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Comment by zxcdw

11 years ago

This is good stuff. If anybody wants to dig deeper to articles like this, I have to mention the Hugi Coding Digest[1] (an executable "diskmag") from 2003 which contains all the articles related to programming from Hugi #11 to Hugi #27, including this one.

The topics of the articles are as follows: "Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science", "General Programming Techniques", "Searching & Sorting", "Object-Orientated Programming", "File Formats", "Text Processing", "2D Graphics Programming", "3D Graphics Programming", "Windows Graphics Programming (GDI, DirectDraw, Direct3D)", "OpenGL", "Sound Programming", "Synchronization & Scripting for Demos", "Hardware-centered Programming", "Code Optimization, FPU", "Data Compression", "64k, 4k and even smaller intros", "Windows", "Linux", "Other Non-Wintel platforms", "Active Server Pages", "ActiveX", "Assembler", "C++", "Flash", "Java", "JavaScript", "PHP", "Other Programming Languages", "Miscellaneous".

Hell, it also has some nice tracker music on the background.

Obviously the format is a bit cumbersome -- but I think it's a good dive into the demoscene culture. Also most of the articles are written by hobbyists -- the real young hackers (oh and a few crackers too!) who just want to share what they have learned.

I think it should run natively on Windows and runs on Linux via Wine. Just launch the hugicode.exe -- of course with appropriate security caution, and if you trust me, Hugi and scene.org to have no malicious intent. :)

Why is the hacking culture like this dead? It was still somewhat well alive just 10 years ago, never mind 15 or 20 years ago. Even after so many years, it still saddens me to look back into gems like this Hugi Special Digest from a decade ago and see it forgotten and gone. Not just the contents or the release itself, but the computing culture which has died along with the demoscene.

[1]: https://www.scene.org/file.php?file=/mags/hugi/hugise01.zip&...

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zxcdw

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userbinator  11 years ago

Why is the hacking culture like this dead?

The demoscene is very much alive, if you look at places like pouet.net there's plenty of new demos released even in the sub-1k categories. The newest ones there are from this month. However, you might be correct to say that it's become less known amongst general computer users and programmers, and I think the consumer-oriented nature of computers today (especially mobile devices) is mostly to blame; users are restrained and actively discouraged from tinkering with their machines software and hardware-wise, and isolated from knowledge by many layers of abstraction and complexity. There's a big movement against users sharing executables with each other and running them, and while the security concerns are real, I think it's also had a chilling effect on the hobbyists. The fact that antimalware software tends to detect packed demos as suspicious/infected (false positives) doesn't help either. In addition, many people probably found their way into demoscene via the warez scene that it grew from - and with the growing antipiracy concerns, that route is becoming narrower too.

While I don't think the demoscene is currently "dead" per se, it's certainly at risk of becoming even more of an obscure and fringe culture than it is now.

  • ChuckMcM  11 years ago

    I agree with this, I think the fraction of people who are looking at computers in this deep way is similar to what it has always been, but it is still a small fraction. And as such its activities are swamped in the noise of other things with the same name.

    Perhaps part of the difference is that before (when RAM/CPU was expensive/slow) you were forced to do this to make something impressive and now we have an excess of compute and RAM. So to rekindle that challenge we set an artificial limit.