Welcome to my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. Make sure to keep tissues handy and enjoy a trip back to times when the computer world was still “intact” and a lot of fun. I hope to bring back some enjoyable memories back for one or the other of you. I will go beyond the simple nostalgic parts, which are clearly an important part of this and try to make clear and suggestive cross-references to things, mostly problems, that we did or did not have back then, but sill/again have today, in this advanced day and age. I created a video where I show some buried treasures of mine and talk about them a little bit. You can watch the combined video, which includes all of them, the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) sound card, the PCBoard BBS Software, the IBM OS/2 operating system and my ACE Demos Collection CD-ROMs below. Backup link to video on Vimeo.com Download this video?? in AVI format (140 MB) Note: Correction to one of the statements that I made in the video. It was a Pentium 100MHz and not a 486/100 where I ran the BBS with OS/2 on. Sorry for that. The video is a bit less than 13 minutes long and provides visual images that will bring back memories for many of you, if you shared some of my own personal history of course. I have actually a bit more to say to each of the treasures and started writing content. What I have[…]
When I decided to pack my collections of scene art logos and pixel art fonts to make them public for others to download, I got the idea to create a nice little intro that comes with the packages. Following an ancient tradition in the scene, an intro does serve the purpose to announce the release and to relay greetings and messages to fellow sceners. The intro (or Cracktro), which is short for “Crack Intro”) pre-dates the text NFO files by many years. In fact, NFO files are something that was developed pretty late in the game and was only extensively used for releases on the PC. NFO files were pretty much a novelty on machines like the Commodore 64 and also not common for the use in releases on the Commodore Amiga. I created a NFO file and file_id.diz for my collections releases of course. Anyhow, I created an Intro with the help of the OSDM (OldSkool Demo Maker) intro engine developed by the fellow German scener with the name Peace/Testaware and released my collections with that new intro of mine. As always, I was not 100% happy with the results and started tweaking, changing and expanding things. Here are the results of that tweaking and one intermediate version that will probably never be used for a release ever. The current version will most likely be used for any update to the current packages or for some new collections (I have a lot more stuff floating around here than just[…]
This post falls into the category “old personal history of mine”. I thought that write once more about how I experienced things, especially because I grew up behind the Iron Curtain in the former communist part of Germany, the DDR or GDR (German Democratic Republic). People always ask me how it was like, so here is a story that describes one aspect of it, a very specific one though. Not everybody will be able to relate to it, but if you know what computer demos and crack intros are and interested to hear more about it, stick around. Computer Tales from the Former East Germany Back in 1987, two years before the Wall fell in Berlin, when my dad was allowed to take the Commodore 128D computer (with monitor and 9 needles printer) home to be able to use it for work there, I thought that this was the happiest moment in my life. I always wanted to have a computer since I got exposed to one for the first time in either 1985 or 1986 (That first computer wasn’t a Commodore, it was actually an Atari 800 XL with Datasette tape without any turbo load hardware tweak). There was no Internet and also no tech support to call, because that support did not extend to the area of the former East German state at that time.The only thing to go on was the user handbook that came with the computer. My dad gave me one empty floppy disc (remember,[…]
Almost exactly one year ago I did publish a post where I introduced 26 cracktros for the Commodore 64, 7 Cracktros for the PC and 4 Cracktros for the Commodore Amiga by one of my former release groups that is dear to my heard, Dynamic Technologies aka Dytec or simply DTC. I also created a remix video where I used the majority of Dytec logos that I had and many of the crack intro videos to show off some artistic high-lights of the group. ____ _____________ ______ ______ / \/ / /_ __// ___// ___/\ / / /\ _/ / /\_/ _/__/ /___\/ /_____/ /__/\\/__/ //_____//_____/\ \_____\/\__\/ \__\/ \_____\\_____\/ C R A C K E D: One thing that I noticed was that the few (4) intros that I had for the Commodore Amiga for Dytec, were pretty much all ugly and almost embarrassing. I was almost certain that there must have been more, since I do recall that we used logos for Dytec that were created on an Amiga for our Dytec PC cracktros. I always thought that those logos were used first in Amiga productions and were not created for the PC specifically (just like Dream Design did while he was in my art group SAC (Superior Art Creations) and also in Remedy Amiga (and “U.D.O.” hehe), still using his Amiga 500 as his main computer and only getting a PC much later). However, I could not find any of those, when I looked for them last year.[…]
I felt that it was about time again to write about demos, recent demos this time and no classics. Another great demo, which was only recently released trigger this post actually. The demo that did this is: Rupture by the Greek demo group Andromeda Software Development (short ASD). The demo won the 1st place at The Gathering (TG) 2009 Demo Party Competition in Hamar, Norway this Spring. I created a nice animated gif with some highlights from the demo and also included a video recording of it further down below. I also decided to seize the opportunity and also introduce some other great great demos to you, including other previous productions by the top-notch demo team from ASD, but also from other groups that produced high quality PC demos in the past 5+ or so years. I hope that you will enjoy them. The animated gif is nice as a preview, but the video below is probably better. Best is of course to download the original demo (see links at Pouet.net) and run it on your own PC. Backup Link to video at Vimeo.com You can find more information to the demo and a link to download the 25 MB program to run it on your computer in high resolution at Pouet.net. There is also a link to the high definition video capture of the demo in MP4 format and 250 MB in size. If that is a bit too much for you, download the lower resolution video in XVID[…]
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