Scene on the Internet
By Adok/Hugi
These days, there are so many places on the Internet where you can find PC sceners and stuff by PC sceners that there is definitely not a single PC scener in the world who knows all of them. This document is supposed to be a guide in this maze; it is supposed to list some of the most important Net resources related to the demoscene: websites, newsgroups and IRC channels. It is far from being complete, and I would like to ask you to send me URLs of other sites worth including here.
This is interesting for newbies as well as for some of the most experienced sceners and even veterans. It might show you some new aspect of that huge community called scene.
www.scene.org - Scene.org hosts the largest archive of PC scene stuff and runs a news server (more on that below).
www.pouet.net - This innovative site has developed to one of the most frequented and most useful Internet resources of the demo scene. It is an archive without an FTP server of its own; it contains only links. However, it's possible to add comments on every production, which has led to many long discussions. There's also a separate discussion board for general scene-related topics.
www.bitfellas.org - An online board, has forums, news, interviews and other articles from diskmags. In addition, it releases a new BitJam podcast once every week.
www.slengpung.com - Photos of sceners, mostly from demo parties.
www.demoscene.info - A new portal by Digitale Kultur e.V. from Germany, primarily designed for newcomers.
www.scenesight.org - A portal maintained by Frank Michlick aka Anonym of Padua that deals with outreach, i.e. how the demoscene has been received in "ordinary" media.
www.256b.com - A pouet-style archive of tiny intros with a size of 256 bytes or even less. It's for true freaks only! :)
www.intro-inferno.com - A rather new scene portal site.
www.linuxdemos.org - A Linux demo scene related portal, maintained by paniq of Farbrausch.
www.asciiscene.org - Another online BBS that runs a discussion board. Its official name is "boondockS!".
http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Main_Page - "Welcome to the new wiki based ExoticA site. You can find here amongst other things, Amiga and Commodore 64 game/demo music, game box artwork, detailed information on Amiga software, demo groups, and more."
http://www.elephantsdream.org/ - Not an immediately demoscene-related page, but "the world's first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license".
(NEW) http://navis-asd.blogspot.com/ - The blog of Navis of ASD.
(NEW) http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/ - The blog of Smash of Fairlight.
(NEW) http://optimus6128.blogspot.com/ - Optimus' blog.
www.scene.pl - Polish Scene portal.
www.amiscena.org - Polish Scene portal for non-PC platforms. According to Venire/DMA, "it's mostly a big forum for the Polish oldschool".
www.scene.at - Austrian scene portal.
www.demoscene.ru - Russian scene portal. It has both a Russian and an English section. The two sections do not have the same contents.
www.scene.ru - Another Russian scene portal. Russian language only.
scene.org.ru - A third Russian scene portal.
www.escena.org - Spanish scene portal.
www.demoscene.no - Norwegian scene portal.
http://www.demology.tk/ - Italian demoscene archive, contains links to releases from 1994 to 2007.
www.deviantart.com - This is not a scene site, but a lot of artists affiliated with the demo scene have some of their artworks there.
http://gfxzone.planet-d.net/ - Working URL of GFXzone, which has not been updated since 2004.
(NEW) http://artcity.bitfellas.org/ - The unofficial successor of GFXzone.
www.scenemusic.net - Nectarine online radio, broadcasting music non-stop. There are also a lot of news about scene music.
www.modulez.org - Another scene music site, maintained by Yero.
www.chiptune.com - One of the largest chiptune archives in the world, maintained by Rez.
chiptunes.back2roots.org - Another chiptune archive. It used to be maintained by melcom.
amp.dascene.net - Amiga Music Preservation, hosted by crown of cryptoburners.
www.lmp.d2g.com/ - "CGM UKScene Radio" was a 24/7 DemoScene radio station, featuring UK artists with songs created on various platforms. ("Dial up" connections supported.) It has recently been closed.
http://dbfinteractive.com/ - A coding forum about C and related languages, and FreeBasic. States to be demoscene-related but the people there seem to be not really well known.
http://code.google.com/p/graphicsdemoskeleton/ - A small skeleton for graphics with DirectX 10. Link submitted by Icebreaker.
www.hugi.scene.org - Website of Hugi, the magazine you're currently reading.
www.ellesdee.org - Grapevine.net, an online magazine.
www.spinningkids.org/umine - Underground Mine is a kind of online magazine published by Spinning Kids. It mainly focuses on coding. There are also some articles in Italian language.
www.pixelate.co.za - Pixelate is an online magazine about game programming.
