______/\___________________________ __ ________________ ___ /\_______ \____ \ ________ _ _ ______ \ / \| \ ________ | \/ ______/ / | \ _) \ \_/ \ | \ / \ \ _) \ | \______ \ / | \ \ | \ | \/ \ \ /~\ \ / \ \_____ /_______/___| /________/\____\_____/_______/_________/________/ ===\_____/============|____/========================================[+tZ^]== DemoNews Issue #83 February 12, 1995 - February 18, 1995 ------------ DemoNews is a weekly publication for the demo scene. It is produced at the Internet FTP site ftp.eng.ufl.edu (HORNET). This newsletter focuses on many aspects of demos and demo making. Everyone is welcomed to contribute articles, rumors, and advertisements. Information about HORNET and DemoNews can be found under /demos/README -Christopher G. Mann (Snowman)- r3cgm@dax.cc.uakron.edu Start.of.DemoNews.083,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.part.1.of.1 SIZE: 22,340 SUBSCRIBERS: Last week: 1252 This week: 1227 Change: -25 Countdown to NAID: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx O +--------------+----------------+--------------+------- January February March April 15! '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' SECTIONS ARTICLES ---------------- ----------------------------------- HORNET News IMPORTANT! New Uploads Files recieved at HORNET Mail Room Reader Response? General Articles What's In, What's Out Partyline Bizarre Music Virus in Inertia Player Introducing GraveDigger Advertising Now its a little bit different Back Issues How to Get 'em, Descriptions Closing Comments DemoNews Top 10 LIst .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., <> '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' _____IMPORTANT! This issue of DemoNews is a rather important one. It is the first issue in over a year that has LOST subscribers, 25 subscribers to be exact. Several months ago, I started posting the number of people who recieve DemoNews at the beginning of each issue. Believe it or not, this number jumped up over 800 in the past year, until we topped off at 1252 this past week. I like to think of this number of subscribers as a kind of indicator reflecting how well this newsletter is doing. Whenever HORNET get lots of subscription notifications, I know that we are doing something right. Con- versely, when we loose subscribers as in this past week, I recognize that we have veared off course somehow. This past week, I received e-mail that helped me zero in on the problem. Over time, DemoNews has included more and more articles that have very little to do with the demo scene. I recognized this weeks ago, but was reluctant to do much about it until reader feedback pursuaded me to. All of you reading this are my friends. And as my friends, you must do a better job of telling me what you want in DemoNews. :) Without feedback, I can only guess what might interest you. This week, we are introducing two new sections which should help with this. In the future, I will try to do a better job to provide decent scene coverage. However, I would rather you let me know that we are going astray through your feedback in e-mail, rather than your unsubscription notifications. .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., <> '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' NOTE: All locations start with /demos and then their respective sub- directory. Please note however that the actual base directories (like /pub/msdos/demos) may differ from mirror to mirror. Location Filename.Ext Size Description ---------------- ------------ ---- ---------------------------------------- /demos /alpha/NEW blueeyes.zip 1435 Blue Eyes demo from @! inspirat.zip 146 Inspiration by ex-amiga group Reality msrules .zip 590 Very cool Micro-Snort anti-demo ;) perfect .zip 1185 Perfect Balance by Wild Style (SB/GUS) /music /disks cd_demo1.zip 1568 demo of Mind Side Out's CD, Synergy esperdiv.zip 1180 Esper Division X-Mas Show 94 (.ult disk) f10_pck1.zip 1736 Force Ten Pack #1 f10_pck2.zip 2250 Force Ten Pack #2 f10_pck3.zip 1672 Force Ten Pack #3 f10_pck4.zip 1430 Force Ten Pack #4 traxx37 .zip 960 Traxx Volume 37 (.s3m and .xm) /programs/players tmpv098b.zip 44 TMP, mod/mtm/s3m player for GUS /songs/midi mycmidi .zip 3 Forget Mong Yau Cho by Linda Wong /songs/mod ftb .zip 115 Feel The Beat by Trance Ambience /songs/mtm k-force .zip 225 The Force by Maelcum/KFMF /songs/s3m _dflow95.zip 350 A new tune by S.A.Harteveld anthrday.zip 68 Another Day by Mr. Fix-it ff2-had .zip 44 Freeze Frame 2 by Hadji / dMk hardlike.zip 160 Hard like a Criminal! by The Peric k-gotz .zip 184 Who Gotz Da Funk? by Lord Pegasus/KFMF liquid .zip 549 Liquid by Spirit of Suicide sbreeze .zip 113 Summer Breeze by Void/Reality wk-spin .zip 132 Wk-Spin by Wolfgang, Ron Labao /songs/xm clone .zip 438 Clone by Hypnotic dissolve.zip 28 Dissolution by Nathan D. Bowen laboru .zip 193 Laboru! by Nathan D. Bowen lightspd.zip 58 Lightspeed by Void/Reality smove .zip 171 Space Move by Vivid 1995 texp_ia_.zip 255 Time Explosion by IA / Force-II wsandmix.zip 531 White Sands by Mental Floss /graphics /utils squash .zip 6 Squashes DOS screen to 1:1 ratio .