Demoscene News

Edited by Adok, Ghandy and Civax

Latest news

Apocalypse. Ciccilleju has opened his artist directory on Trax in Space.

Haujobb have released an Amiga invitation demo at Mekka & Symposium advertising for their new webproject Back to the Roots. Currently this site is under construction, but it seems that it will become interesting to sceners of all kinds of computer platforms.

Hugi Core & Royal Family. The Hugi website was redesigned, now it has a better structure, look and speed. Unfortunately, our member Psykax has had a serious accident, as one of his friends reported to him. He is in a more stable condition by now. We really hope that he will recover well soon. If you want to express your sympathy, send him some e-mail.

Kolor. The source code of void-3, the brilliant 4k intro by Franky and Shiva that won last year's Mekka & Symposium, has been released.

Mekka & Symposium 2k, one of the biggest and most popular scene-only parties, took place on April 21-25 in Fallingbostel, Germany. The results and all releases are available at scene.org or chscene.ch. Especially worth checking out are the first four places in the demo competition (Sleepless by Smash Designs, Mikro Strange by Acryl and Hellfire of Haujobb, Nature suxx by Federation against nature and Strange Feelings by Droid of Haujobb & others), the winner of the 4k intro competition (Toasty by Freestyle, showing the rollercoaster scene of Cubic & $een's Toasted) and the AHX musicdisk DisIsSid #4 by Abyss (placed 9th of 25 in the PC demo compo!). Lots of pics from the party are located at codersger.de and Slengpung. Crest has also written a party report for his website. The mpeg video of the live striptease at MS2k is available for download on the Radwar website (10 mbyte).

Orange. Some weeks ago Ghandy received the news that Lemming has left Orange in order to join Dual Crew Shining from Evan of DCS and Nah-kolor. However, this is not true. Lemming comments: "This is total bullshit. I have never in any circumstance for any reason been joining DCS and definitely not leaving Orange! It's just a rumor with no basis."

Soundstate. Chavez has recommended the tracking music related site Soundstate to Ghandy. It offers masses of samples and interviews with various tracking legends of the past like Rob Hubbard, Martin Galway, and Ben Daglish. The page is owned by the famous chipmakers 4T Thieves.

Talent are currently working on the PC conversion of The Official Eurochart, one of the oldest chartsmag for the Amiga. You can already register as a voter and read a preview issue. The first real issue will be released in June 2000 and be HTML based. Talent's group site has also moved onto the new domain.

TAP. The website of the group TAP and the German language diskmag TAP.MAG has moved.

Vantage. The Swiss Sceners List has moved.

Way-X. The amateur game development group Way-X may soon become a division of a well-known game company. Details will follows later. Also, Peter Dobrovka of Way-X is one of the three editors of a new book on game programming. WildMag issue 2, a diskmag in German language, was released on April 23 on MS2k. It can be downloaded or read online at the WildMag website. It is also included in the latest version of the CD DiskMag-Pack. This Hugi issue includes a review of WildMag.

WinCue. Cortex of Index released the first Public Beta of WinCue v1.0. It is a general purpose plug-in for WinAmp that allows setting up playlists and specifying a delay to be inserted between the songs. As far as Cortex knows, it is also the first plug-in that infiltrates WinAmp's own menu.

What has happened since Hugi 18

100% Prophets. A new wild demo group called 100% Prophets has been founded. Their progress status is according to their homepage: "Concept Completed". It will probably take six more months until they release their first wild-demo.

4096 byte website competition. The results are now available on the competition site. There are loads of interesting entries, for example a memory game by Zden of Satori.

Access Denied. P-rat opened his website at a new domain. Sceners might get free webspace and subdomains there. Scenial 5 has still not been released yet.

Acumen released his first tune in the year 2000. The song is called "Out of The Blue" and it is a "humble tribute [to] Michael Cretu (Enigma)". It is available on his website as MP3 and IT (the latter with a size of 11 mbyte, though).

