3.1 What's IRC? Are there any IRC channels established for demos? IRC stands for Internet Relay chat. You can find more info about it in newsgroups such as alt.irc, etc. With IRC, you can enter "channels" (like a CB Radio) and discuss things with people located all around the world in real time. It is a good place to stop by and ask questions. As of this writing, the main two channels concerning demos are #coders Concerning PC Demo coders #trax Concerning PC Music Makers. Feel free to join at any time... it is fun and pretty addicting! +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 3.2 What's the World Wide Web (WWW)? Are there any places to learn about demos on the WWW? Created by university professors in CERN (Switzerland), WWW is a network of hypertext documents that can connect to other hypertext documents. Accessible by WWW "browsers", such as Mosaic and Netscape, it allows you to connect to WWW pages, where you can read articles, look at pictures, download files, etc. In short, if you haven't tried the WWW yet, you're missing a whole new aspect of the Internet. If you're looking for a browser, try one of these three: Mosaic, the original WWW browser, can be found in ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu and exists for Windows, Mac and Unix. Netscape, a very nice browser that supports additional layout commands, is available in ftp://ftp.netscape.com Lynx is a text-mode browser that you can use on any terminal. Many demo groups in the demo scene have their own WWW home pages. It would be too long here to list all of them, however Trixter has a homepage which explains about PC demos and lists many, many demo resources. You can access this page at: http://www.mcs.com/~trixter/html/demos.html +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 3.3 Are there any newsletters about demos? There are two semi-weekly newsletters produced by the Hornet demo group: DemoNews and TraxWeekly. DemoNews is both a list of new files uploaded to ftp.cdrom.com (Hornet's home base and one of the largest demo sites on the Internet), news, interviews, and articles that pertain to the demo scene. DemoNews was started by Dan Wright (Pallbearer / Toxic Zombies & Hornet) and is continued by Snowman, Gravedigger, and Trixter / Hornet. TraxWeekly is similar to DemoNews, but is dedicated to the music scene (see FAQ 2.4). It's called "TraxWeekly" because it stemmed >from the IRC channel #trax (see FAQ 3.1). Here's how you can subscribe to either magazine (the following is an excerpt from TraxWeekly): _____How to subscribe to TraxWeekly TraxWeekly subscriptions are free, and can be requested in this matter: Send mail to: listserver@unseen.aztec.co.za And put in the message body: subscribe trax-weekly [your real name] If you want to unsubscribe to the list, mail the same address and write: unsubscribe trax-weekly TraxWeekly is also available on ftp.cdrom.com: /pub/demos/incoming/news/ for the most recently uploaded version, or /pub/demos/news/traxw/ for all of the back issues. _____How to subscribe to DemoNews #1 E-mail to listserver@unseen.aztec.co.za (any subject line will do) #2 On the first line in the body of the mail, write: subscribe demuan-list FirstName LastName Examples: subscribe demuan-list Christopher Mann subscribe demuan-list Snowman subscribe demuan-list r3cgm@dax.cc.uakron.edu <---- WRONG!! The listserver will automatically take the return address of your mail. That address is where newsletters will be sent. You can not specify an alternate address. #3 Send it _____Having Trouble? If you have difficulty with the listserver, feel free to write Snowman at r3cgm@dax.cc.uakron.edu for problems with the DemoNews list, and Popcorn at campbell@fox.nstn.ca for problems with the TraxWeekly list. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+Misc. information about Demos+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 4.0.0 Why is the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) sound card supported more than the Sound Blaster in demos? Several reasons: - The GUS sounds much better than the Sound Blaster because it can play back 32 channels of stereo digitized sound at once, while the Sound Blaster Pro/16 series can only play back 2 channels. - Because the GUS can play back multiple channels, there is no need for mixing several channels into one (like playing MODs on the Sound Blaster series), so much less CPU time is utilized for playing music. This means more CPU time is available for graphical effects, calculation, etc. - Many demo coders consider the GUS easier to program. - Many demo scene members have gotten free GUS cards in exchange for programming demos/games/utilities that specifically use the GUS. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 4.0.1 What are the different types of GUS sound cards? There are three currently available, and their major differences are mostly in their recording abilities: Name Record Playback ~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~ Gravis Ultrasound 44.1KHz, 8-bit stereo 44.1KHz, 16-bit stereo Gravis Ultrasound MAX 48.0KHz, 16-bit stereo 48.0KHz, 16-bit stereo Gravis Ultrasound ACE Cannot record sound 44.1KHz, 16-bit stereo The Gravis Ultrasound is not manufactured anymore; the MAX retails for about $179 US, and the ACE retails for about $99 US. