Intro to Demoscene
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual art, and musical skills. Demos and other demoscene productions (graphics, music, videos, games) are shared, voted on and released online at festivals known as demoparties.The scene started with the home computer revolution of the early 1980s, and the subsequent advent of software cracking. Crackers altered the code of computer games to remove copy protection, claiming credit by adding introduction screens of their own ("cracktros"). They soon started competing for the best visual presentation of these additions. Through the making of intros and stand-alone demos, a new community eventually evolved, independent of the gaming and software sharing scenes.
Starfield Effect
The classic space demo -- 3D points using a perspective projection to calculate 3D depth of 2D point coordinates.
Plasma Effect
Plasma is the name of a VGA graphics demo created by Bret Mulvey in 1988 and released on CompuServe. It uses a diamond-square algorithm to generate a 2D pattern, and then cycles the colors using hardware palette in its 256-color mode.
Chrome Ball Raytracer
A dual-core raytracer: a reflective chrome sphere orbiting over a cream-and-red checkerboard, with specular highlights, and a shadow. Core 1 renders while core 0 upscales and blits.
Vector Valley aka Fractal Landscape
Continuously scrolling grid of wireframe 3D terrain moving toward camera.
Rotozoom
2D image/texture effect with continuously rotating and scaling image. Added complexity with a magnifying glass effect superimposed over a region.
Amiga Juggler Demo
From Wikipedia:
Sculpt 3D is a raytrace application released in 1987 for Amiga computers programmed by Eric Graham. Sculpt 3D was one of the first ray tracing applications released for the Amiga computers. It proved that raytracing could be done on home computers as well as on mainframes.
The first demo that showed the raytracing capabilities was an animation of a juggler juggling three chrome balls. Even though the juggler was constructed out of spheres, the balls' reflections and movement made it look realistic. The juggler demo was generated on an experimental version of Sculpt 3D. The animation, released in January 1986, generated so much interest that the full 3D application was programmed.
Page last edited July 22, 2026
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