Alpha64.org. The Alpha64.org FTP server is now open to the public. You can upload or download demos, music, diskmags and samples.

Anadune. Kazik's gfx gallery Elf Sun has been opened.

Android's Dream. Lesnik left. LossWave came back. Jimi joined as a 3d artist. Skuter was kicked out. Mantra joined as a 2d-artist. A "mega-hiper-demo", two 64k intros 64 and another issue of the Polish language diskmag Legend were announced to be planned.

Ashrama. A new musicgroup has risen, "not just any new musickru - we are trying to find the psychedelia in art of sound. Actually not just in sound, we're planning to make psychedelic gfx and animations too, and then construct these elements into one psy-artistic experience. We're also trying to investigate thoughts behind psychedelia in form of words too, thought they cannot be compared to real experience of psychedelia and are not that way important. (But could be written someday into Hugi diskmags?) So, well, who the heck are we and what we call ourselves? Members are Apofish, Pandaa, Psylent Buddhi, Sunsquid and Zealan, we are Ashrama. If these names don't say anything to you yet, all I can say that they are very impressive set of psychedelia artists in form of psychedelic ambient and maximalic trance/goa music." Said Zealan.

Assembly 2000. There will be 4000 tickets in total, 2000 of them for computer places. Normal tickets will be available all the time starting on May 10. Advance ticket sales will end on July 19. Instead of 100% public voting, there will be 20% jury voting, 20% "oldskool" (invited) sceners voting and 60% public voting to prevent that joke productions are rated higher than quality productions again, like it was the case in last year's 4k intro compo. For the latest news, check out the Assembly website.

Aural Planet. Do you remember the CD Lightflow created by the musicians Scorpik, Key-G and Falcon? (All of them are former Pulse members.) Lightflow is full of fanciful ambient trance songs which were perfectly mixed with each other. Ghandy still loves it, even if it's about four years old. And now, nearly the same musicians have finished the work on their second album: Aural Planet.

Bomb. All scenish wedding presents Skal got, like modules and wedtros, are now downloadable on his website. Djam has a new personal homepage, as well as Made (with lots of sketches, steps and goodies for graphicians and designers).

Budyn Ural of Cube and others are working on the resurrection of the mainly Polish language diskmag Budyn. The latest issue, Budyn 2 from late 1997, was a blast, with 2.1 mbyte of articles (100 kbyte in English). Can the next issue beat that?

Calodox. Calodox Demolinks Exchange v2.o was created. It features a multi-review option. Access to the site is now better logged as well to prevent lamers from trying to erase all reviews on the page.

CFXweb. The CFXweb Demo and Game Development site, run by Civax, moved to its own domain and changed its focus from news to programming-related articles. Read more in Adok's article on Scene Portals in this Hugi issue.

Condense. No Recess opened a website with free libraries for demoscene coders, among others a file-packer, a DirectDraw display manager, and an image loader.

Demoscene.org is a new news and links site related to the demoscene. Read more in Adok's article on Scene Portals in this Hugi issue.

Dirty Minds. Those who cannot run Dirty Minds' CPC diskmag Ovation on an emulator but want to see at least some screenshot can now do so it at the Dirty Minds website.

El Afghano is a new diskmag available at scene.org. Also read the review in this Hugi issue.

EliteGroup. The TP9 demo compo winners (with Kasparov - final version, also working with Voodoo cards, now available!) got their own official fanclub - a great parody to the EliteGroup website. Also read the articles on EliteGroup by Adok and TAD in this Hugi issue.

Fleur. Similar to Sierra, who skipped volume 4 of their adventure game series Leisure Suit Larry, the Fleur staff will not release issue 4 of their mag but directly proceed to number 5. According to d-lee it will be out soon after MS2k so keep checking the Fleur website.

