The reverse Midas touch.

People still use old platforms without GPUs. It's a completely different art form. On a modern PC with a GPU you can render anything you want because it was solved years ago.

No, its not at all similar. Comparing shader coding with AI prompting is just dumb, sorry.

I think i was pretty clear in my original post.

Its about people doing the seemingly impossible with technology, not technology doing whats possible with technology. If you use AI, you did nothing but ask it, and i could never be impressed by that.

And how would you vote in the competitions at demoparties? By tokens used?

Most parties strictly forbid the use of AI in production, but im afraid some people aren't honest enough to abide to that rule.

From discussing with demosceners I think people pretty unanimously agree vibecoded prods are lame, if sometimes fun. There's nothing impressive about a vibecoded demo, and even if they are visually impressive, that isn't really the point. The point is that people actually made it, the demo itself is an artifact of the talent of the group that made it. If anything it's a bit awkward when people submit heavily vibecoded demos.

Yes demoscene is about doing the impossible with Technology, but its also about proving that your group is good at performing miracles with computers. Modern demos are still technically impressive, but art direction is much more important for a high-tier demo. It's not "we are doing this impressive thing" as much as it is "Look what WE are able to do with this technical trick we are harnessing". The group and people behind the demo is a brand and part of the experience.

My personal opinion is that if you think a 100% vibecoded demo is cool, you don't really "get" the demoscene. Nobody is impressed that you could vibecode a visually impressive demo. You aren't winning anyone's respect. Nobody will work to beat you (they will at best push Claude harder - its a question of money not talent). The point of the demoscene is to pull off impressive feats with computer hardware, and if you didn't even do it yourself, nobody cares, because it's not impressive.

I think few are going to hate you for outsourcing basic, repetitive work to an LLM. But if you go "hey claude make me a particle engine" it kind of misses the point?

Then again I'm not really a hardcore scener myself, with just a few mediocre prods, so maybe someone from Farbrausch, ASD, TBL, or others will show up and tell me why I am wrong.

> Demoscene was always about doing

Yes, but “doing” with AI is not actually doing it, is it? Yes, something gets done, but the end result was never the point of the demoscene. The finished product was merely the proof-of-work.

> Cycle accurate emulation helps little with this era PC demos

It works, and has done for some time, surely. What more is there to add here above accurate playback?

> From 386SX-16 to Pentium 66 MHz, that's 10-20x difference in performance.

Yep, and some demos had specific requirements for not only minimal CPU but maximal because the assumptions inherent in small-code timing tricks would break beyond a certain speed or because of significant differences in relative instruction execution times (and sometimes the unpredictability of those execution times as the P5 architecture and some of its frankenstein-486-like competitors added branch prediction). Larger demos were more flexible as you didn't need the small-code tricks to squeeze into 4Kb or sometimes less, so 64K demos and larger could be more flexible wrt target CPU.

But cycle-accurate emulation has this sorted to: you just need the instruction cycle time accuracy to be matching a particular CPU running to the pace of a particular clock. And given the description of how this is being done (“The demo is run on an x86 emulator that records…”) I assume this is actually using cycle-accurate emulation!

I'm guessing the benefit here is that the overhead of playing back the demo on each client machine is lower when playing this recorded version, compared to each viewer's browser running the initial emulation live in the browser. That and doing something a new way was fun or otherwise intellectually stimulating for the dev(s) involved.

> You have to constantly fight so hard to not get this.

By “fight so hard” you mean “do a bit of basic editing before publishing the text”?

You wouldn't have thrown a junior's text straight at end users without any review in the past (at least I hope not, though obviously some teams actually were and still are that lax), why do you expect to get away with skipping the review/edit step with your clockwork colleague?

I didn’t notice it when using Codex. Recently switched to Claude to test Opus 5.5, and it is constantly adding useless commentary.

This only works for something noninteractive that always executes the same code (unless I'm misunderstanding the LLM's description of what it did)

Being cycle-accurate is annoying when you want full realtime if the hosting platform doesn't have enough CPU power to emulate all parts at full speed.

I guess the point is that a pre-compiled version could have HW checkpoints from a slow emulated run, so that it can then run at full speed and just advance the HW to the required timestate when a write is to occur (ie, instead of costly cycle-accurate emulationg, most HW operations can be batched inbetween time-sensitive checkpoints).

Then again, why not just record a video at that point? :P

Man, demoscene has always been pointless. That's one of the beauties of the thing, you cannot sell that. I call it love.

To be specific, the Amiga scene for a good while chased "coolness" with accelerated "monster"-Amigas.

But the focus shifted in recent years to treating "OCS" (ie "standard" Amiga500 with original chipset and 1mb,etc) more like a fixed platform like the C64 instead and imho has seen a bit of a revival since is mostly in the interesting part of pushing the OCS HW.

Second Reality ran comfortably with only 640KB RAM using the Gravis Ultrasound.

But it did require a 386, which typically had 2 MB or more of RAM back then.

Second Reality runs in real mode, and doesn't use XMS or EMS so it runs in 640kb!

> probably 8MB of ram at the most. Running it in the browser is probably at least 20 times the memory.

lol, that would be 160MB then, a fraction of what a Firefox Tab consumes and in todays hardware specs its a roundoff error :-D

(while back then you were the ultimate king if you had 8 MB of RAM available at all! :-)

Not sure if this will help, but nothing can take away the enjoyment of investing time in doing something "the hard way" for the sake of it unless you let it. Factories have been able to make good wooden tables efficiently since probably the 1950s, but there are still people who make their own with woodworking tools because they find it satisfying.

I think the biggest effect of AI here is that you can no longer make the inference from "that program looks impressive" to "the person who created it must be very skilful and/or invested a lot of effort in making it". So someone else seeing your work might not appreciate the level of effort and skill you put into it, or might even suspect you of lying if you say explicitly that you made it "by hand". I'm not going to say that we shouldn't care what others think; that's not realistic, most of us do want some recognition for things we've worked hard on. I think there will always be people interested in doing things the hard way, and among those people the "old" paths to recognition and respect still operate, it just gets harder because there has to be a lot of trust between them that no one's taken the easy way out (AI) and pretended otherwise.

Revision attends approximately 1000 people.

Uh, many people. There are plenty of demo parties with retro categories in the compos, and plenty of people still interested in writing their own code for those platforms.

That is a nonserious nonresponse.

Or an eternal heaven, our every wish coming true. The next iteration of homo sapiens will not be thinking how to do things, but what things to do. Is this the new creative space for us?

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.

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.

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.

Ah, yes, sorry. At this point, XP and DOS are almost synonymous for me.

The entire point of the port was to add headless play for AI training. But porting the old interface and playing it in the browser was lots of fun. Can not upload that to GitHub, obviously.

It is true what people say wrt using agentic development being like being a manager: you take an idea from elsewhere (a lot of game porting is happening right now), describe it to someone else who will do the hard work while you relax, and then at the end you as the team lead/manager claim all the credit.

I find it hard to congratulate someone on a project when they say Claude or whatever did it for them. It just feels so insincere. I myself wouldn't feel good getting compliments about something that I prompted into existence.

Opus 5.5.

Haha.