Give a newbie a break...

Neon Jam

Does anyone remember how it felt being a newbie? I do, because I still am one, even though I have been monitoring the progress of the scene for the last two years or so...

My first contact with the scene was in about 1990, when I was 6 or 7, when my mum bought herself a Commodore 64 with diskdrive to do her word processing at uni on... My dad got a huge collection of games off of his friends, and of course they were all cracked. I wonder why all of these nice pictures and graphics of groups called Twilight came up all the time when I played a game. I didn't realise that these so called group were actually removing copy protection so that I could play the game...

About five years ago we threw it out, and got a PC, but no games were allowed on it. My first contact with the PC scene was about two years ago, when I was visiting a friend who had justmoved about 700km away. He had just started doing becoming active for the scene, and he showed me an electronic magazine called Hugi. I started to read it, but I had no idea what 31337 meant, or what a MOD was. I had heard about mp3's, but when reading an article on "MP3's in demos", I thought it meant that game developers were going to start to use mp3 compression in their game demos...

Then, as soon as I got home, I started to get a collection of demos, intros, modules, diskmags, and assorted crap from across the web. I watched, I listened, but I don't think I learned a thing. I thought "Wow, that water pulling apart thing in Jizz looks really cool!", "How freaky is that skull getting drilled in Robotnik?", and "I like this dnb music type, whatever it stands for."

Over the last six months or so, I have started to understand most of the scenlish and terms used, but I don't have enough skills to join a demogroup, or to even consider myself active in the scene. I have every issue of Hugi that contains English language, and I have only done that because of my friend showing me the quality of Hugi. But no-one has given me any other places to look at except for Hornet, which has shut down. There just isn't enough information for a newbie to look at when trying to enter the scene, or there is plenty, but no-one tells us newbies...

I thought to myself that I should try to get some "demoscene hardware", so I recently got a Gravis Ultrasound PnP Pro, cause I saw some demos asked if you had a GUS. After finally getting it to work, and put 5Mg of RAM on it, I was incredibly annoyed at finding that it did not do GUS compatiblity above 1Mg, which means that I can't listen to half the XM's I have in FT2...

Do you remember being a lamer? We all were, and I still consider myself one. But when did you get help understanding what the scene was? Did anyone help you? I still haven't had any help, and I want to start tracking and coding... I have done really lame covers of songs I know, but they sound too rough. I start to learn some coding at uni this year, but I can't grasp a thing in the coding corner, with all of the commands confusing the absolute hell out of me.

The state of the scene at the moment makes it very daunting for a newbie to enter with confidence, and if more experienced sceners did a little bit to help all the newbies, think of how the scene would flourish... Newbies would become elite so much quicker (even though I hate the term elite :-)

Also remember, that newbies aren't always lamers... even though most are...

Neon Jam