User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

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Ahh, the demo scene - a digital art subculture, a motley gang of creative nerds, and a favourite pastime of mine. So much amazing art, music and code has been produced by sceners, and anyone who comes into contact with the scene might start to wonder exactly how - apart from hours of dedicated grind, of course.

The scene has a long and storied tradition of building its own tools. Sometimes from scratch, sometimes by stealing ideas or even code from existing offerings. In a combination of teenage inexperience, old habits, a penchant for experimenting and a desire to make things look cool , this has resulted in some rather peculiar user interfaces.

A few of them are presented below. Most of them are for the Amiga, but several other platforms are represented as well.

Not wanting to be accused of clickbaiting, let's start off with one of the main attractions: Elite Sinus Producer (sinus here is to be understood as sine ), made by Ipec Elite for the Amiga. Demos are usually described as "real time", which is true in the sense that they're (almost) never just animation players, and that demo effects are produced, frame by frame, from code. However, to achieve seemingly impossible technical feats, extensive "cheating" is employed. The most common cheat is probably the so called precalc, meaning that instead of doing complex maths on a 7 MHz (or even slower) CPU, lookup tables are utilized. A plethora of tools for creating such lookup tables exist. This is one of them.

When first starting Elite Sinus Producer, the user is met with this menu. Upon pressing an F-key to make a selection, the corresponding menu option is highlighted and a sample of a cuckoo clock is played. Loudly.

Here I've selected the "Flower" option. Pretty, no? This can then be saved to disk as (presumably) assembly source code. Any sprite would look nice when moving along this path!

There's also a handy help screen, which is so outlandish I had to grab a short film clip of it : Part of the background consists of moving blue raster bars, and the other part flashes between red and cyan. This obviously helps immensely when reading the text, displayed in a font designed with nothing but legibility in mind.

Plenty of scene related tools are either command line utilities or predominantly text based. First out, we have the assemblers. There was a wide variety of assemblers for the Amiga, but the scene always favoured Seka, Asm-One and other derivatives of the same concept. There were so many different versions and hacks (Trash'm-one, for example) that the sprawling family tree rivals that of Unix systems .

Here's Seka 2.0, and as we can see, it's based on a commercial assembler. This type of assembler always asks the user for the size of the working memory to be allocated. They then enter a command line mode, which can be used to examine RAM memory and CPU registers, and load source files into the editor proper.

Here's AsmOne in one of its many incarnations. It's quite similar to Seka (in fact, it's "Seka-Updated"), but has more built-in commands and presumably other improvements as well (I've never been much of a coder). Interface-wise, it opens its own screen, as opposed to running in a window on the default Workbench screen.

What if you found a piece of cool music or graphics in, say, a game? What if you wanted to steal some samples, or a sprite, or perhaps just save an entire tune for easy listening? Then you'd need a ripper - a tool for hunting through your computer's memory, looking for remnants of such data after quitting the game. There were tons of various such rippers for the Amiga. Here's Multi-Ripper, which has a fairly representative set of features.

Here's another type of ripper, specifically written to look for Seka assembly sources in memory after the computer had crashed. The Amiga, like most other home computers, had no memory protection, and demo coding is a notoriously crash-prone activity. Saving often was common practice, but even seasoned coders sometimes messed up and forgot. With a bit of luck, the code could be extracted from memory after a warm reboot.

Here's another type of sine precalculator, called The Sinus Creator. I have no idea if the numbers I've entered in the screenshot make sense, but the two-window text interface is interesting. Of course, the result can be saved as a Seka source file.

Demo music has historically been made in trackers. Far from traditional notation, a tracker lets the musician enter tones along with various modifiers and effects in something that's more reminiscent of a programming editor rather than regular composing. They also let the user manage instruments, whether sampled or synthesized.

Sample-based trackers on the Amiga have an even more sprawling family tree than that of Amiga assemblers, but they all originate from Karsten Obarski's commercial Ultimate Soundtracker from 1987. Being commercial and thus costing money, it was soon picked apart by sceners, which resulted in NoiseTracker, which was then revamped into ProTracker, which in turn exists in so many various versions and re-hashed hacks that it's nigh impossible to keep track (heh) of. The sprawl is even sprawlier than that of Amiga assemblers!

SoundMonitor 1.0 for the Commodore 64 (by Chris Huelsbeck) isn't strictly speaking a scene release, and wasn't called "tracker". However, the interface (with one "track" per available sound channel) is what inspired the previously mentioned Ultimate Soundtracker, and is thus included here for posterity and correctness.

NoiseTracker by the Swedish duo Mahoney and Kaktus wasn't the first, but it was immensely popular and came to define the tracker experience for years to come. Its legacy lives on just not in Protracker on the Amiga, but on several other platforms as well.

