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,[…]
It’s not that I have already to deal with a lot of crap at the moment that something that just happened a few days ago has to come on top of all of it to “make my day” and “make my head shake in disbelief’“. It started with a big fat screen where you can see the snapshot of below, when I logged into one of my YouTube.com accounts. I was forced to acknowledge the message, before I could do anything else. I was upset at first, because I thought that once more some idiot would claim something that is not his to begin with to cause trouble and inconvenience for YouTuber’s, because they are full of themselves. Dreyfus – Jarre – Oxygene & The Demoscene Wouldn’t be the first time. I still remember when in February 2008 a company with the name FRANCIS DREYFUS MUSIC came along and claimed the video recording of the PC/MS DOS demo called “Contrast” by the French demo group “Oxygene” from 1996 as their intellectual property that I was supposed to be infringing on. Well, Dreyfus did believe back then that any video with the word “Oxygene” in the title must be automatically infringing on the rights they hold for the music by the French musician Jean Michel Jarre with the same title. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Right … Anyhow, I did a Google search for the name of the somebody who claimed ownership of material used in some of my videos. Matt Swoboda,[…]
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[…]
I posted earlier this month the article ASCII Art Nudes versus Original Playboy Centerfolds where I show for several ASCII Nude pictures of my ASCII Nudes collection the original photograph that was used by the text artist. I updated the original article, which showed the originals for 29 40 ASCII pieces, and added one more match that I found afterwards. Since then I even found two more matches, which I did not add to the article yet. The obvious matches are taking care of and also the ones where the file name or content of the ASCII itself had useful and correct hints about the original photograph. I were also able to match a number of ASCII’s to photographs where the ASCII had completely incorrect information, such as the wrong name of the girl. Now it’s tougher to find corresponding photographs and I could use some help with it. It is not such a bad job actually. You get to watch a lot of beautiful girls naked hehe. I also ran into cases where I am not 100% sure, if I matched the ASCII with the right photograph. Like this one. The arm position is right, the pose is the same. The breast size is about the same and the hair resembles also the photograph. I am pretty sure that I found the right photograph, but a second opinion would increase my confidence even more. If you want to help matching ASCII pictures to Playboy photographs, then you will need[…]
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