The First Demo That I Saw in my Life

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, the C128D had a floppy drive build-in) for me to use, which was a awful nice thing to do for him, considering that it was incredibly hard to buy those in the former GDR. The black market price for one 5 1/4 inch double density floppy disk ranged between the equivalent of $100-$200.

First on my mind were of course computer games. I was 13, so what else would you expect. Well, I didn't know anybody else who had a C128D or C128 computer or heard of anybody who got one and the C128/D computers were different from the Commodore 64. You did not get the familiar blue screen with light blue borders and font when you booted the machine up.

So there were at first only two pieces of software that I could use. 1) The "Starwriter" software that my father used for work and 2) the build in C128 BASIC interpreter to run C128 BASIC code (which I did not have yet).

A text processor is fascinating for about a day or two and then gets awful boring so I decided to see if I could do something more interesting with that build in BASIC compiler. Luckily for me, the user manual contained the list plus a brief description of the available basic commands.

I thought to myself, If I don't have a game to run on the machine, then I will change that by writing my own. Well, it was a bit more complicated than I thought, but I made good progress to the point were I experimented with the advanced BASIC features such as Sprites and drawing functions.

In a stroke of luck, one of my class mates heard/read somewhere that the C128D is supposed to be 100% Commodore 64 compatible and that it could be switched to the C64 mode with the command "go64" (or was it "go c64"?!, something like that). I couldn't wait until school was over and my abilities to concentrate on what my teachers said was out the window that afternoon.

 

 

 

 

Back home I tried it and it did not work. What? That cannot be, my C128D was not one without that compatibility I told myself and tried it once more, using different variations of the command with different spellings until the screen flashed and the familiar blue C64 screen appeared with the text "**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC ****, 64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE, READY. followed by a blinking Cursor. Horay! Getting Software was now relatively easy. It only took a friend with a C64, his Datasette (nobody else who I knew had a floppy drive), cassettes with games and to figure out how to transfer a program from the cassette on to my floppy disk.

The first 3 things were relatively easy to get, 4 was a small hurdle I guess, but I did it and cannot remember how it worked, so it might not have been such a big challenge after all.  I think I was not able to transfer all games that I wanted, but I could be wrong, because maybe I was able to copy it, but not able to play it. You have to know that the C128D from my dad's work did not come with a game joystick (dough). There was also no way for me to get one elsewhere. I did not have the financial resources to buy one for East German Money (which would have cost probably 100 or 1000 times my monthly allowance) and as every other East German citizen, I was short on West German money (Valuta) as well. So... NO Joystick.

I remember playing Pole Position, Amidar (or Omidar), Hero, Little Computer People, some ugly Pinball game where I forgot the name and some other games that I cannot remember. There was a Submarine (U-Boot) game that my dad loved to play, but I cannot remember its name to find something like it on the PC for him. No, it was not a simulation game like Silent Service. It was an arcade game. If you got an idea what it could have been, let me know. I'd appreciate it.

Anyhow, I remember that I was not able to play on this computer my all-time favorite 8 bit computer game, which is International Karate (the original), bummer, but nothing is perfect, right?!

The First Demo that I Recognized as What It Was

A friend left me for a few days the datasette and a bunch of cassettes that I could check out what I want to copy on to my floppy, which suddenly became very small and somewhat limiting.

I did copy a program called "Shade", which did not serve any apparent purpose, but looked good and had a fabulous sound unlike anything that I heard before on any computer. It got lost and it took me over 20 years to find out exactly what that program was (It took me only about 10 years to find out what the music was and who created it).

The program was the  Demo/Intro called "Shade" by the group "Newlook" for the Commodore 64 (C64) from 1987

It uses the song "Shades" by Chris Huelsbeck (download MP3 version) which won the open music contest by the German computer magazine/software publisher Markt & Technik in 1986 and launched his career of becoming, next to other musicians such as Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish or Martin Galway, one of the most popular and successful musician on the Commodore 64 Home Computer.

• Video capture with enhanced sound (39 MB) or watch video online at Vimeo.com
• Video capture with original sound (26 MB)

He created the sound tracks for the games R-Type and The Great Giana Sisters, which are also in the Top 100 popular sound tracks on the Commodore 64 ever (Top 100 by http://www.hvsc.c64.org/)

This was the first "Demo" that I got exposed to and recognized as such. It was an independent piece of software, all by itself, like any game or software application that I (or my dad) had at that time.

