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- Hacker News
- I think a lot has been lost by an overfocus on chasing a unified look and feel for User interfaces.
Standardising the user interface allows applications that have no design to share a common appearance. Making a custom user interface requires designing something. It can result in monstrosities if the designer lacks skill, or experiments with new ideas that don't work out. The antidote to that is dogfooding. Using the interface you made is the next incentive to make it good.
The demo scene philosophy of building precisely what you want to serve a function was clearly one of the influences on winamp, which was beloved by many.
I guess a lot of this went away with the lack of software choice. If you didn't like winamp you didn't have to use it. When a program is marketed as the only solution to a problem and they want everyone to use the same program (often by locking people in). If the software aims to be to everyone's taste it is to no-one's taste. It just becomes bland.
by Lerc - Old man (well only in my 50s but hey it's old) rambling but these were the days. The way it started though is really intereseting: as a 11 years old kid learning BASIC, it quickly escalated...
At first we got pirated C64 games (because of course and that's how I became best friend with my neighbors and, to this day, we still exchange Telegram message on a near daily basis) and those games had an "intro" (a "cracktro" except the cracktro term only came much later on). And for some crappy games, the intro was better than the game. So we'd just look at the pirates' intro.
The intros became demos of their own and half my Amiga floppy disks were demos. I loved musicdisks and "diskzines": and some diskzines had articles explaining how to code certain intro/demo effects.
And as of course we had to learn how to code that, these tutorials in diskzines were most welcome. So BASIC gave way to assembly and then 680x0 and x86 assembly had no secret cycles for us.
Then we wrote intros for pirate BBSes etc.
Some of those screenshot do feel like home: XCopy, DeluxePaint, the trackers, etc.
I still have all those machines and some are still working but I don't turn them on often. Last we tried (with my brother) is a SNES and its rare (and now valuable) chinese Super Pro Fighter Q+ copier: a PC USB floppy drive, formatting old 3"1/2 floppies and copying SNES ROM from a modern PC, and we've been able to run old SNES games (fun fact: there were a few demo effects for the SNES that people who had such copiers could obtain on floppy disks).
Another rarity I've got is a pirate 5"1/4 floppy disk reader for the Commodore Amiga (that was supposed to use 3"1/2 floppies, not 5"1/4 ones), with a switch to pick if the Amiga is to boot on the 3"1/2 or the 5"1/4.
Nostalgia is a real heavy drug but those were really better days than ads-infested websites and inferior devices spying on you (looking at the smartphones).
P.S: and don't get me started on the cars from the 80s/early 90s, they were much better than the "I update OTA without your consent / I show you ads on you car's screen / I spy on you": but then I own two very fancy, very spiffy, cars from that era (one german, one italian).
- I'm younger than you, but I did had contact with the 2000's internet, where sites existed just for fun.
I try to find these types of sites today, a collection of fun and interesting ones.
https://matbm.net/gold - it's a WIP but so far it's been a fun ride.
by MatMercer - ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts were as complicated as vim.by noduerme
- Fasttracker was coded by demoscene people though, namely members of the group Triton (later Starbreeze Studios). It has a couple of demoeffects in its about screen, and even a version of Nibbles (qbasic snake game) you can play.
And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...
by bitwize - Like mentioned FastTracker was created by people in the demoscene, also the module format fasttracker created was fairly dominant in the demoscene from maybe 1994 to 1998-1999 (when PC's were fast enough that people started moving onto streamed music via mp3 soundtracks as shown by State of Mind/Bomb).
The FT2 XM format was more powerful than the ST3 format (limited in track numbers and iirc no 16bit samples?) and less powerful than the impulse tracker IT format (virtual tracks without tying tracks to output channels), but for many demos the XM format was a sweet spot since third party IT replayers were few due to the more advanced features while XM replayers were plentiful and often powerful enough to create the music people wanted to do.
by whizzter - For me, Fasttracker II still remains the most nostalgic, intuitive, immersive DAW ever made. Aslo, one of the best thought-out pieces of software in general.
I wrote so many tracks on it, some of which played on local FM radio and in clubs. Fondest memories circa 1996-2001.
