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Comment by Sharlin

6 hours ago

If there’s no human effort behind this, what’s the point? You could just as well watch any of the zillions of video recordings of these demos. There’s no inherent value in "running natively in the browser". Never mind the vast irony in demoscene specifically being a celebration of human skill and creativity.

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Sharlin

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Karliss  5 hours ago

Not going to say anything about AI translations. But the video recording don't do justice for many of demos.

The effects in some of the demos simply kill any video encoder, only way to properly experience them is by running or emulating locally. Not that crystal sharp upscaled square pixels on modern display or poor quality CRT filters are very representative either, but it's likely better than blurry mess you get when video encoder tries to deal with high frequency details or random noise from procedural effects.

  • Sharlin  5 hours ago

    I’m sure there are lossless recordings around. At 320x200x8bit even a simple sequence of PNGs wouldn’t take that much space in today’s terms.

    • Karliss  4 hours ago

      Just did a quick test 320x200x8bit grayscale PNG (couldn't quickly figure out how to get 8bit color pallet) compressed to ~15-40kB. Multiply that by 60frames a second (or whatever odd framerate historic hardware used) and 120seconds and you get 200MB. Not completely impractical, but I wouldn't call it trivial amount of space. And if you find any demoscene collection providing losslessly compressed videos let me know. All I have seen is original executable+youtube video (which suffers from compression artifacts). And I doubt many demoscene website maintainers are eager to increase their storage and bandwidth costs 100x.

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inoop  3 hours ago

I must have watched Second Reality almost a hundred times when I was younger. A video does not do it justice. This is the closest you can get on modern hardware.

Retr0id  6 hours ago

Well, there is a little advantage. Most recordings are not at the native framerate, and have compression artefacts (which impacts some effects more than others)

  • mrob  3 hours ago

    Lack of CRT flicker is the biggest problem. Demo text scrolls are far more readable when you don't have sample-and-hold blur. There are gaming monitors with strobed backlights but I don't know of any that allow you to enable the strobing at 70Hz.

    A workaround for modern hardware is frame doubling then blanking every other frame (software black frame insertion). It halves the brightness, but modern monitors generally support higher brightness than CRTs so this just brings it back to the authentic level. It's possible with FFMPEG filters, although I don't remember how I accomplished it when I tried it years ago.

    The importance of CRT flicker is one reason I greatly prefer DOS demos to C64 and Amiga demos. Those were mostly designed for 50Hz PAL CRTs, so the flicker is far more annoying than 70Hz VGA.

  • bananaboy  5 hours ago

    I mean even these browser ports aren't at the native framerate. The native framerate for these demos was 70hz as they were all designed for VGA video modes.