Comment by masternight
16 hours ago
Ah wow.
I really enjoyed the demoscene back in the 90s. Was never a part of it but I was always fascinated by the effects and music and ascii art that these guys created.
A BBS in my city always had the latest e-zines like Reality Check Network and Affinity, and others I forget. Reading up on the scene and about groups like Razor1911 was something I spent a lot of time on when I was younger.
Amazing demo and homage to the era.
> I really enjoyed the demoscene back in the 90s. Was never a part of it but I was always fascinated by the effects and music and ascii art that these guys created.
It was quite something... I take it there are quite a few hotshots on HN who used to be in the top groups. I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends and then we'd get infinite leech/upload ratio on those BBSes. Best memory was driving through Belgium / the Netherlands / Denmark / putting the car on the boat / Sweden (Uppsala) with our computers (Amiga, Atari ST and PCs) to participate at a demo compo. Forgot its name but in the PC category we tied first place with Future Crew (we would have been first had I not screwed the sound playback routine which crashed half-way the demo), before they had their big breakthrough on the PC demoscene. I think that was in 1991.
Cops/customs stopped us as the boat arrived in Sweden and thought we were dealing drugs: they tore the car apart and had no idea what we were talking about when we were explaining them in broken english that we were going to participate in a demo compo :-/
I still have a few effects as executables but I don't have the code anymore for these.
Thankfully I still have the entire source code of a game I made in assembly (for PC / 386+) in 1991 (never published but it's how my career started, long story) and lately I've been having a huge lot of fun trying to compile it again with Claude Code CLI / Sonnet. I'm using UASM, which is compatible with MASM which I used to use. I managed to have all the utilities I wrote back then (picture converters / sprites extractor / etc.) compiling and running (in DOSBox) but haven't managed to compile the main game yet. A few more hours with Claude Code CLI and I should get it running.
FWIW it's hilarious to go back to code from 1991 and see comments in my code talking about this and that bug and asking the LLM: "Find where that bug could be" and the LLM manages to find it. It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories. Copy/pasta code everywhere. And then 10 000 lines of code per source code file.
What an era. Diving in that old code of mine brings me back: the decades they've been flying.
P.S: funnily enough by lack of luck a macro I had used back then happen to become a reserved keyword/macro in assemblers later on. I had named back then a macro "incbin" and that was preventing my code from compiling in UASM: Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 found that issue instantly.
P.P.S: 0x777 in hex gives 1911. RZR, legendary: probably the most legendary of them all. Probably still have a few 5"1/4 floppies (both C64 and Amiga for I had an Amiga with a little software mod to read 5"1/4 floppies as if they were 3"1/2 for the 5"1/4 were way cheaper) with Razor 1911 "cracktros" (even if they weren't called that yet) still working (back in 2020 quite a few of my floppies were still reading: maybe half to 2/3rd of them). I know it won't last, nothing will.
> I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends
Ah that would have been such an awesome time. Thanks for sharing!
> It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories.
I can understand that - under dos - but as I recall quite a lot of gnu/nix tooling was workable on the Amiga - RCS harks back to 1984...
What are using as a linker? Also, do you use protected mode and if yes, what do you use for that, PMODE or CWSDPMI or something else?
It's an old MS-DOS .EXE. Actually it compiles with the ".286" directive too. So I don't use protected mode.
It requires a VGA card and those were more common in 386 IIRC and, anyway, performance-wise to run at 60 Hz it needs a 386. I never tried to run it on a 286 with a VGA card: don't know if that was a thing.
It's funny looking at that old assembly code and see ax, bx, cx, dx registers and not the eax, etc. ones.
The utilities I've compiled to .EXE so far are self-contained in one file and I just use UASM to create directly the .EXE:
UASM v2.57 does the job in my case (note that I compile from Linux: UASM exists for several platforms/OSes):
https://www.terraspace.co.uk/uasm.html
I haven't tried yet to compile the entire game yet: that one is more involved as it implies many files.
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