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Demo Source Code

Demo Source Code


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The Demo Stuff files contain some of my very first source code for the PC.
Lots of assembler code and Pascal routines. Fancy 3D graphics was what I did mostly those days (back in 1993).
Unlike most 3D graphics libraries you find today, these are brute-force programming. The 3D graphics card wasn't invented at that time - in fact, your video card/memory was so slow that the assembler language was the only game in town. You had to put the pedal-to-the-metal and use all the tricks in the bag to get the most out of the 40Mhz processor you had bought for a ridiculous amount of money.

The Demo Scene

If you don't know about the Demo Scene, it will probably be difficult to explain.
It unfolded during the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, and could be described as a friendly competition among young computer nerds to create dashing visual effects and electronic music. Sort of like the new concept of Music Videos that MTV later introduced. Mostly written in assembly language on computers like Commodore 64 and the Amiga and with crude tools to compose computer music and pixelate images.
It was in this environment I spent quite some happy time trying to get familiar with 3D rendering techniques.

When I left the scene to turn my attention to the PC, the first thing I did was to get familiar to Intel assembler. And what better way to do this than trying to move my Motorola 68K experiences to the PC.
Along the way, I produced several 2D and 3D graphics routines for the PC, which I after some time decided to upload to a once busy Finnish FTP site.

Strangely, my Demo Stuff files were very popular downloads. They didn't contain the very state-of-the-art routines because I never did have the time to dwell over how to make bump-mapping or phong-shading. But they do demonstrate the basics of making 2D and 3D rendering using simple and compressed routines.
They are written in Borland Pascal 7.0 with embedded assembler language and are all for the PC.

They need to be run in DOS - so bump your Win98 to DOS mode before running anything.

DemoStuff #1

Some of my very first code for the PC.
Amazingly some of these files were written on my Amiga 500 computer! Using a portable Pascal compiler and macros in the ASM-ONE assembler, I wrote them on my Amiga 500 and tested them at school on a PC.
The main features are some simple star field, simple polygon graphics and stuff that I ported from my Amiga demos.

DemoStuff #2

Due to popular demands, I released all my remaining sources in 1994.
I finally got the money to buy my first PC, a 80486 40Mhz. With this I could explore some of the more neat 3D rendering techniques at that time, such as gouraud shading.
This package also includes a Wolfenstein ray-casting engine in 500 lines of code, more polygon graphics and some morphing routines.

DemoStuff #3

The last bunch of sources I did before giving up making demo stuff.
Contains mainly some helper routines for creating an actual demo executable. Includes converters for various graphical formats and some gouraud shaded objects.

Source Code Dependencies

MS-DOS 6 (or Windows 9X in DOS mode)
Borland Pascal 7.0

Useful Links

Visit Scene.org for the latest info about the current demo scene.

Download Files

DownloadDemoStuff #1 Source Code and Binaries (79 Kb)
DemoStuff #2 Source Code and Binaries (98 Kb)
DemoStuff #3 Source Code and Binaries (95 Kb)

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