But compared to games or software applications does this program not serve any practical purpose or function other than to just look at it and enjoy it for what it is. The school of the company where my school sent its students to for the in East Germany mandatory "PA" (Produktive Arbeit), "ESP" (Einfuehrung in die Sozialistische Production) and "TZ" (Technisches Zeichnen) education (and also offered voluntary classes in Computer Sciences, where I got to learn the programming language BASIC for the East German home computers KC-85 1 and KC-87, which looked identical and I don't know what the difference was between them), got for themselves a Commodore 64 computer, which they only used in special occasions. At one of those occasions I brought a copy of this demo with me to show it to the teacher and to follow students, to demonstrate the capabilities of the machine, which was a difference like day and light, in graphics and sound, compared to the first versions of the East German KC computers.

I just started English classes so could not translate the scroller text. The English abilities of the teacher were obviously also limited, because not a single eye-bow was raised during the presentation of the show.

Reading the scroller today makes me smile, when I look back to this moment and what could have been the consequences, if the teacher would have been able to understand the text. :)

The good times were unfortunately much too short in my opinion. It only lasted for a few months when my dad had to take the computer back again to the office. Gosh, what I would have given for not loosing it... a leg, probably. I didn't need a leg to use the computer. Makes sense, right?! Aehm... well, maybe not and sacrificing a leg of mine would also not have helped to get the computer back :(.

The First Cracktro that I Recognized at Was It Was

I don't remember any Cracktros from the Atari 800 and would not bet any money on the question if there were any at that time (1985-1989). In 1987 Commodores popped up everywhere. The Atari 800 was a loner in my world in the years before and the only home computer that I heard of and knew.

I frequently was at home at Another friend who owned a Commodore 64 (do you see a pattern emerging here? hehe) . Anyhow, he had a lot of games from the start where I never found out from where he got them himself. Games were not sold in East Germany, nor any other piece of software for any computer from a capitalist country. Every software, with the exception of any software that might have come with the computer hardware package itself, was a pirated copy and there was nothing anybody could have done about it.

It was at his place during a normal computer gaming session, when I suddenly recognized my first crack intro by a pirate group as what it actually was, a program that did not came from the authors of the game itself, but somebody else who did something to the game that it was possible to do with it was every East German did without having a choice, making a copy of it for somebody else to use on his computer.

I don't know why I did not recognized them before, yeah, never having seen an original in my life ever, makes this task more complicated than you might think.

Also that there was rarely text at first then often in English, which I was just starting to learn made this recognition more complicated.

Anyhow. I have seen that crack intro already a hundred times or more before, but assumed it to be a part of the actual game. Which one was it? Okay, here it is...

It was the Crack Intro titled "Mini Putt" (Cracktro) by the release group Eagle Soft Incorporated (ESI) for the Commodore 64 (C64) from September 1987.

Credits for this intro marvel as far as I know them:

Code: don't know yet
Eagle Image by: Scorpio (Carol) of Eagle Soft
Music (two songs were used interchangeably)

1. Song "Future Knight" by Ben Daglish (download MP3 version)
2. Song "R1D1" by Antony Crowther (download MP3 version)

Video captures of the intro for download

• Video Capture with enhanced sound  (19 MB) - AVI/XVID/MP3 or watch video online at Vimeo.com
• Video Capture with original sound (4.5 MB) - AVI/XVID/MP3

You can download the Demo by Newlook and the ESI Cracktro for the Commodore 64 (D64 and PRG format), the original C64 tunes by Chris Huelsbeck, Ben Daglish and Antony Crowther in SID format and converted to MP3, plus some images, in one convenient ZIP archive (only 17.8 MB) from my Mediafire.com file sharing account here.

Download C64 Disks, Executables, SID Music files and MP3 version of them, of the demo and intro that I talked about in one ZIP archive: C64-CCU-ESIIntro-HuelsbeckShades-D64s-SIDs-MP3s.zip

I hope that you enjoyed my not so short story :)

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Dynamic Technologies - Dytec - Introduction Continued

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 temporary gave up hope, until recently, when I stumbled across new Dytec Amiga releases, which I have not seen before. They also look pretty good actually, nothing I would have to be ashamed of in any way.

Well, I captured recordings for those and would like to expand on my original introduction and list of Dytec releases to provide a much more complete picture of the group.