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., <> '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' _____Reader Response? Hey, I thought of something the other day while I was reading a new computer mag I got. You've read some before of course,..well, you know how they always have a "public mail" section in the beginning? maybe you could do the same. ..print the interesting mail you get every week. Just a suggestion ..:) -The Veritech Knight (NAID Organizer) And it became so. Starting this week, we will hopefully make "Mailroom" a regular column. The concept is simple: You write me interesting mail, and I reply to it in here. Easy enough? So send in your questions or comments and we might print them in here! .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., <> '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' _____What's In, What's Out Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening! (Everyone gets their copy of DemoNews at a different time in the day. :) Anyways, after reading DN 82, I was oddly inspired to attempt to compile a "what's in, what's out" list, for some reason. A fashion guide, if you will, for the demo world. Last Saturday evening, I was wasting time on IRC on the #trax channel (as I often do) and knowing that my views alone should not attempt to describe the demo world's opinions, I asked others if they wanted to help with the list. I was able to con Musicman and Blackwolf into helping me with it. Therefore, the list below is a result of the mismatched personalities of the three of us, who came up with the majority of the list, and a few others who helped some, but I can't remember anyone else from that evening. (Next week, maybe I'll publish my hate mail!) What's Out What's In Comments ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- IRC MUDs Zer0 C.C.Catch MUDs IRC From the rest of us! S3M/MTM XM FastTracker - the best thing since sliced bread! Purple Motion Necros One word: Borland Turbo C/C++ Watcom C/C++ Thanks to Tran's PMODE/W Computer Shopper DemoNews Well, which would YOU choose? TheParty NAID Just be there. :) #ansi #trax Just be there. :) MS-DOS OS/2 Warp What's conventional memory? hornet.eng.ufl.edu ftp.cdrom.com The mirror is faster! NAIDTRO NAIDINV2 See for yourself... MusicDisks CD's In the immortal words of Maelcum: "Perfect test is to put the end result on tape." Quantity Quality SoundBlaster Gravis UltraSound What static? DMP IPLAY No more DMP upgrades. :( Sampling Ripping Hmm.. Commercial Shareware/Freeware Hmm.. Studying Wasting Time Hint, hint, Ryan Cramer! Coke Milk Quarex - Human cow! (Or cow human?) We hope this list is informational, helpful, yeah yeah, whatever. At least, if you can't stay on IRC through all hours of the night and pick up the hot juicy info, we'll find some losers who can and get the info from them. Wait, I can speak for myself, but the rest of the guys who helped might be a little ticked with that. Anyways! Uh, thanks for reading. :) GraveDigger / [Defiance] digger@freeside.scsd.k12.ny.us .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., <> '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' _____Bizarre (the untold story) a. BIZARRE was originally started by Whistler and Einstein. Later Soundwave and Omega joined them. AcmE and Hypnosis produced the intros, but didn't do any organizing. Dream Syndicate wasn't involved at all! (The fact that Soundwave was in DS, doesn't mean anything at all, and is pure coincidence) b. AcmE and Hypnosis told everybody they would organize Bizarre'95, or at least everybody thought so. But they cancelled their involvement because of other plans. c. Because of lack of time, Einstein, Whistler and Omega (all three from Mega Industries) cancelled their involvement in Bizarre'95. This means that Soundwave was the only one left. The staff as it is now: - Soundwave, Virus and Badvibes. (all individuals, no group!) - Spirit d. About Bizarre'95: Nothing is 100% sure, but: - It WILL be there. - It will be 100% PC only - It'll be better than Bizarre '94. -TcM/Ground Zero .