the oldskool way of life

pLOp

it happened few weeks after spring started, as i recall... i was hiking in a forest somewhere near my hometown, as i had been doing for years... this time i decided to change my route, and i'll never know why did i do that. i don't know, it was hot, i was in a good moode, so i decided to try a new path this time, a path wich was, infact, just a presumption that a little road that led deeper into the woods was something interesting. soon, i was inside the woods, surrounded by trees and birds singing. and again, i was thinking about something really different...

hmm. really strange... i'm in surrounded by mother-nature but i still think about those guys of the demoscene... i really am strange sometimes... well, after an hour or so i realised that i have gone into a part of the forest that i was never around. birds were still singing, the sun was there, but there was something different. i've been following a path that was almost invisible, almost erased by time as noone surely passed it for a long time...

again i act strange... why the hell do i think about the sceners, why don't i enjoy the surroundings? shit, i've been involved in computers for 10 years now, i should have been bored by now... what was that sound?! heh... i really am strange.. i thought i heard the endpart song of Sanity's 'Arte'... i really am strange...

but hey, here it goes again... i didn't imagine that. where does it come from?! i must find it. it seems like it's coming from everywhere. no, wait. it's right from here. i walk, soon i'm walking very fast, and a second later i'm running like every virus on earth is after me. i really am strange...minutes (or seconds?) later i'm on a little clearing. and i'm speachless. there is a house, a wooden house which looks centuries old. but there is a satelite dish. and some solar panels, which are a lot different than those i've seen before. and there is a table.

WITH A COMPUTER ON IT.

i can scarcely believe what i see. no way someone lives here. but i must look at that computer. i come nearer and nearer i come, i realise that the music comes from it. shit, someone ripped the modules from arte. i would really do anything to have them. well, almost. i really am strange. minutes (or hours) went on while i was looking at this machine. searched the in's and out's of it...

AND THEN HE CAME...

"did you find my collection of old intros, my friend?" he said. i was shocked. i was scared. i would like to run away from him. but i AM strange. of course i've found them. and i've looked them over and over. good ol' c64/amiga stuff...it really brings up memories. i am really strange.

"NO, YOU'RE NOT, MY FRIEND"

he said. and i just stood there. "don't be scared, just tell me your story. my friend.". heh, like it's so easy... a lot of things bother me a lot, but there is something, i think. and so i started to talk...

"some time ago i met a guy from germany who presented himself as a coder. we started to mail eachother discussing some coding questions, but shortly we begun to argue about how should be a demo made in these days. you see, in his opinion, the main part of making a demo is the final product, the demo itself. he said that he made his routines using OpenGL, and that this was the best way for making demos, since OpenGL has loads of prewritten routines that we can use. and after that sentence the story begins. i asked him how can he call himself as a coder if he can't write even a simple cube-rotation routine without using an OpenGL routine, but in his opinion the point was in the math involved in rotating, not the screen setup and other stuff. unfortunately we stopped mailing eachother too soon so we never finished our discussion. oh, i almost forgot. in his opinion, knowing asm today is stupid."

...i stopped as i thought he was about to say something, but he just looked at me with no expression on his face whatsoever... so i continued, as i am strange.

"what is my point here? well, i later realised that the way of thinking of the person above is rather common these days, and i piss on that way of thinking! i read almost every week some nonsense about the oldskool way of making demos, that i really have my head full of such shit. a big part ( 90% ?) of the new generation of sceners think that the oldskool is a stupid way of making demos. why? i think it's because it is MORE DIFFICULT to make a demo in the oldskool way. or maybe they think that making a demo in pure asm is nonsense, since we have c/c++. most of the complaints against the oldskool are based on the fact that we should be 'along with the technology'. whatever that means. i'm not saying that we should all buy ourself a c64 and start making 'new' DYCP routines or 'amazing' rastersplits. all i'm saying here is that we should use our machines at it's best, not as the others do. i mean, we all know that using someone else's code and calling it yours is called ripping, and we all hate this kind of coders. so, how can we use stuff as directx or opengl?"

"BUT WHAT IS YOUR POINT, MY FRIEND. THE REAL POINT OF THIS MONOLOGUE?"

"5 or 6 years ago i remeber that a friend of mine asked me what the hell i do on my amiga the whole day. i simply say that i make it behave as i want, not as she would like. simple. today i can't say that i make my pc work as i want. that would cause serious headaches to my os. and not to forget that i don't code anymore... but i'm tired of those lame demos around there. i heard that we must catch up with the game industry, as in the old days we were actually ahead of them. and so new sceners know nothing about the real concept of demomaking. making a demo isn't difficult. making a demo whhile knowing what are you actually doing is difficult. todays game industry is commited in releasing a new game every 6-8 months, if they want to survive. that results in bugged and badly optimized code. but at least they get paid for that. who pays the demomakers for a lousy demo!?"

"I SEE... YOU REALLY HATE THOSE CODERS WHO CAN'T CODE PROPERLY. RIGHT, MY FRIEND?"

"hell, yeah... i hate democoding in c only... the oldskool doesn't make you write demos in asm from scratch, but it makes you use every cell of your brain to get every (and i mean every) cycle back from your routine, making it faster and shorter. making routines shorter isn't stupid, as a shorter routine uses less cpu cycles to execute. and if we want to make our routines optimized, we must know asm. and if we know how to use asm, we know our machine. how it thinks, how it behaves, how it lives..."

"DO YOU REMEMBER TRACKMOS?"

i almost jumped at the sound of his voice. it has somehow changed... and i was scared.

"of course, how would i forget them. making an amiga demo as a trackmo was a beautifull thing. take a disk, make your own boot up, make a library to load, allocate memory, make an os all for you! and to do that you must know your machine, know how to use every chip in it as you want it, not letting the machine act as it wants. it could be done even today, but it's rare to have something like that... today a demo is a exe with a mp3 and 10-15 gfx files. all in one file or even dissipated over the directory. a hard usage of read() hass to be known.... lamers. a look at the gfx an msx artists. why are oldskool gfxers better than the new ones? they aren't. but they know how to make something beautifull in less space. and they know how to use every resource of their limited environment. they can make a beautifull pic in 256 colors, while their fellow new generation gfxers need photopaint in true color mode. the point is in using our machines at 120%.

The demoscene rised as we collected knowledge about our machines, while we learned more an more. and we used that knowledge to make games. or even an os. or even a life out of it. today it is different. demos are made for showing off only, not for being proud of it. releasing something at a party is a must. no way we could see a just4fun release... last one i saw was in 1999. i really hate all this things... i'd like a lot, but the thing i'd like the most is to see the demoscene act as it should. people writnig demos, music, drawing logos, reading articles..."

"AND WHAT DO YOU WANT NOW, MY FRIEND?"

hmmm. time (or space?) passed before i answered that question.

"nothing. my friend. as i am really strange"

"SO THEY HAVE SAID."

pLOp