	The PIT BBStro (1992) Credits Code: Direct Font: Viper Music: Pitty Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Cracktro for Dungeons Avalon 2 (1992) Credits Code: Direct Music: Pitty Font: Viper Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Trainer/Intro (1992) Credits Code: Grain Gfx : Orion, Fuzzi, Bart, Amblin Music: Pitty Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Lemmtro  (1992) Credits Code: Acromancer Graphics: Magnum Music: Pitty Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Ami Expo Invtro (1992) together with Skid Row Credits Code: Paso/Dytec Gfx: Crux/Dytec & Viper/Dytec Music: Vince/Dytec Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	"Bintro in Blue" (1992) Credits Code: Hosot Graphics: Tridi Music: Vince Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Cracktro for Perfect General (1992) Credits Code: Paso Music: Paso Graphics: Viper Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Dynamic Technologies Dentro (1992) Credits Code: Tuner Graphics: Crux & Magnum Music: Pitty Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video
	Unreleased Cracktro (1992) Credits Code: Blade Graphics: Orion Music: R2D2 Watch on YouTube - Download AVI Video Why "unreleased", since it was obviously made public? Well, it was never used for its original purpose ... as cracktro/crack intro for the group, which runs before a computer game that was cracked and then released within the warez scene by Dytec.

Not bad, eh?! Not bad indeed.

An All-Time Dytec Member List?!

While I was looking for the new Amiga productions and where I could download them, I started just for the fun of it, compiling something like a Dytec all-time member list. I did not take it as serious by far as the SAC All-Time Member List, where I spent a significant amount of time researching (and it is still not complete). What I want to say is that my list makes no claim to be complete nor 100% accurate. However, I think that it is better and more than anything that might be already out there. So here it is.. just for the fun of it.

Handle                  Function            Notes          Platform (A=Amiga, C=C64, P=PC)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Acromancer              coder                                        A
Amblin                  graphics                                     A  
Bacchus                 sysop                                           P
Beaker                  swapper                                      A
Blade                   cracker                                      A
Brainbox                                                                P
Brockhaus                                                               P
Christo                 sysop/courier                                   P
Crux                    graphics                                     A
Datacrime                                                               P
Deathwalker             sysop                                           P
Direct                  coder                                        A
Don                     supplier                                     A  P
Dr.Crime                sysop of whq         died in 2000            A
Dragnet                 sysop                                           P
Elvin                   sysop                                           P
Faithhealer                                                             P
FanFan                  sysop                                           P
Fatman                  leader/swapper                            C  A  P  
FCC                     cracker                                         P
Fuzzi                   graphics                                     A
Grain                   coder                                        A
Grizzly                                                                 P
Hetero                  coder/graphics                                  P
Hosot                   coder                                        A
Iceman                                                                  P
Jan                     courier                                         P
Jive                    coder                                        A
Johnny Cyperpunk        cracker                                         P
LBM (Little Big Man)    coder/cracker                              C
Madmax                                                                  P
Magnum                  graphics                                     A
Mainman                                                                 P
Maverick                sysop/courier/supplier                          P
Oliver Stoned                                                           P
Onyx                    cracker                                         P
Orion                   graphics                                     A
Palladin                sysop                                           P
Paso                    coder/music                                  A    
Pitty                   music                                        A   
Proton                  coder/cracker                             C
R2-D2                   cracker/music                                A   
Ramirez                                                                 P
Roach                   courier                                         P
Roy                     leader/sysop/graphics                           P
Shanon                  swapper                                      A  P   
Sharp                                                                   P
Slash                   sysop                                           P
Spoon                   music                                           P
The Clan                                                                P
The Outlaws             courier                                         P
Tic                     coder/cracker                                   P
Tridi                   grapics                                      A
Tuner                   coder                                        A
Turner                                                                  P
Twin!                   coder/cracker                                   P
VFast                                                                   P
Vince                   music                                        A
Viper                   graphics                                     A
Wine                                                                    P
Xerxes                  courier                                         P

And while it is so nice to gather up all this kind of information and publish them here, I'd decided to throw in another goodie as a bonus (or something like that hehe).

A Brief Dynamic Technologies History

... from my Point of View, as I remember it!