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., <> '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' _____Virus in Inertia Player I saw in the last DemoNews issue that Inertia Player Asm'94 CD edition has been uploaded to Hornet. Among many bugfixes, this version contains a very nasty bug. Basically: the setup program (isetup.exe) is a Tai-Pan virus dropper, which means that from running isetup until rebooting all EXE files (smaller than 64 Kbytes) will be infected with Tai-Pan virus. This is a humble virus, doesn't cause any damage, just copies itself to EXE files like crazy. Most of viruskillers can't recognize that isetup is infected because the virus was Pklited with the original isetup. Fprot 2.16 can eliminate Tai-Pan from infected EXE files but can't kick it out from isetup.exe ('coz the virus is compressed with the original program as I mentioned above). So the safe way to use isetup: run it, save the configuration, and reboot the machine immediately before starting any other program. Future releases of Assembly'94 CD will have this bug fixed. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- When should You ignore this letter :) 1. Someone included a similar textfile for the player. 2. Bug has been fixed already. Virus writers will burn in the hell's deepest wells! (Ayye, this sounds clerical, but I hope it will be... ;) Best regards, Ervin / AbaddoN _____Introducing GraveDigger Greetings! This is GraveDigger, and I thought I should introduce myself a bit. Ryan Cramer's been recently preoccupied with schoolwork, so I'm trying to cover the music scene for DemoNews in his absence. A lot of you don't know who I am, so I thought this would be a good time for a brief introduction. Or rather, it would have been a good time a few issues ago, but, anyways.. The first issue of DN i saw was 73.. I believe Phoenix sent it to me in DCC while on IRC. A few weeks later, KFMF released their musicdisk, "Trancescrambled," and wanted a review for it written up in DN. I volunteered to do it, and my first article appeared in DN 78. Having quickly developed an interest in DN, I asked Snowman about my possibly doing more articles for DN. He encouraged me to continue writing, and this prompted my NAID survival guide article, as well as an interview with Maelcum of KFMF. So at last, a personal dream is realized for me. Back in mid 1992, I went to a friend's house, where there was a crowd of 10 or so people. I did not realize at the time what the night had in store for me. Back then, I was a C64 owner and user, and had no real desire or interest in IBM-compatible systems. That night, however, through a louder-than-necessary soundsystem, and on a friend's 486, I witnessed Future Crew's "Panic" trackdemo. Not many days after this event, I was trying to figure out how I could get an IBM of my own. I was amazed at the quality of the graphics and music of "Panic," compared to the demos I was used to on my C64. Around the beginning of 1994, after I had been an IBM user for a few months, Future Crew released three musicdisks and their composing program, "Scream Tracker." I personally became interested in tracking after a local band named "Zadoc" released a MOD of one of their songs, hoping to attract a more diverse audience through a different medium. I soon got a copy of ModEdit, and my first experiment with it was a bass line with occasional bassdrum hits. I played it for a friend once, and he said "It sounds like techno." I replied: "Yeah, I guess that's all this is good for, really." Frustrated with the interface of ModEdit, I checked out Renaissance's MultiTracker, and just couldn't get the hang of it. Then, I got Scream Tracker. My first realization was "My samples sound corrupted!" This was soon fixed though by Phoenix's SAM-to-SMP conversion program, a program I owe my tracking to. So there I was, around Spring 1994, interested in the IBM demo scene and trying to compose as well. However, I found it difficult to find out what was really going on in Finland and Europe as I sat on this side of the puddle. What new demos were coming out? Where can I find these demos? Then, like a voice from heaven, DemoNews found its way to me. It soon became obvious that DemoNews was the link that holds the chain together: the latest uploads to the main demo site, Hornet; reviews of releases; news on demo competitions; interviews; it was all there. DemoNews brought me much closer to the demo world than I thought I would ever be. It is my hopes that DN can reach out to others and bring them closer, as it did for me. The entire staff of Hornet deserves a great deal of appreciation, for all that they do, and of course, Snowman, for making it happen every Sunday morning. GraveDigger / [Defiance] digger@freeside.scsd.k12.ny.us .