Only many years later, Ableton managed to create another DAW that got close to FT in spirit, which is don't impede the creative flow. A DAW written by actual musicians for musicians (hail Robert Henke aka Monolake!).
And recently, Bitwig pulled another stunt and married Ableton Live's simplicity with feature richness more typical of a heavyweight DAW league, without all the inherent clutter.
P.S. This seemingly turned into some kind of advertisement, but it's just gratitude from a devoted user :)
by wartywhoa23 - Never been into building tracks, always the coder (assembler on 6502 and MC68000). Somebody should do a similar article about all the demo build tools like kkrieger, or modern ones like Tixl. Anyway…good old times :)by gokohl
- .werkkzeug1 was also my first though while scrolling through the articleby MK2k
- I loved .kkrieger. The best first person shooter 96kb ever produced! :) [1]by b3lvedere
- FR released the source code for their tools in 2012, some of the concepts are described in the repo, e.g.: https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/blob/master/werkkzeu...
A couple of additional links from my bookmarks:
- The EXE packer : https://www.farbrausch.de/~fg/kkrunchy/
- Some tech details in "The Farbrausch Way to make Demos" slides : https://llg.cubic.org/docs/farbrauschDemos/
- Various related videos (search for ryg/chaos/fiver2): https://files.scene.org/browse/resources/seminars/code/
- Overview of their tools + misc links: https://adrianboeing.blogspot.com/2012/04/farbraush-demo-too...
- Some .kkrieger details: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
by nuxi - There's a blast from the past. At 16 years old I created Multi-Ripper with a friend, using AsmOne, and smartly included my phone-number in the mods it converted. My parents really appreciated random strangers calling years later.by fudgie
- Pastor Emmanual Laphroaig [1] as well as the phRack crew [2] continue carrying the torch in this tradition as best they canby Schlagbohrer
- Doesn't mention ScreamTracker. A good example of demo group dogfooding. Unique text based UI too. As far as I can remember this was the first dos tracker.by momocowcow
- A nice, somewhat nostalgic read. I had X-Copy and D-Copy both, although I'm more familiar with the later X-Copy editions that were quite purple [0] [1]. It was also my first contact with the concept of disk defrag.by krige
- > When a copy was finished (which could take some time), the program helpfully played a little "boing" sound.
And how that "boing" sound worked is interesting in itself. It's one of the few uses of Paula's "attached" mode, where the output of one sound channel is used to modulate the volume or pitch of another.
I put the full source code of the boing sound here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174583
by amiga386 - I swear music trackers had the most impressive UI back then. FastTracker and ImpulseTracker were to me the highest piece of art and engineering at the time. They kind of hold up even to this day. Especially ImpulseTracker's instruments and sample editor.by p2detar
- I can verify that modern AI's, even the frontier ones, are absolute crap at producing ASCII art or ANSI art. It's really unfortunate. We need models to be better trained on digital fine art (digital graffiti).
First thing I did at one aerospace company I worked at was get root on the nearby office printer, which served its own webpage, and digitally deface it a bit with some fun ASCII graffiti.
by Schlagbohrer - “Back then”? You can buy a brand new Polyend Mini right now with built in synths and samplers, all while being portable!by alfiedotwtf
- I first thought "Elite Sinus Producer" and "The Sinus Creator" were trackers specifically designed for creating nasal-sounding music; but of course the explanation for why the term "sinus" came to be used instead of "sine" is likely because many demosceners were from a native European background, and their language retained the Latin origin word instead of deprecating its usage in favour of "sine", as happened in English.by userbinator
- Can confirm it's sinus in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French.by vidarh
- I vividly remember FastTracker II, and how intuitive and tactile it felt to get things done in it, despite the minimal user interface real estate. As an example, there were no sound effects. So, I routinely manually created echo effects by copying the sounds from one channel to another one of the available channels, offsetting the notes by a few ticks and lowering the volume. It was simpler times.by superted
- Maybe I should pick it up again, limited tools are great :) That's why I also love my small Volca collection.by tiborsaas
- Intuitive? I never thought anyone would ever describe something as arcane as a tracker intuitive. I can't think of something worse. Pure Data comes close.by tosti