Goodstuff is a new scene music guide on the Net. "This site is dedicated to quality music, made by musicians from the demoscene", it says. "Our staff reviews only quality tunes which are, from our point of view, something really special you should not miss to listen to." Members of the staff are Xenon (admin), A-Move, Andromeda, Jazz, Netpoet and Velvet (editors). They are always looking for nice people who enjoy electronically made music and would like to write reviews.

Greenroom. The betatesting phase of the Greenroom sceneforum is over. It shall now be extended to a scene portal. Currently discussions boards are hosted for a lot of European languages, from Croatian over English and Hungarian to Slovakian.

Haujobb. Haujobb's coder genius Droid reports: "Jessika got fucked by Sixpack/Haujobb on The Party 9 (maybe there will be next generation sceners in Haujobb after nine months?)" Furthermore, Acryl's website went online, with masses of graphics.

Hugi Core & Royal Family. Psykax left the demoscene to concentrate on his real life. Ghandy joined Hugi Core & Royal Family as an editor. He also publishes Scenet and edits several Amiga diskmags, including Showtime, Jurassic Pack and The Scene Press. Soon after him TAD joined Hugi Core & Royal Family, too. He is very active for Hugi as a writer and graphician also does important contributions to the organization of the Hugi Size Coding Competition. On March 11, Hugi.GER 1 was released. It is the sequel of the German Part that existed in Hugi 11-17. Subtitled "Back to the roots", it is based on the principles of the early Hugi issues: open for any topic, no censorship within the scope of democracy and tolerance for any writing style. Issue 1 includes 560 kbyte of articles in German language on various topics such as literature, computers, politics and animals. It is available as a diskmag for Windows 9x/NT and as a HTML edition. Furthermore, Hugi Size Coding Competition 11 with the topic "maze pathfinder" was held.

Icarus is a new group based in Australia. It was founded by Dante, formerly known as Skullturkey. Its main function will be to create a form of support group for newbie sceners to help them become aquainted with the scene, and to also recruit new people into the scene. If anyone is interested in joining or being a mentor, write to Dante. Sceners from across the world are welcome.

Independent Magsite. The Swiss Scene Server now hosts a website focussing on diskmags. Here you can find reviews of Pain, Shine, Demojournal and Hugi, as well as information on their history and archives of all their issues.

Infect. Since 1996 Spiv of Infect has worked on several webprojects, which are documented on his website. He's now deeply involved in the mediaart scene: "That are artists, curators, theorecticans and so on (maybe you know "Ars Electronica" Exhibition in Linz/Austria????). I initiated and programmed the portalsite to that scene to be found under http://www.verybusy.org - center for hardwired arts. The Site features tons of automous and dynamic tools like, coverart uploads, collaborativ exhibition calendar, user generated search database for project covering net- and mediaart, file up/download, chat, discussion and mediatheoretic publications." Dj Mellownoise, musician and member of Infect, now also has an official homepage.

Incognita. The final version of Incognita's demo Platipus, made for Asm'99 but not shown there due to an error in the uploading process, was released together with its sources to Incognita's new website.

Inprise released the compiler of Borland C++ 5.5 for free. It can now be legally downloaded at the Borland homepage. You just have to submit your personal information and fill in a survey to get it. Note that it's only the compiler, no IDE.

Jecoute. The jazz tracking label Jecoute released a new musicdisk by Carlos with 13 jazz and funkjazz tracks and an .exe interface. It is called Giant Steps.

Level-D. VK is a new art- and musicdisk released under the Level-D label. It features 19 pics by artists like Made, Fred, Flan, Feather and Uma, and 17 tunes by Radix, Lluvia, Traven, Djam, Distance, Nogsf and others.

Melcom. The "world's biggest chiptune archive" by Melcom is now online. He also released two new tunes: First, The Dome 2000. It is a re-recorded version of his song The Dome from 1998. The Dome was originally written for Cheat The Machine's Windows Demo for Assembly '98, which was called Anonymous, but they did not use the song for the demo. Melcom wonders: "Was it too good? :)" Second, doom.mp3. It is new re-recorded version of the original song from id-software's game Doom and requires WinAmp.