www.pain.scene.org - It's pain in your eyes.
www.jurassicpack.de.vu - Jurassic Pack, for Amiga; there are a lot of PC-related articles inside. The website also contains some online issues.
shine.scene.org - Shine issues are available here.
scenial.scene.org - Home of Scenial diskmag.
amber.planet-d.net - Download Amber issues 1 and 2 here.
demojournal.planet-d.net - Demojournal newsletter archive.
www.blackmaiden.de/releases/type/mag - Diskmags by Black Maiden: Crescent and Beam.
sunray.planet-d.net - Sunray was the demoscene's annal. Only one issue was released (from 1999).
amnesia-dist.future.easyspace.com - Although only one issue of Amnesia has ever been released, the website still exists.
www.sceen.org - The website of a paper mag about the demo scene, machinima, VJ'ing and other branches of multimedia art.
www.centolos.com - Centolos is the group that used to release the Ceibe diskmag, in Spanish language. Now they release Becanne.
www.scene.ru - I've already mentioned this portal. They host websites for the following Russian-language diskmags: 7Zone, Armor of Gods, CooleR, Evil, Hacker, HaRM, LMD, RRR, Scene, Tsifra and X-Ray.
www.wildmag.de - Website of WildMag, a diskmag in German language. Its contents have been radically reduced lately.
www.tap-home.de - Here you can find TAP.MAG, which was also a German diskmag.
comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos - The oldest and most popular scene-related newsgroup.
scene.* - A lot of country-related newsgroups as well as groups of general scene interest. They are only located at news.scene.org. You can access them via the World Wide Web from www.scene.org.
alt.trebel.* - Scene-related newsgroups installed by the people behind Trebel. There isn't quite a lot of activity.
All of the following channels are located on IRCnet, not on EFnet.
#coders - This is primarily for programmers. Most of the time, however, people just talk crap. ;)
#trax - Musicians' talk. By the way: Both in #coders and in #trax you won't meet demosceners only - even though most of the people there do know what the demoscene is.
#pixel - Definitely not only for graphicians. This used to be one of the main channels for debate about general scene-related issues. Nowadays there is some competition. Read on...
#pouet.net - Quite a popular channel for all sceners, established in 2002/2003.
#bitfellas - The channel for the Bitfellas online community.
#thescene - International scene channel founded by Surfing of RamJam and his friends. It's not only for PC - you'll also find Amiga and C64 sceners there, and maybe people from other platforms, too.
#amigascne - International Amiga demoscene channel.
#szene.at - Austrian scene talk. There are usually not many people, but the ones who do visit it seem to do so on a regular basis.
#scene.cs - For both the Czech and the Slovak scenes.
#dk-scene - Danish scene channel.
#suomiscene - Finnish scene channel. There are usually a lot of people around. There seems to be little tolerance with foreigners trying to start a discussion in a language other than Finnish.
#altparty - The channel of the Alternative party is probably the second largest Finnish demoscene channel after #suomiscene.
#assembly - The channel named after the world-renowned Assembly party is mostly frequented by Finnish people, and they primarily use the Finnish language for communication there.
#demofr - Main French scene channel. They use some kind of altered French, which especially differentiates from the main language in the way they spell some words.
#codefr - There is also a French channel for coders, and probably for other "specializations" as well.
#coders.ger - German scene channel, not only for coders.
#szene.ger - Another German scene channel.
#demo.ger - Currently the most active German scene channel.
#kotraum - And yet another German scene channel.
#ilcoders - Israeli coders.
#demo-ita - Italian scene channel.
#demoscene - Despite its international name, this channel is Hungarian.
#scene - The same as for #demoscene: It's Hungarian. By the way, rumour has it that #pixel originally was a Hungarian channel as well.
#SceneChat - Another Hungarian channel.
#coders.hu - Hungarian coders.
#nlcoders - Dutch coders.
#daskmig - Norway. It's named after a popular Norwegian diskmag which was published in English language.
#scene.no - It's also Norwegian.
#polishscene - As the same says it, it's for people from Poland.
#scene.pl - Same as the one we've just had.
#scene.si - Slovenian scene channel.
#scene.se - Swedish scene channel.
#swedescene - Another Swedish scene channel.
#chscene - Swiss scene channel. They mostly talk using the English language. Sometimes German is used as well.
#scene.tr - Turkish scene channel.
#ukscene - Scene channel for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
If you have any comments and suggestions, contact me at cdvolko@gmx.net.