1990	Dytec is founded by Fatman in East Berlin on the Commodore 64
1992	Amiga Section was started
1993	Dytec PC Section Started, then merged into TRSI/DRG, which then became TRSI/Faith
1995	TRSI PC dissolves; several TRSI members join Genesis (formerly known as Pentagram). Assault becomes the Utility/Apps division of GNS, Dytec re-emerges as German games division; TDU-Jam is the English CD-Rip division (a German Games CD-Rip division also emerged, but I forgot the name of it). Genesis dies out naturally, since less and less games are being released on floppy disks anymore. Long distance calling across the Atlantic becomes a bigger issue, at the same time ISDN starts to dominate communication at least in Germany. All this causes a natural separation of the TDU-Jam and Dytec divisions, which eventually operate virtually entirely independent from each other. The friendship remained, but you could not speak of "one and unified" entity or group anymore.
1996	TRSI got revived, which is also rooted in Germany. Dytec became for a brief period of time what DRG and then Faith used to be, the German games release division of TRSI. (PC TRSI/DTC (Feb)) This period was only very short lived though and Dytec was once more on its own.
1997	Dytec PC Merge with Vortex and Empire of Darkness to form the new Group Dynasty. The Background Story: Dupes became a major issue, due to the high phone costs that caused the shift of when most trading across boards in Germany occurred to the ungodly hours between 2:00 am and 5:00 am, when phone fees were at its lowest. The major players in the German games release scenes were shattered all over Germany, with Dytec in Berlin, Vortex in the Ruhr area around Essen; Backlash around Hannover and Empire of Darkness in the southern part of Germany. That two or more groups released the same game during the day or evening was not realized before 2:00 am when the cross country trading started. The leader of Vortex, Menion Leah contacted me to discuss the issue. We talked about each groups strengths and weaknesses. Vortex had slightly faster suppliers, but no good crackers. Dytec had some of the best in whole Germany. We teamed up for some trials, where Vortex supplied an original for Dytec to release and Dytec cracked a game for Vortex to release. Those tests worked very well and talks about a possible merger started. Then we thought about an even larger merger. Menion and Vortex had good contact with EOD, to whom Dytec had no contact at all. However, Dytec, specifically me and a long time board and sysop of a Dytec HQ had very good contact to Backlash. My Board was a Backlash site, even while it was Dytec PC WHQ and I knew several of the BLH guys personally and even partied with them (hard). A mega-merger was on the horizon: Backlash-Dytec-EOD-Vortex, but Backlash backed out, because they refused to merge together with the EOD folks for several reasons. The decision was made to move ahead with the merger, even with Backlash dropped out of it. Dynasty was born. The leaders of each founding group became the senior staff of the new found Dynasty. The WHQ problem was solved intelligently by not making any board to the WHQ, but the three former WHQ's of the individual groups to HQ's and former HQ's to basic Distro. Sites. Backlash was the only serious competition for Dynasty. The relationship between the two rivals were mixed. While my BBS remained a Backlash site and I continued to consider several of the Backlash senior staff to be my friends, some ugly flaming occurred, especially between Backlash and former members of EOD on the Dynasty side.  Dytec Amiga and C64 continued to exist.
1999	Dytec PC re-emerged (separated from Dynasty), initiated by The Driver & Shanon. I was retired from the Warez-Scene (I was busted in 1998), but disapproved of this separation/re-launch, but the original founder and highest instance in this matter, Fatman, who was by then also retired, gave his blessings. This revival attempt was short lived though. Why, I don't know, because I was leaving Germany at that time and moved first to Switzerland (in 1999) and then to the United States in May 2000.

Did I miss something important? Do you disagree with something that I said about how the events unfolded from my own personal perspective? I am human und thus biased and controlled by emotions. The human mind likes to play tricks on you when it comes to long term memories and remembering specifics from events that lie many years in the past. I did not do a gigantic amount of background checking and research, but I also did not just write everything straight out of my head as and how it came back to my mind. This said, feel free to leave your comments at the end of this blog post below. I won't bite :).

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC (ex-Dytec)

p.s. While I did a little bit of facts checking, I re-discovered my old email signature that I seemed to have used all the time throughout the years 1998-1999 at least. Here it is :)

     Roy / Superior Art Creations                        .  . ..: ... 
     Email: NOT VALID AT THE MOMENT                      . . .:::::..  .
     WWW  : http://www.roysac.com/            .o$$$$$$$$$o. .:::::::::::.
                                                .  .o$ `$$$ "  `"::´ " .o$
     SAC Contacts                              . . $$$ o$P´.o$$$o..o$  $$$
     WWW: http://www.superiorartcreations.com/   : $$$o$o."$$ `$$$$$$  $$$ 
     IRC: #SAC (EFNet)                          .: $$$" $$$$$. $$$$$$. $$$
     FTP: N/A                                    ` $$$  $$$`4$$$P´`4$$P"$$"
     --------------------------------------------- $$$  $$$ ---------- $$$ -
     - --- ------------- ------------ --------- -  $$$  $P´ .::´  .o$" $$$
                                                   $P´     . :´ . $$$ .$$$
                                                             .    `4$$$$P´ 

Copyright Complaint Notice Filings in the Scene? WTF?

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, the plaintiff, turns out to be Matt James Swoboda, better known in the scene as "Smash" of Fairlight, Razor 1911, Beam, Insanity, Shadow and a few others.

Realtime Generation

The two video(s) in question used 12 and 45 seconds of a demo from 2008 by Andromeda Software Development (ASD) & Fairlight & Alcatraz, titled "Realtime Generation" (watch demo on Demoscene.tv), where "Smash" actually was one of the guys who created it, thus his claim was not so far fetched and absurd. I don't want to start debates about fair use and all this. I did use a fragment of the demo as back-drop for the intro of two of my amateurish videos with semi-professional background, but non-commercial use. In other words: I spent time on them and didn't receive a penny for it myself.