Microsoft. The latest version of the Microsoft Macroassembler is available on the Net for free as a part of the MS Windows 98 Driver Development Kit.

Nah-kolor The new, modernized website of the mainly Polish/Dutch Amiga/PC demogroup Nah-kolor is online.

Nextempire. The Nextempire website was totally redesigned by Kowboy.

NME. Franky's HSC player was released as a plugin for WinAmp. "I sent my source to some weirdo, he combined it with an adlib emu, and now it plays the HSCs in WinAmp. Totally CRAPPY quality but who cares."

NO. Seffren has left defacto2 from an organizer/leader position to start a new group. The new group is called 'NO' and includes the following people(random order): Dawn - Music & Pixel, Jelly - Music, Sond - Code & Music, Sh^ar - Pixel, Goldpush - Code, Zalza - Music and Seffren - Code & Pixel. The defacto2 demo productions made for the Hype party will be released under the 'NO' label. NO are also working on NHX, a Win32 conversion of the Amiga tracker AHX (Abyss' Highest eXperience, previously known as The Highest eXperience) by Abyss. The goal is to create a tracker for the Windows 32 platform with AHX compability and extensions to this format. The creators are looking for betatesters to test upcoming beta version(s). If you are interested jump to the betatest section on the NHX website.

NTK. The final version fo the Windows tracker NTK is out. There will be no major improvements any more, just bugfixes.

Outlaw Triad. The website of the Dutch demogroup Outlaw Triad moved onto the planet-d server. In the future OT's coding tutorials and current project of the group will be made available here.

Padua are the new owners of the scene-central.com domain, which hosted Comic Pirates' scene portal Network from 1998-1999. A new scene portal may appear here in summer 2000.

Pain. Two new issues of Pain (12/99 aka 00/00 and 02/00) were released. Read a review of the latter in this Hugi issue.

Paradox 2k demoparty invitation demo is out. You can download it on the official website or a Russian ftp server.

Paragon 5 (a game company owned by Pyromaniac of Beyond) released the first music disk for the Game Boy, featuring music from Mystical, Beek of AA, and Reptile of Astroidea, also featuring art from Snake Grunger, code by RV, and organizational splender by Pyromaniac. Available on their website.

Park. The "strange new music group" Park is online now, and their first release - the melancholik ep - is ready for download on their homepage. Members are Velvet, Netpoet, Falcon, Xenon and A-move.

Planet is a new chartsmag by Agravedict. You can download its first issue at alpha64.org.

Planet-X. Jay aka Planet-X, known for his commercial success with music he ripped from demoscene musicians, is honoured by a long article on him. The article was written by Grendel of Byterapers, a professional journalist working for Finland's and Scandinavia's largest computer-related magazine, Mikrobitti. As a result of the article Jay took off his page from the net and replaced it with a note on "irresponsible internet journalism".

Pragma was founded by xel/iso/s!p/role and unseenfate/iso. As unseenfate says, "pragma is quality group of a few members who are motivated." They will be active on c64 and PC.

Replay. Apart from lots of demos and intros, Replay released issue 7 of their diskmag Shine. Read the review in this Hugi issue.

SceneCity. Anhk and Sacrilege of the scene portal SceneCity are working on a new diskmag with "great interviews" and "great surprises". It was originally planned for April but delayed due to lack of articles.

Scenet. The email/website database Scenet 32 is out. 95% of the links have been checked. A news section, a party/fair calendar, and a fat interview section (40 interviews with sceners) have been added to the Scenet website, thus making it a true scene protal.

Size Optimizing. There is a second interested size coding compo series on the Net apart from ours, Martin Flynn's.

SkaG is a new German language diskmag, whose first issue features 10 kbyte of articles and an interface coded in QBasic. The next issues of SkaG may be HTML based.

Slengpung is Sixpack of Haujobb's new archive with photos of many scene parties.