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 4.0.2 Why is the Gravis Ultrasound sound card supported more than General MIDI? While General MIDI has much higher sound quality instruments, the number of instruments (and the instruments themselves) are fixed in nature; that is, you cannot change any of them. (If you don't like the sound of a particular piano instrument, for example, you're stuck with it.) MODs, and MOD-like formats (see "music modules" earlier in this FAQ) allow the composer to use whatever instruments he feels like. Also, General MIDI boards differ greatly in price and sound/instrument quality, and a song on one GMIDI board might not sound the same on another. Finally, General MIDI boards usually cost over $200 for a good quality one--which is usually unattainable, given the budget of most demo scene members. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 4.0.3 Can I emulate the GUS with my Sound Blaster? No. The GUS performs so many functions over the Sound Blaster that writing an emulator would be extremely difficult. Couple this information with the fact that many demos take over the hardware entirely, and you realize it makes writing an emulator impossible. Of course, a *hardware* emulator for the GUS exists. :) It's called the GUS ACE (see FAQ 4.0.1), and was designed to co-exist with your existing sound card. They're only about $90 in the US. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 4.1.0 Which video card is best for viewing demos? The nature of demo programmers dictates that they program the coolest stuff with the crappiest hardware. In other words, most (if not all) demos require a register-compatible VGA card. For the best experience, you need as fast a video card as possible, because most video cards are the main bottleneck when displaying fast graphics (the PC's memory is much faster than the video card's memory). If your PC has a VESA Local bus (VLB) or PCI bus (PCI), then make sure you're using a VLB or PCI card, as the speed of these cards are at least twice as fast as a standard ISA card. Try not to buy a video card unless you've tested it yourself on the store's computer--preferably with a demo or action game, which update the video card's memory over 30 times a second. If you can't do that, then generally, get a video card based on either the Cirrus Logic, S3, or Tseng ET4000 chipset. These chipsets are very fast. (Many older demos use special hardware tricks that might only work on an ET4000; the ET4000 is considered the demo "standard".) Several people in comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos have compared their sound cards; here are some of their comments: : Try a card based on the Tseng ET-4000W32p chip. It's the fastest for DOS : I've ever come across. And they're quite cheap, too. I can second this. On a 486/66 my Diamond Stealth 32 clocks at 75% of system RAM speed. Also for anyone interested, the now discontinued Diamond Stealth 32 is a dream for anyone developing a VESA Hi-res game or app. We have compared many, *many* video card BIOSes, and that one the closest to fully complete VESA support that we have ever found (just one small, obscure bug). It even supports the low-resolution hi-color modes in ROM. (to which Kendall Bennet of SciTech software, makers of the very excellent UniVBE driver, responded with "WHAT!?! No one supports that in BIOS"). --- Try an ARK1000 or ARK2000 chip on a fast PCI bus machine (which he has). They will clock in at nearly twice the speed of system RAM (about 60Mb/s, even higher on Triton chipset boards, system RAM is about 40Mb/s). The WT4000/W32p is fast, but nowhere near the fastest. The ATI Mach64 is faster than this, as is the S3 Vision864/964 and new Vision868/968 chips, but the ARK chips are the fastest bar none (and I have over 75 video cards in our office for testing purposes). --- >I don't know what the current rave is, but I'm settling for the new >Matrox Millennium 2mb wram. I'm hoping to get some GOOD programming >docs to take advantage of the hardware Gouraud shaded poly's. >Currently it is the fastest 24bit card out there, according to PC mag, >with over 16million 24bit pixels/s @ 1024x768. 20fps!!! not too shabby >with that resolution and color depth. DON'T TOUCH a Matrox Card if you are interested in DOS performance. These things fly under Windows, but are about 6 orders of magnitude slower than the fastest DOS cards (no kidding; they get about 1Mb/s to video memory, the fastest DOS cards get around 60Mb/s on a PCI bus). --- The Hercules Stingray 64/Video is currently the king of the hill as far as demos/games are concerned. It is based on the ARK2000PV 64-bit chipset, and has really decent Windows performance as well. This is your best bet I would say, as it also comes with full motion video enhancers. Next in line would be anything based on the Tseng Labs ET4000w32p chips. I would recommend PC Bench as a good benchmarking program. --- One possibility for you (since you can go up to almost $1000) is to get a ATI Mach 64. The 4MB VRAM configurations will only set you back about $600 and have very good DOS as well as overall performance. It is considered high-end, but its well within your price range. --- I would stay away from VRAM, the new WRAM is dual ported, faster and cheaper than VRAM. Look at Matrox's new board (Triton has one on the way as well), they significantly outperform ATI and the S3 964 in DOS performance. --- For , the best video card is an ET4000/W32 one. And it's very cheap too. For games and demos, avoid Matrox, it's very very slow, the millennium is faster than the other Matrox, but is still sooo sloooowww... Now, a Diamond Stealth 64 (964 for RAM) or an ATI Mach 64 VRAM are very good too, in both windows and