The full videos in question are available for viewing online and also for download in AVI video format at the following URLs below (in the case that you would like to make up your own mind about the use of the demo material).

Video 1: Download AVI (57 MB) - Watch Video on Facebook (requires FB account)
Video 2: Download AVI (72 MB) - Watch Video on Facebook

Anyhow, I do not intend to start a legal debate here, because that is not the reason why I blog this. My problem is the fact that a scener (Smash) filed an official copyright complaint against another scener, me, for something that could have been resolved quickly via a few emails, a phone or Skype call or chat instead. Since when did this become the means of communication in the scene? The time it took to prepare the official complaint was most likely more than the time it would have taken to check the background of the person behind the videos and to find the means to contact me. I did plaster the URLs to my web pages, including this one and all my other YouTube channels (including SACReleases) on the profile page of the YouTube account that hosted the videos in question (yeah, PAST TENSE is correct here, HOSTED).

Update/Addition: I just also recalled an incident at Dailymotion.com in January this year regarding the same material actually. There was a company called "Toei Animation" who claimed intellectual property ownership of one of the two videos. There was also no advanced email or anything, just a take down based on the claim by that company. I am unaware that anybody involved in the creation of the demo has any ties to that company and that they own anything of that demo. 

Team Mates or Hates?

Gosh, Smash and I were even in the same group once, Razor 1911. Both words in "team mate" seemed to have lost their meaning at one point from what it looks like.

Learn more about my past and present group allegiances here.

Misunderstandings?

I believe that I found Smash'es LinkedIn profile and contacted him via the LinkedIn mail system (asking first, if the Matt Swoboda from the UK, is "my" Matt, who I am trying to get in touch with. A Finish scener with the name "Mandibular Joint Dysfunction" also contacted me via Facebook regarding this issue. He did not refer to the actual source of his information for me to check and follow up on, but I asked him to clarify where he heard of this "misunderstanding" (I hope that this is what it is).

The problem with those complaints in YouTube is that they don't go away and that my one account is now in jeopardy of being suspended because of anything that might comes up. YouTube does not care, double check or listens to anybody than a lawyer who threatens with legal actions in writing. I know this from first hand experience, since I got myself already an account suspended once, because of some BS, which caused some major pain in the ass for me, hours and hours of work lost and the unpleasant experience of "talking to a hand" that completely ignores you.

So resolving this "misunderstanding" means for me also that the official copyright complaint (actually two, one for each of the two videos) will be retracted that YouTube will remove those from my account history. Here is how it looks right now. Not very pretty, isn't it.

Here is the video recording of my two little intros that started all this trouble

Backup Link to Video at Motionbox.com

As you can see, I did some modifications to the original video recording of the PC demo to make it suit my own purposes. Could I given credits? Sure I could have, but I didn't for several reasons. First, I didn't know who did what to be able to give accurate credits (I am still not sure about this part).

Furthermore, I only used tiny fragments of the demo and distorted it with effects and content that I created in front of the original video. The 2nd place demo at the party where Realtime Generation won 3rd place did a homage to some well know PC demos as well and also did not properly credited those, but everybody knew which demos were depicted.

I didn't give it another thought actually.

If you ask the question, how I would feel, if somebody would do the same with my art work, I'd say:
"No Problem"  and I actually made that one clear publicly in 2006 with clarifications added to it in 2008.

Update/Addition: I'd say something, if somebody would rip off my stuff and actively run around claiming that he did it. Not saying anything does not mean making a claim. If you want to know if somebody did something himself, entirely, partially or not at all, ask and see what the answer is.

If credits are "forgotten" and the creator asks for them, I would be the last to deny it to him. It usually boils always down to the question where and how to put them, without having the credits taking over the actual piece or destroy the setting where it is in. I added additional credits to stuff where I missed them myself and also asked others to add credits to their stuff, not always myself, but credits to other artists as well. 

Well, I hope that the the "Matt" at LinkedIn who I contacted is "my" "Smash" and that we will be able to sort things out. The LinkedIn profile says that he works at Sony now. Maybe he spent too much time "under some bad influence". Sony's approach to deal with copyright issues is not what I would call "consumer friendly" (I just say "root kit", do a Google search for "Sony root kit", if you don't know what I am referring to).

We will see. I will write another post, if something comes out of this.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

 Update June 9, 2009.

