[masternight]

Ah wow.

I really enjoyed the demoscene back in the 90s. Was never a part of it but I was always fascinated by the effects and music and ascii art that these guys created.

A BBS in my city always had the latest e-zines like Reality Check Network and Affinity, and others I forget. Reading up on the scene and about groups like Razor1911 was something I spent a lot of time on when I was younger.

Amazing demo and homage to the era.

[philxor]

It is a great demo and really nostalgic. I was briefly a courier for Razor 1911 in the mid 90s. I recognize many of the handles throughout the demo and in the list at the end, and even BBS names if you slow down or pause some parts of the demo. So certainly brings back a lot of good memories. The music is great also.

[tetrisgm]

Thanks for your service, you got kids like me into PCs back then.

[TacticalCoder]

> I really enjoyed the demoscene back in the 90s. Was never a part of it but I was always fascinated by the effects and music and ascii art that these guys created.

It was quite something... I take it there are quite a few hotshots on HN who used to be in the top groups. I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends and then we'd get infinite leech/upload ratio on those BBSes. Best memory was driving through Belgium / the Netherlands / Denmark / putting the car on the boat / Sweden (Uppsala) with our computers (Amiga, Atari ST and PCs) to participate at a demo compo. Forgot its name but in the PC category we tied first place with Future Crew (we would have been first had I not screwed the sound playback routine which crashed half-way the demo), before they had their big breakthrough on the PC demoscene. I think that was in 1991.

Cops/customs stopped us as the boat arrived in Sweden and thought we were dealing drugs: they tore the car apart and had no idea what we were talking about when we were explaining them in broken english that we were going to participate in a demo compo :-/

I still have a few effects as executables but I don't have the code anymore for these.

Thankfully I still have the entire source code of a game I made in assembly (for PC / 386+) in 1991 (never published but it's how my career started, long story) and lately I've been having a huge lot of fun trying to compile it again with Claude Code CLI / Sonnet. I'm using UASM, which is compatible with MASM which I used to use. I managed to have all the utilities I wrote back then (picture converters / sprites extractor / etc.) compiling and running (in DOSBox) but haven't managed to compile the main game yet. A few more hours with Claude Code CLI and I should get it running.

FWIW it's hilarious to go back to code from 1991 and see comments in my code talking about this and that bug and asking the LLM: "Find where that bug could be" and the LLM manages to find it. It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories. Copy/pasta code everywhere. And then 10 000 lines of code per source code file.

What an era. Diving in that old code of mine brings me back: the decades they've been flying.

P.S: funnily enough by lack of luck a macro I had used back then happen to become a reserved keyword/macro in assemblers later on. I had named back then a macro "incbin" and that was preventing my code from compiling in UASM: Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 found that issue instantly.

P.P.S: 0x777 in hex gives 1911. RZR, legendary: probably the most legendary of them all. Probably still have a few 5"1/4 floppies (both C64 and Amiga for I had an Amiga with a little software mod to read 5"1/4 floppies as if they were 3"1/2 for the 5"1/4 were way cheaper) with Razor 1911 "cracktros" (even if they weren't called that yet) still working (back in 2020 quite a few of my floppies were still reading: maybe half to 2/3rd of them). I know it won't last, nothing will.

[e12e]

> It's also insane the lack of version control: version control was copying entire directories.

I can understand that - under dos - but as I recall quite a lot of gnu/nix tooling was workable on the Amiga - RCS harks back to 1984...

[masternight]

> I was in a group and we were writing small intros for BBSes with a couple of friends

Ah that would have been such an awesome time. Thanks for sharing!

[DrJokepu]

What are using as a linker? Also, do you use protected mode and if yes, what do you use for that, PMODE or CWSDPMI or something else?

[TacticalCoder]

It's an old MS-DOS .EXE. Actually it compiles with the ".286" directive too. So I don't use protected mode.

It requires a VGA card and those were more common in 386 IIRC and, anyway, performance-wise to run at 60 Hz it needs a 386. I never tried to run it on a 286 with a VGA card: don't know if that was a thing.

It's funny looking at that old assembly code and see ax, bx, cx, dx registers and not the eax, etc. ones.

The utilities I've compiled to .EXE so far are self-contained in one file and I just use UASM to create directly the .EXE:

    uasm -mz myutil.asm

UASM v2.57 does the job in my case (note that I compile from Linux: UASM exists for several platforms/OSes):

https://www.terraspace.co.uk/uasm.html

I haven't tried yet to compile the entire game yet: that one is more involved as it implies many files.

[Narishma]

VGA was pretty common on 286, I even had an SVGA card on my own back in the day. And it also had protected mode but was still 16-bit.

[TacticalCoder]

> VGA was pretty common on 286, I even had an SVGA card on my own back in the day. And it also had protected mode but was still 16-bit.

Oh that's intriguing. Well I still have one, so now I'll have to find a VGA card and see if my code even works on a 286!