Palantir

Palantir was a newsletter about the DemOS project, edited by the Norwegian developers Beren and Finrod of Ewox. Unlike the other demoscene-related publications that called themselves newsletters, Palantir was not text-only but embedded in an executable file. It was made for MS-DOS and works with DOSBox. Download it at scene.org.

Palantir #1

Palantir #1 came out in December 1995. The interface of Palantir #1 (and also of #2) was a plain text viewer with music playing in the background. The Midas sound system was used for this. In this first issue, Beren and Finrod explained their motivation for creating a new operating systems especially for demos instead of coding for DOS, Windows 95 or Linux, and they described some of the ideas they had concerning the kernel, I/O, multitasking, video and sound support, the file system and shells. To quit the mag, you had to press ALT+X.

Palantir #2

The second and (as far as I know) last issue was released a month after the first one, in January 1996. This issue dealt with the boot process, the file system, music support (Impulse Tracker had recently been released), and plug'n'play. We could also read that some new people had joined the project and development groups focusing on certain aspects of the OS had been formed.

I don't know in detail how the work on DemOS thence progressed, but eventually, DemOS was never released, and you know the story: The demoscene moved from DOS to Windows.

Adok/Hugi