Somebody pointed me via a comment here at my blog, to the original Pouet.net forum thread where it all started (the one "Mandibular" mentioned in his FB message). I joined the discussion there and addressed more comments than I probably should have, but then it wouldn't be me I guess. Anyhow, the discussion seems to have shifted to over there. It's already three pages long, but I hope that this will not scare you off from checking it out anyway. I hope that in all the BS that also seems to be part of the discussion there actually a resolution will be found that makes everybody happy again.

p.s. Also a message by Smaash (misspelled) turned up. It was sent via the contact form at Cumbrowski.com about one day before the videos were already taken down by YouTube. The message was unfortunately sorted away with all those messages about "link exchanges'", "web development in India proposals" etc.  and I didn't get a chance to look at it in time (yeah, my main computer is still broken, I got a new main board, but now miss a power connector for the GFX card fan to the mother board. I was already checking at RadioShack and other stores, including a PC repair shop to get such stupid connector that fits, but nobody has this. I found something online, got that one shipped as well... and guess what, wrong size! Gosh, how many versions of a three pin cooler fan to mother board connector are there?

Gateway still gives a crap. I hope that they will be out of business soon too. Bastards. 

Update June 18, 2009

I had some extensive email communication going with Smash and tried to elaborate the reasons for my rage and what I saw as the biggest problem with his actions. I thought that I made it already clear enough that I also admit that I made mistakes too.  In case that it was not clear for somebody yet, here some quotes from my emails to Matt.

I admit my own mistake. It taught me the lesson that whatever you put anywhere online, publicly or or not public and not protected, will be out there for anybody to find, if you only look hard enough for it. In this case my experiments of the creation of a short video introduction (there are more of those by the way, nothing I would be particular be proud of, but once they are out there, there is nothing I could do about them now). It was used for something small and semi personal to get some feedback and along the way learn how to do things better (testing is one of the key elements in marketing that you cannot ignore or neglect, no studies in the world can replace actual tests) .

Where there was the discussion about it, I provided honest information about the source of the material and included references and credits. Then it was "over" and I moved on. However, the "pilot" or "test" did not disappear how it usually does in the offline world. If it happens online, it's there virtually forever. I did not think about that somebody would even care about those experiments from yesterday, and certainly did not assume that somebody would have any issue with them.

My biggest mistake was to forget that it can look for somebody else completely different and all brand new, because that person just got exposed to it now and stuff in the digital world does not age or decay. It's there, brand new, like on the day it was created. I also did not include ALL details related to every bit of the content, which gave room for miss-interpretations.

Matt understood the issue and said that he will try to retract the complaint at YouTube.com. That was 6 days ago on Friday June 12, 2009, but today Thursday, June 18, 2009 does it still show in my YouTube account the complaint and that my account is not in good standing.

I provided him with a lot of material regarding the copyright issue on the Internet, including some very bad examples where it is clear that the system is completely messed up and a harm to society in general. I hope that he now also understands my rage about the way he acted on the problem.

He is surely not a large corporation like Sony and just an individual like, but he unfortunately acted like a big corporation and used by extension another big corporation (Google) to get things his way. I believe that he was not aware that the corporate system in place today is truly against individuals and often creates significant collateral damage and overall more harm than good.

I also asked him for his advice regarding Pouet.net. I am still undecided, if I should post once more to apologize to the folks who I gave credits for comments that they did not make or if I should just let it be the way it is. My error was pretty obvious (afterwards) and I also was consistent with it, so folks should have been able to figure it out. I did not get a response regarding that from Mark as well. It is kind of odd, because he usually responded within less than 24 hours to my emails, until Friday.

I will send him another email about this blog update. The matter is still not completely resolved, because the main issue for me is still there and that is the note in my YouTube account. :(

Rupture by Andromeda Software Development and other cool Demos

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 .AVI format (61 MB).

If you enjoyed that demo, then you will certainly also enjoy what is coming next. :)

Now I have some great demos for you from previous demo parties, and also created  by the guys from Andromeda Software Development (ASD). I also highly recommend watching those, if you get around to it. You can find all of ASD's productions and links to download at their official web site at www.asd.gr by the way. They are Greek and lucky to be able to get the 3 character domain name at the Greek TLD :).