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., <> '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' _____Help Wanted Advertising Section Hello, this is GraveDigger (not again!?) with a new feature for DemoNews. This is the "Help Wanted" section, much like a "Classified" section in a newspaper. The idea of this section is for groups who are looking for certain talents can submit a message asking for such a person, and hopefully, will be able to contact someone who can help them out. Here's an example: "Hey guys! Can anyone code out there? I'm in this PC music group and we need someone who would be interested in coding a musicdisk player for us! We have a lot of music we want to release, and would like a player for it. If you are interested, please mail me (Zer0/Defiance) at: zero@host.yab.com Thanks!" What you should do, in submitting such an article, is follow these few basic guidelines: 1 - Identify yourself at some point 2 - Give an Email address 3 - Make a request for a specific talent (coder, gfx artist, etc) 4 - Explain what the person is needed for Hopefully, this section will help people find each other more easily. Plus, it will save many students wasted hours on IRC looking for people. :) Here are the rules for submitting an article for this section: 1 - Use 'DemoNews Help Wanted Ad' for your subject line 2 - Send your article in plain text form 3 - Mail it to digger@freeside.scsd.k12.ny.us 4 - To get it in that Sunday's copy of DemoNews, I need to have it no later than the preceeding Friday, at 4pm EST. 5 - Please only send it once. If you do not see it in that week's issue of DemoNews, wait for the next week's. If it's not in there either, then you may send it again. Thanks! Hope this section will be helpful to you. The sooner you get your articles in, the better! GraveDigger [Defiance] digger@freeside.scsd.k12.ny.us .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., <> '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' _____How to Get 'em After reading this issue of DemoNews, you may be wondering how you can get previous ones. Well fear not! There are two different ways to do so: 1: FTP to hornet.eng.ufl.edu and go to /pub/msdos/demos/news/OLD_NEWS and start downloading anything you see. 2: Now you can request back issues of DemoNews via e-mail. Start a letter to listserver@oliver.sun.ac.za (any subject line) and in the body of the letter include "get demuan-list " where INDEX refers to the index number of the issue. For example: get demuan-list 55 This would retrieve DemoNews #80 For more recent issues that are split into multiple parts, you must send an individual request for each index number. _____Descriptions Issue Index Date Size Description ----- ----- -------- ------ ---------------------------------------------- 77 45,46 01/01/95 101100 Chart History, Snowman Near-Disaster, Son of Snowman, The Party 1994, Making Waves, Using Assembly Part 2. 78 47-49 01/08/95 111185 The Party 1994: Results and Reviews, Report by Stony and Friends, What happened to PC- Demo competition. Editorial: TP94 = ASM94 part 2. Egg2: Trancescrambled Review, More on Fast Tracker 2.03. General Rambling by Denthor. 79 51 01/15/95 41832 A Day in the Life of Snowman, Ambient Sample CD 1, Where's the Sound Blaster, TP94 Graphics review. 80 55 01/22/95 27028 DemoNews/HTML, Traffic Jam, CodeThink(School); The Solo Sample CD 81 58,59 01/29/95 53434 NAID Survival Guide, General Protection Relationships, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, Now Its a Game!, Assembly Part 3 (It ain't no party), BSP Trees 82 64-66 02/05/95 81428 Setag and Notron News (A New Format), NAID FAQ, Interview with Maelcum/KFMF, Optimizing Vector Transformations on a Pentium, The Perfect Body, Top 10 Mistakes of Beginning Assembly Language Coders .,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,., <> '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' See you in CyberSpace, -Christopher G. Mann (Snowman)- r3cgm@dax.cc.uakron.edu ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,End.of.DemoNews.083.