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Comments (26)

• superted
  I vividly remember FastTracker II, and how intuitive and tactile it felt to get things done in it, despite the minimal user interface real estate. As an example, there were no sound effects. So, I routinely manually created echo effects by copying the sounds from one channel to another one of the available channels, offsetting the notes by a few ticks and lowering the volume. It was simpler times.
• sph
  I miss the colorful interfaces of DOS, before standardisation and "human interface guidelines" were even a thing.As a kid, running an .exe from the floppy discs my father was bringing home from work meant being blasted with unknown colours and sounds, never knowing what to expect. Just experiencing random user interfaces from programs and games was great fun.
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  userbinator
  I first thought "Elite Sinus Producer" and "The Sinus Creator" were trackers specifically designed for creating nasal-sounding music; but of course the explanation for why the term "sinus" came to be used instead of "sine" is likely because many demosceners were from a native European background, and their language retained the Latin origin word instead of deprecating its usage in favour of "sine", as happened in English.
• krige
  A nice, somewhat nostalgic read. I had X-Copy and D-Copy both, although I'm more familiar with the later X-Copy editions that were quite purple [0] [1]. It was also my first contact with the concept of disk defrag.[0] https://jope.fi/xcopy/releases.html[1] https://jope.fi/xcopy/img/xcopy/xcopyapr93en.png
• p2detar
  I swear music trackers had the most impressive UI back then. FastTracker and ImpulseTracker were to me the highest piece of art and engineering at the time. They kind of hold up even to this day. Especially ImpulseTracker's instruments and sample editor.
• HexDecOctBin
  Another good one is the visual editor of .werkkzeug3 used to make .kkrieger which serves as an alternative interface to the typical node based shader editor.https://media.demozoo.org/screens/o/82/e2/a055.334456.png
• momocowcow
  Doesn't mention ScreamTracker. A good example of demo group dogfooding. Unique text based UI too. As far as I can remember this was the first dos tracker.
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  noduerme
  ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts were as complicated as vim.
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  weinzierl
  Oh, the memories!My favourite one was on a C64 disk mag called "Input". It looked roughly like this: menu entry 1 <-> * menu entry 2 menu entry 3 ----------------------------- with <-> a little space ship * a projectile ----- the ground You had to move the spaceship up and down and then fire at the menu entries to select them.Since the menu entries had gaps between them you could miss. You likely missed by accident even, because control on home-computers was not what we are used to today.When you missed the projectile was reflected from the opposite wall and if you didn't dodge, it hit your own ship.The little ship crashed to the ground and a tiny, just a couple of pixels, figure appeared complaining and dragging his broken ship off the screen.
• meerita
  I remember FastTracker II pretty well from the gatherings we had with our demoscene friends in Buenos Aires. Many of them worked exclusively with it for our demos.
• truemotive
  Yes! The details about trackers in this post are something I've needed straight away for a chiptune-related project. Thanks for sharing
• Tepix
  The screenshot of "The Virus Protector 1.0" brings back ancient memories. If I remember right, it played a short jingle from the Queen song "A kind of magic" whenever it had removed a virus. It sure felt very magic at the time.
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  jsonc
  Oh wow, great read! I was an amiga demo scene coder down here in Australia, spent many long nights in asm-one :)I had no idea there were tools for pre-calc lookup tables back then! Instead I just generated my own from code as I assumed everyone else was :DUsing pre-calc sine tables freed up so many clock cycles.Big shout to all the sceners on here! I really do miss coding 68k asm sigh :)
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  madhu_ghalame
  Performance is important, but developer productivity matters just as much. I'm curious how this balances both.
• shevy-java
  I like that the demo scene is quite creative. It seems as if the non-demo scene kind of abandoned creativity to a large extent here, at the least with regards to the User Interface. I noticed almost the same with regards to menuet OS. Personally I would not use Assembly, but creativity is still leading to changes: https://menuetos.net/
• Haley_076
  [flagged]