pouët.net

Cool! and please do! I removed mine. Maali and Okkie threw it down as a challenge, I did pick it up in order to show them it was possible in classic demoscene fashion, but I also feel strongly that approval and working with the original authors with these kind of ports is important.

Thanks! I appreciate it :)

Great... I fail at quoting.

is it my oldfart pc (almost an amiga!! :P although it runs like at 3% CPU most of the time, so probably not?!) or does that starstruck win port have severe sync/timing issues?

@maalinstrippari Nice! Not your PC :) CPU-wise, the demo is almost free, it barely uses a few percent even on old machines. Any hiccup makes things worse, even permanently, so yes, these are real sync issues, but they're caused by the port, not by your machine. I'll be improving this and testing the next version inside a VM configured to behave like an old PC, so it should work properly on hardware like yours. Thanks for reporting it!

@hot multimedia Hehe, it's a genuine rebuild: no WinUAE inside. The whole thing, parts, software rasterizer, C2P-era pipeline, music playback, etc. has been reimplemented natively and verified piece by piece against the original running under emulation with custom tooling. So, at least for the parts I've certified, it matches down to the pixel. WinUAE was used only as a reference oracle, never as the engine.

This pet project is partly an excuse, to be honest. I loved this demo (as I explained in the zip file's readme), and I'm using it as a real-world test case for a compiler I've been working on for quite a while. It's also pushing me to build my own small x86 simulator, so verifying ports like this will become much faster without relying on overfeatured software such as VirtualBox or 86Box. There's still a LOT of work ahead on all fronts :)

As for the HTML page, I'm not posting one for now. I'd rather do it properly later as a small interactive making-of, so people, especially younger generations can discover the beauty of what was happening behind the scenes in masterpieces like this decades ago. These were works that made so many of us genuinely happy back in the day, and somehow they still do.

And there's one thing I keep daydreaming about, and I don't think anyone has mentioned it in this cool thread, apart from the direct ports: could a 64K port of some of the aforementioned spectacular demos even be possible?

Because let me tell you: no matter how much custom tooling, AI, or whatever else you throw at it, you'll soon realize that this is an extremely, ridiculously hard engineering problem. I've been wanting to port to 64k some of the huge megademos I love for years, and I'm still trying, lol...

And no AI whatsoever is going to magically solve this kind of hard problems magically, at least not now. And if it can, prove it, cos I'd absolutely love to get back the same "WOW!" feeling I had often decades ago when visiting pouet on a daily basis ;)

i wonder what other 'most people don't have the hardware (anymore)'-releases exist that would benefit from a port. for example, i know one demo that only runs on 32 bits windows vista, but it's not worth porting that one :D but surely there are similar yet more popular candidates.

If you extend "hardware" to "platform", you can include all the demo released for Java by Komplex. On the french side of things, the Alambik releases could be kind of tricky as well.

ah yes, java... including my own java demos :D

cdak by quite & orange
https://mrdoob.github.io/cdak/#party
https://mrdoob.github.io/cdak/#final

Haha, awesome :) ... I wonder, though... Could this, let’s say, atrium be done in 4096 bytes of js, real time, like the original one 1:1? That’d be an amazing feat to see, especially the synth, which is a true masterpiece when you start reading the original asm and realizing all the cool tricks behind the code, truly a piece of art.

Also, trace... I still remember, +20 years ago, after Euskal Party 2006, asking around post-party on ol’ Spanish IRC #escena about some of the effects behind tokyo, questions were unanswered at the time... Now... just saying ;)

Just kidding, keep it going, guys!

</whislist>

What questions were unanswered? 👀

Haha, pfff... 20 years is a lot of time, but probably whether that demo could be ported to 64k, or about the demotool you guys used, or maybe the metaballs refraction, don't remember specifically... :D

Just kidding. Lovely demo, especially when watching it at the partyplace, was definitely one of my fav demos that year.

Sorry for going offtopic... Atrium browser port now ;)

@mrdoob just wanted to say I really REALLY appreciate the work you're putting into this - preservation and accessibility of demos is super important to me.

@rc55 thanks! preservation and accessibility is exactly the goal.

hplus by halcyon
https://mrdoob.github.io/hplus/

Moved all the ports to a new github org:
https://github.com/demoports

virus by matt current
https://demoports.github.io/mc-virus/

I would be interested to know what are the perspectives in terms of preservation of an executable work of art that relies on a web browser, a Javascript API, WebGL and the acceleration API (shaders, drivers, etc). I see it as dozen of regressions opportunities on the decades to come.

I agree this is as an excellent short term mediation tool (what you call accessiblity).

I did ROME 15 years ago and it still runs as the first day without requiring a single change.

The open web is pretty good at not breaking stuff.

akkordarbeit by bypass
https://demoports.github.io/akkord/

That said, as with any other additional link that's not pointing to a single file, should "online version" links break we'll probably just remove them unless an alternative is readily available.

…and my mirror will not stand a chance at saving them, unless they're a single file. I don't know of a good automated way to do this currently (there are various things that try to fire up a headless Chromium and pack a web page, but few of them seem to work well with demos).

wel this was only a matter of time I suppose... (not by me)

www.secondreality1993.com

It would be possible for mrdoob (or whoever does the ports) to bake them down to a single .html file I think, maybe? Like with huge base64 data URLs for the assets etc. A bit wasteful for sure, but that'd make archiving/spreading very easy. That said, it'd ruin the current "no build tool" setup which is very nice.

Oh, I was almost done with my port...
I can spot a couple of bugs in that port though.

Well, for one, the whole presentation is off... SR runs at 320x200 in a 4:3 aspect ratio, with non-square pixels. Ideally, you render that to a 1600x1200 buffer with 5 pixels horizontally and 6 pixels vertically to compensate and you present that at a 4:3 aspect ratio on screens with square pixels to preserve the original aspect ratio. If you look at the lens/rotozoom part you can see that both PSI (the lens should be a sphere, not an ellipse) and Pixel (circles in the corners of the artwork should be circles, not ellipses) accounted for this in the original...