started to code in C on the PC.

So I continued Basic coding in GFA for some time. I was 14 at the time and just saw the trigonometric Sin & Cos functions so I started to write a program that would rotate a cube in 3D. I actually came close to finding the actual rotation formulas by trial and error but at some angles the vertices would strangely collapse on themselves. It's only months later I came across the actual formulas explained with nice graphics.

During that time, a good friend of mine living in the neighborhood fed me with disks he got from a friend of his who got them from a friend and so on... We were swapping cracked disks and I didn't understand yet the concept of cracking but I was happy to be able to write some code, play some games and discover new stuff from these cracked stuff... That's also the first time ever I saw demos. Actually, that were only crack intros at the beginning of a games compilation.

A note here on the recent events about piracy and copyright infringements :
It's my conviction that, although piracy may be viewed as economically dangerous because of a serious lack of control over the phenomenon as well as a consequential loss in revenues, it's another one of the aspects of the many short-term economic views that drive our world to disaster a little bit more everyday.
So, mister big lawyers, mister big CEO's of big companies who cry after their lost money : don't forget that you wouldn't ever have all the technological tools you use everyday to plan your meetings, handle your stock options and do pretty much everything you take for granted were it not for the infamous piracy you are now complaining about. In a word : don't forget that your money comes from technological achievements made possible by cheap availability and exchange of information that piracy helped to setup these last 40 years ! Don't bite the hand that (indirectly) fed you, that would be kind of counter-productive to say the least.

Okay, leaving the political aspects aside and coming back to our current matter : Namely, the first cracktro I ever encountered was from a cracking crew called "The Replicants" (certainly from Blade Runner but I didn't know the reference at the time). That was it ! I was hooked ! I wanted to do what these guys did ! Raster bars in nasty eye-molesting RGB colors ! Scroll texts ! Sprite animations ! Even early wireframe 3D ! Sometimes even in fullscreen !!! How the hell did these guys manage to kick out the screen borders ???!!

I had been programming some graphic stuff for years now, but these guys really kicked ass compared to my Basic programs ! That's also the time I put my hands on Devpac, the Atari ST assembler. I bought some books to learn assembler, many esoteric texts that didn't quite explained correctly what assembler was to a 14 year old kid wanting to create awesome graphics-oriented stuff like the ones he saw in cracktros. For almost a year then, I focused on collecting all the intros and demos I could find. Ordering some disks from magazines that started to talk about the growing demo phenomenon, even trying to take some private lessons from a college student that vainly attempted to teach me assembler using examples I thought were lame (like concatenating a string in memory, that kind of stuff), but still being unable to understand and put down the necessary knowledge barrier.

Then, at the end of summer holidays, almost on the eve of entering high school it all became clear. The assembly epiphany as I call it. I finally understood what that fucking manual was trying to tell me ! I woke up from bed at 3am to read the text passage I was stuck on for weeks and it was clear ! I switched on the Atari to code some stuff that... worked. I was rolling and ready to become a demomaker ! I went to bed with the largest smile ever, knowing I would now wake up in a different world. Tomorrow was another day.