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These web pages archived from http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/ on October 17th 2000 in compliance with the statement "If you would like to use this website as a historical reference of the PC demoscene or a starting point for your own pages, feel free to do so as long as you give me (Trixter) credit somewhere." found on the home page. For the most part these web pages are outdated, most of the links are not functional. They are provided for the content which is found specifically on the pages.

Demo Music and Art

Music

Music Groups are groups of people who compose music. 90% of the music composed is tracked with a tracker; the rest is either MIDI or another music format. Probably the most well-known music group is the KFMF. For more information on music formats or trackers, feel free to visit the Glossary.

These are examples of typical music you hear in demos. All sound samples are provided in both Microsoft WAVE and Sun/NeXT AU format. All samples were taken directly from a playing Gravis Ultrasound, and sampled in 8-bit mono 11KHz sound.

Microsoft WAVE file format examples

Chip Music. (130K) (unreleased song by Mark Brown) Most chip music is very small, because the name "chip music" comes from the instruments used--they are very small, and sound like a cheezy on-chip synthesizer. Still, they can escape that genre in rare cases, and sound like this sound bite, which is as good as chip music gets. (Ironically, the sound byte is 130K, while the source song is only 25K!)

Mellow Techno. (160K) (from Verses/EMF) This is your "typical" demo music. It's dancable, but has more style and structure than regular dance or techno music. (Americans consider this type of music "european"; europeans consider it cool. ;-)

Rock & Roll. (158K) (from Show/Majic12) Some demos are abandoning the traditional demo music and coming up with music that mimics traditional styles. This example, from Majic 12's Show demo, is a bit like rock.

Techno. (221K) (song by AiRoN Jayder) This is the second-most common style of music for demos--techno. Dance music, full of raw energy.

Unclassified. (140K) (from Wired '94 results intro) Occaisionally you'll hear music that just doesn't fit into a category. Sometimes an experiment, sometimes awkward, but always fresh to listen to.

Sun or NeXT ".au" format examples

(For descriptions, see above.)

Mellow Techno
Techno
Rock & Roll
Chip Music
Unclassified

Graphics and Art

Much of the art produced by graphicians is hand-drawn on the computer, usually with DeluxePaint, one of the most popular paint programs used by demo artists. Other times, ray-traced art is used, but this is generally frowned upon, because unless it's a fairly complicated object, it doesn't take a greal deal of time or effort. However, scanning a picture is never allowed. If a picture is scanned, who's to say the person claiming it's his artwork actually did it? (The only exception to scanning is the popular Amiga artist technique of drawing something on paper in pencil outline, scanning it, then re-working it on the computer. This is considering mildly acceptable.)

Here is an example of some of the fantastic art created by graphicians.

ANSI Groups are groups of people who draw graphics for BBS's, but the graphics they draw are entirely made up of ASCII and extended ASCII text characters. (This is so the graphics can be displayed in text mode, or conviently transmitted via a BBS while on-line.) ANSI is the term given the standard color and positioning codes that are embedded in pictures to give them color, etc. More recently, ANSI groups have been drawing pictures for demo groups. Here's an example of ANSI Art.

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