	Lifeforce by ASD (2007) The demo won 1st place at the Summer Assembly 2007 combined Demo competition in Helsinki, Finland. Wrote about Lifeforce by ASD in February  2008 (14 months ago), because I was so impressed by it. I also uploaded it to FaceBook.com and got feedback from non demo "sceners" about how cool it is. It was definitely a demo high light, not just in 2007 (Lifeforce won the title Best Demo of 2007 that year), but the several previous years. My 2008 post includes the YouTube.com Video version of the demo in lower resolution. A better version is available at my Facebook account and you can also download a even better version of the video at Pouet.net, where you can also the demo executables as well.
	Iconoclast by ASD (2005) This demo won 1st place at the Assembly 2005 combined Demo competition. Watch the video of this demo at my Facebook account and/or download a high resolution version or/and the demo executable at Pouet.net. Iconoclast is also one of my all-time favorite demos. Cool effects and nice music as well.
	Planet Risk (2004) This demo by Andromeda Software Development "only" won 2nd place at the Assembly 2004 Combined Demo Competition (The 1st place won the great demo "Obsoleet" by Unreal Voodoo, which I also highlighted in my History of the Demoscene article.   Again, more information and download links for the demo itself etc. is available at the Pouet.net demoscene database and repository.

More Great Demos

by other Demo Groups than Andromeda Software Development

	FR-41 Debris by Farbrausch (2007) This demo by the reputable German demo group (yeah! hehe) won 1st place at the Break Point demo party in 2007. Remarkable about this demo is also the size. It is almost small enough to enter the 64KB intro competition, but it's a full blown demo. The folks from Farbrausch wanted to make a point about debates about the file size of demos, which is increasing more and more in recent years. You don't need 20 MB to create a great demo. That's a myth and "Debris" debunked that myth once and for all :). You can watch the video of this demo at my Facebook account and/or download the demo at Pouet.net and run on your own PC in High Resolution.
	Fr-25 The Popular Demo by Farbrausch (2003) This demo won 1st place at the Break Point (BP) demo compo in  2003 A funky "Disco" style demo with cool lighting effects. Watch the demo in video format at my Facebook account or visit Pouet.net to download the demo and watch on your own PC.
	Final Audition by Plastic (2005) This demo won 1st place at the Evoke 2005 demo party compo in August 2005, which is like Break Point held in Germany each year. Great ambience, cool music and  breathtaking effects. I fell in love with the demo first time I saw it. Definitely one of the all-time best demos. Again, you can watch this demo at my Facebook account or download the high-res video and/or demo itself at Pouet.net.

I hope that you enjoyed the demos as much as I did and that you might got a bit more interested into the fascinating world of the demoscene. There are a bunch of resources and links to the subject available at my main web site, if you want to learn more about this underground art scene and its history.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

The SAC – Superior Art Creations All-Time Member List Project Update

I am trying for a while now to create an all time Superior Art Creations member list. This is unfortunately no easy task, because the information in the SAC.NFO files of the SAC Pack releases were not always as well maintained as they should have been. I don’t want to point and blame anybody, but its is pretty tough to get a clear picture of who is who and who was in when as what, with the amount of information that can be extracted from the releases of the group itself.

Here is what I came up with so for. The stuff that is high lighted with an orange background is where I would be happy, if anybody has an answer to my question or the missing information, whatever the case might be.

Also, the whole last section with “Non-Contributing Temp Members” is open for input. Listed there are names that were mentioned that they are members of SAC, but I could not find any contribution of those guys in any of the SAC art packs. Maybe they did something under the name of SAC, but nothing that found its way into an art pack. If that is the case, then I want of course give the credits where credits are due and remove that person from the “non-contributing” section.

If you know any of the folks where questions are still in the room or if you have any tip how or where I could find out more about them etc. Please let me know. The comments section of this blog post would do just fine.