Here's Protracker's file picker. Just like in NoiseTracker above, it's accessed by clicking the "Disk Op." button in the rather dense interface. It's hard to describe what a strange experience this UI delivers, because it's almost - but not quite - intuitive to someone used to more mainstream Amiga programs. It's easy to misclick, misunderstand or just plain miss things. To illustrate its idiosyncratic design, take note of the vertical EXIT button, which quits back to the main menu. It's conveniently placed between the up and down arrows used for scrolling the purple file and directory listing.

Here's Digicomposer 1.0 for the Atari ST/e, which in turn builds on Noisetracker for the Atari. The interface is clearly more than just inspired by its Amiga counterpart. It's but one of a whole menagerie of trackers for the Atari ST, some "digi" (sample-based) like this one, some for YM-chip based music.

Fasttracker II for MS-DOS is iconic in its own right. With support for Gravis UltraSound and other advanced PC sound hardware, it has features for 16-bit samples, bizarre amounts of sound channels, and even lets the user play a simple version of Snake if they so desire.

Abyss' Highest Experience is a chiptune tracker for the Amiga, intended to sound like the Commodore 64's SID chip. The user interface is an interesting crossover between Soundtracker and a more modern, Workbench 2.0 -like look.

I don't know much about Megatizer for the Atari ST, but it sure does look cool!

JamCrackerPro for the Amiga eschewed the traditional tracker UI and opted for a system-friendly, multi-window interface.

In order to distribute demos (and pirated software), disk copying was a common activity on the scene. Commodore provided a disk copier in AmigaOS, but it wasn't always up to the task of copying demos and games that bypassed the file system by writing directly to the tracks of a floppy. Thus, special software was needed!

Like SoundMonitor, X-Copy isn't strictly a scene release. Although originally written by sceners , it was released commercially and then heavily pirated on the scene. The prominently featured grids contain one square for each track on the disk, displaying the status for copying that particular part of the floppy. When a copy was finished (which could take some time), the program helpfully played a little "boing" sound.

X-Copy was released in many versions during the Amiga heydays. Here's X-Copy 3.0, apparently in an illicit variety distributed by the cracking group Paradox.

Personally, I preferred D-Copy, mostly because I thought the user interface looked cool (and I still do). It is, as far as I know, a bona fide non-commercial scene product.

A short article like this can only ever scratch the surface of the numerous demo scene tools ever created. Here are but a few more various tools and interfaces, selected for being interesting and/or representative of their kind.

This is Titanics Cruncher for the Amiga. A cruncher uses asymmetrical compression of executable files. This saves space on disk, with the tradeoff being longer loading times, due to the decrunching (decompression) of the executable upon running it. Several other crunchers exist, and on a variety of platforms.

Before the Internet, there was the Bulletin Board System , or BBS. Sceners were usually interested in Elite BBS:es, meaning ones that offered pirated software for download. There were few, if any, Elite BBS:es without cool ANSI (or PETSCII, on the C64) graphics, for example in animated menu screens. Thus, many various ANSI editors popped up for different platforms. This is Digital Intelligence's Ansi-Editor v2.4 for the Amiga, and it has a very peculiar user interface. The toolbar at the bottom displays the currently active colours, but you can't select them from there. Click all you want, to no effect - you have to use the pull-down menu to actually pick one.

Before Twitter, Facebook, IRC and even widespread access to modems and BBS:es, scroll texts were the communication medium of choice for the scene. Cool scrollers required cool fonts, and it could be helpful with a dedicated font (or charset) editor. Here's Charedit by Escape, for MS-DOS.

Home computers often came with custom or otherwise esoteric hardware. The Atari Falcon, for example, sported a Motorola 56001 digital signal processor. DSPdit by tSCc (short for The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation) is an editor and assembler made specifically for DSP56k programming. It uses the standard GEM toolkit, which gives it a very clean and professional look.

The first computer virus for the Amiga was a bootblock virus, infecting the boot sector of floppy disks. As such, it could potentially ruin games and other floppies with custom bootblocks. It was constructed by the Swiss Cracking Association, SCA. The virus spread like wildfire and perhaps SCA was plagued by a guilty conscience, because later they also produced the very first virus killer for the Amiga - designed to counter their own virus. The mega-mighty interface is easy enough to grasp!

As mentioned above, plenty of Amiga demos were so called trackmos, meaning they didn't use the file system, but rather stored data straight on the tracks of a floppy disk. This soon resulted in various tooling becoming available for creating such trackmos. Mostly it was just code shared between sceners, but there were also complete software suites, like TrackmoDOS by Poison of NOVA. Among other things, it came with this orthodox file manager for writing and deleting files to a trackmo floppy. Being a scener tool, the GUI of course sports some rather spiffy colour gradients.

This is RAW, which isn't really a tool, but rather a disk magazine, or diskmag. A diskmag is just that - a periodical published on one or more floppy disks. Most of the articles were usually scene related, although some mags branched out and featured everything from short stories and poems to essays about history and politics. RAW was one of the most popular Amiga diskmags during the early 1990s, and as we can see, the UI was shiny and textured long before Frutiger Aero was a thing. It