DOS. --- I don't know much about the Stingray boards, but they have good benchmark numbers and certainly have excellent word-of-mouth. I use a Dynamite Power 2mb board, model #D902 I believe, and I have only good things to say about it. In fact, before I sort of side-graded to a PCI motherboard from a VL-bus motherboard, I owned a Dynamite Pro 2mb (-W32i), and was impressed enough with that card that I skipped a legitimate opportunity to buy a bleeding-edge video card and just bought the -W32p PCI version. (At the time, the Stingrays didn't exist. >:) If you go for this card, get the 2mb version. Even if you don't care about the couple of extra display modes, you'll benefit from the faster (interleaved) memory access that's used with 2mb installed. You'll also get higher refresh rates - to be honest, though, most (aka "cheap") displays can't handle these without warping, fading, ghosting, etc. --- : DON'T TOUCH a Matrox Card if you are interested in DOS performance. These : things fly under Windows, but are about 6 orders of magnitude slower : than the fastest DOS cards (no kidding; they get about 1Mb/s to video : memory, the fastest DOS cards get around 60Mb/s on a PCI bus). Old news. Matrox fixed the nasty DOS performance in the new Millennium card. Now it's faster than the Diamond Stealth and the Mach64. Not quite as fast as the ARK1000 etc but plenty fast enough for demos and games. --- There are some benchmarks from Vidspeed (and others too) at http://www.dfw.net/~sdw/index.html. I don't believe 41M/s for et4k with 16bit writes, because that would mean about 1.6 bus cycles per write. 32bit writes yes, but not 16. As for the results on that site, they show the ARK1k/ARK2k as fastest, ET4k close second, but only in VLB. Nowhere near 40M/s with 16bit writes, only about 25M as I recall. --- (end of quotes) +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+Contact Information+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 5.0 Who's contributed to this FAQ? The creator was Houman Ghahremanlou, who wrote questions 1.0 to 3.0, with some small help from Trixter / Hornet's PC Demos Explained page. Trixter then reformatted the FAQ and became the maintainer, and continues to add to it. Once released, many people submitted some contributions. Trixter and Houman would like to thank the following people for submitting to the FAQ: Andr‚as Khne Anssi.Saari@lmf.eua.ericsson.se (Anssi Saari) Blake Kadatz Cobra@aloha.com (cobra) Grave Digger / Hornet Jordan Phillips Kim Davies Niklas Kring Paul Hsieh Peter Kendell Phil Jones Snowman / Hornet THE ROPESTER Tero Pulkkinen andreas.kuhne@mailbox.swipnet.se (Andr‚as Khne) chuck@freeside.fc.net (Chuck Walbourn) davidm@them.com (David Mandala) fmah@morse.ecn.purdue.edu (Frederick Y Mah) gerald@parker.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (THE Gerald) grosje_s@epita.fr (Le Fongus jaune) gt4148b@prism.gatech.edu (Stephen Carter Morgan) jeanmarc.leang@ping.be (marmelade) jtavn@netcom.com (Jeremy Tavan) larsen@lal.cs.utah.edu (Steve Larsen) matthewp@netcom.com (Matt Pritchard) millen3@alum01.its.rpi.edu (Neal W. Miller) mrytkola@tor.abo.fi (Markus Rytk|l{ INF) mystical@inet.uni-c.dk (Asbjorn Andersen) plexus@plexus.seanet.com (James B. Johnson) ppsloan@buzzworm.cs.utah.edu (Peter Sloan) prsam1@MFS02.cc.monash.edu.au (Paul Sampson) rbarnhar@freenet.niagara.com (Robert Barnhardt) rbeath@julian.uwo.ca (Stephen Beath) rcskb@minyos.xx.rmit.EDU.AU (Kendall Bennett) ryan.mahoney@tssbbs.com (Ryan Mahoney) sci-slb@groper.jcu.edu.au (Stephen Banhuk) slmyv@paradise.declab.usu.edu (Denys Larry) whippet1@quiknet.com (Scott Tyson) +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 5.1 How can I contact you guys to submit something? We need help to make this FAQ bigger and better, so please mail us your suggestions! Houman: ghahrema@bowler.dacc.wisc.edu Trixter: trixter@mcs.com Some things we are looking for currently: - A pointer to the most recent Demo Contact List - The *original* demo FAQ ----- Note from Houman: I did this FAQ for the comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos newsgroup. I was getting tired of huge threads being created that could have been avoided most of the time if general help was available to public. I accept any help, critiques, or anything else. I would like to thank Jim Leonard (Trixter/Hornet), for without his special help and documents, I would have not been able to create this FAQ. ----- Note from Trixter: I formatted all the ftp addresses as URL's, so if you see something like "ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/demos", it means you should ftp to the site "ftp.cdrom.com" and then switch to the "/pub/demos" directory. Also, I seem to remember someone else taking a stab at a demo FAQ file earlier, and whoever you are, I thank you... I'm deeply sorry you didn't (seem to) find the time to keep it up and maintain it. One of these days I'll track it down and try to implement some of it here. Of course, thanks go to Houman for starting this thing; greets also to Snowman, for being a good friend and bringing me back into the scene when I was going to quit. Finally, thanks to all past and present Hornet Core and Family members, for having me. The Demo Contact List Maintainer: rob@span.com ----- If you have any questions, or want to help us make this FAQ bigger and better, please email us: Houman Ghahremanlou ghahrema@bowler.dacc.wisc.edu http://www.dacc.wisc.edu/~ghahrema Trixter / Hornet trixter@mcs.com http://www.mcs.com/~trixter/html/home/html Thank you!