South Africa. A new South African demoscene page was opened.

Storm Studios released the first issue of the Russian language diskmag Cooler. They have announced to make an English edition, too.

Sunray. The final bugfix of the Sunray December 1999 Preview, a review diskmag, is out.

Takeover 2000. The organizers of the demoparty Takeover 2000, to be held in Eindhoven/Holland on June 16-18, originally planned to hold no tracked music competition, but just an MP3 compo. After protest from many tracking musicians, who said that the scene musicians should not deny their roots and tracking is still interesting today because of its special music engineering technique, a poll was held. It resulted in the cancelling of the MP3 only compo. Now last year's music-compo rules are applied again. Read the details on the Takeover website.

TAP. Tomaes of TAP released the first two issues of his German language diskmag TAP.MAG. 70 kbytes of articles, a nice oldskool interface (mode 13h, 2d starfield in the background) and an interview with Adok may be reasons to download at least TAP.MAG 2.

Tesko. The UK demogroup Tesko has made a comeback to the scene. Tesko are known for their simple yet funny demos. They lately released a Win32 port of their award winning Shape! demo. Watch out for lots of "silly" (so said Sulphur of Tesko) releases, there are a load of sceners releasing stuff under the Tesko label.

The Party 9. Just in case you did not know it: You can download all results and productions from TP9 at scene.org.

Theralite. Livedown, an MP3 with 8.8 mbyte of size and a duration of 9:37 minutes, is the first release of the "new" Theralite music-group with MP3-only orientation. It is an acoustic recording session with a deep trip hop atmosphere and funk grooves, instrumental, performed and mixed music.

Trinity. Plek dyed his hair blonde and now looks gay, according to Avalanche's eyes. Avalanche and Plek have founded the pink power club label (gay house music - no, they are not gay) and are working on setting up a live act using 2 sl's and tracking. Check out the Trinity website for more. Morph's new personal website has also opened, with really loads of articles, stories, poetry, reviews and graphics made by him - strongly recommended!

Twilight are working on a demo for the Abort 2K party, currently for Linux only. It will be released as opensource, so other people can "debug" the code or even use it if they want to. Visit their homepage for more infos.

Unik. While The Party 1999 was happening Unik released their latest creation: a musicdisk called "green navel" with music by Mash and an interface designed by Tomic and Markus.

Warp Engine Team. From the inner core of the Italian scene, it seems like the old masters are gathering again to renew their skills and show to people what "old school" is all about. "Warp Engine Team" is the name under which they will release their stuff. Among WET we actually can find Parsec (Musician, ex editor of Abnormalia, still active in Italy with many commercial activities in music and graphic), Pitagora (legendary ex-HBT coder, now owner of a big computer-related society) and even Macno (the ex Abnormalia editor, now owner of an Internet provider, present into the group as a cool-extra-ideas-provider). WET is currently slowly working on a opengl demo that will be brought to public as soon as finished.

Way-X. Mr.M!ke is working on a new IRC client called Bleeze.

Wild Bits. Wilby issues 4 and 5 have been released. They contain a few articles, mostly on size optimizing and 4k intros. Each is about 4 kbyte of total size.

Wanted: People and Groups!

Access Denied announced to be looking for a 3D gfx/raytracing artist for demos. If you are interested, you may contact them via e-mail.

Alpha Millennium Crew announced to be in need of a good 2D artist who can make "nice" textures and demo graphics. If you are intrested drop a mail on v0id.

Android's Dream are looking for very good 2d-artists, coders and musicians. Contact Frey.

Gas are searching for new experienced hirez pixel artists. Download their latest packs from the artpacks archive at cdrom.com and contact zL.

Marshals. The demogroup Marshals are heavily searching for experienced coders and at least one musician. They have good graphicians but people with coding & tracking skills are wanted. Contact Bomber.

Winter of July is in need of a graphician (pixel or Photoshop). Contact CoaXCable.

Adok & Ghandy & Civax