I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

#	Handles / Aliases	File Prefix(es)	Country	PPE	PRG	VGA	MFX	ANS	ASC	ADM	Notes/Comments
Contributing Members (Included in Art Packs)
1	2Fast	2F	Germany						X
2	Acen	AC	Germany				X
3	Allanon	ALN	Sweden						X
4	Antibody	ANTI / AB	Denmark			X		X	X
5	Argon Factor	AR	Germany				X
6	Arlequin	ARL / AR	Argentina					X	X
7	Asphyx	ASX	France			X		X	X
8	Axess	AXS	Germany			X	X
9	Barium	B5	n/a			X		X	X
10	Bazilla	BAZ	Germany			X
11	Brane	BNE	Sweden						X
12	Cokine	COK	Sweden			X
13	Comrade	COM	Canada		X
14	Creator	CRE	Australia			X
15	Creature of Hell	COH / CH	USA			X	X	X
16	Crome	CROME / CRM	Germany				X
17	cRu / Maverick	CRU	Germany					X	X
18	Crusader	CDR	Sweden						X
19	D0n	DN	n/a						X
20	DAC	DAC	Germany				X
21	Dalezy / The Unconsciousness / Animal	DLZ / TU / AN	Germany				X
22	Dark Star / Puschel	DS / PL	Germany			X		X	X
23	Davek	DKNY	USA					X	X
24	Desolation Angel	DA	USA			X
25	Dipswitch	DIP	Germany						X
26	Don Rapello	DON	Finland						X
27	Dream Design	DD	Germany		X	X		X
28	DW0	DW0	n/a					X			What's the full name?
29	Eboy	EB	Finland			X		X	X
30	Edge	ED	USA			X
31	Ex0	EX0	Australia					X	X
32	F0st	FST / FS	France			X			X
33	Ferrex	FRX / FX	Germany		X	X		X	X
34	Flames	FLAMES	Germany			X			X
35	Fourth	4TH	n/a						X
36	Geareo	MYD	n/a						X
37	Giovanni	GIO	Germany				X
38	Grap	GP	Germany		X
39	GrymmJack	GJ	USA						X
40	GTI	GTI	Canada			X		X	X
41	Helix	HLX	USA						X
42	Hetero	HT	Germany		X	X		X	X
43	HKultra	HKU	n/a			X
44	IxLover Buddha	IX	n/a			X			X
45	[K]	K	Germany		X	X
46	Kaethe	KT	Germany					X	X
47	Kenet	K	France			X
48	KMX	KMX	Poland		X						What does KMX stand for?
49	Maktone	MT / M1	Sweden				X
50	Markgoh	MG	Canada						X
51	Marky	MY / M	Germany			X			X
52	Matador	MTD	Russia		X				X
53	Mattey	MATTEY	n/a			X
54	McBarn	MB	Sweden				X
55	Midfit	MF	Germany		X
56	Moolok	MOO	Germany			X		X
57	Mr.Death	MRDEATH / MRD	Sweden				X
58	Mr.Jezus	MRJEZUS	Finland			X
59	Mydknight	MID	Canada						X
60	Myth	MYTH	Germany		X
61	Neophyte	NP	Germany		X
62	Nerv	NERV / NR	France			X		X	X
63	Nova	N	Australia			X
64	Pasha	P	Germany			X			X
65	PDZ	PDZ	n/a						X		PDZ = Podzi?
66	Poldi	PD	Germany			X		X	X
67	Quasar	QS	Sweden						X
68	Rainer	RN	Germany				X
69	Raiser	RS	Germany					X	X
70	Rave	RV	Germany			X		X	X
71	Rez	REZ	Netherlands		X		X				Is Rez an abbreviation?
72	Roodolph	ROO	Poland						X
73	Roy	ROY	Germany/USA	X	X	X		X	X
74	RZ	RZ	n/a						X		RZ = Rahzel? Uses }8]a or }8] as sig in pics
75	S!	S!	n/a						X		S! = Stylez or S! = Serges or somebody else?
76	Scour	SCR	USA						X
77	Senser	SNS	France			X		X	X
78	Sergeon Cuts	SERGEON	USA			X
79	Stonehedge	SH	Germany				X
80	Shaq	SQ	Russia						X
81	Shot	ST	Germany					X
82	Silent	SiL	n/a			X
83	sOul	SOUL	Germany				X
84	Spectrum	SPC	Germany		X
85	Spoon	SPN	Germany				X
86	Sprocket	SPROCKET	Norway			X
87	Squizzy	SQZ	Netherlands						X
88	Strike Light	SL	Canada					X	X
89	Svenzzon	SVENZZON / SVEN / SV	n/a				X		X
90	Synec	SY	Germany		X
91	Techbit	TB	Canada			X
92	Teepak	TPK	Germany			X		X	X
93	Toxic Trancer	TOX	Germany				X
94	v0uck	VK	n/a						X
95	W.O.T.W.	WOTW	Germany				X
96	Webpige0	W0	n/a			X		X	X
SAC PPE Coders (Had no file prefix)
97	Cyz		Germany	X
98	Monster		Germany	X
99	Fox		Germany	X
100	Cyber Brain		Germany	X
Administrative Members
Internet Coordinators, except for Idiana who did Group Management and Organization
101	Hoziris		Israel							X
102	Cercyon		Germany							X
103	Corex		Germany							X
104	Idiana		Germany							X
Guest Contributors
Included in one or more SAC Pack releases, but never had status of SAC member
n/a	Z80	Z80	Germany		1
Non Contributing Temp Members
This list may includes members where I could not match them up confidentially with a file prefix from the pack.
It could also be that one person is listed with multiple nick names or real name.
If you know of any contributions to the group and it to the comments please.
	Ripper		Germany
	Prosthesis		Finland
	Paledeth		Sweden
	White Zombie	TWZ	Denmark
	Darkheart		Sweden
	Felix		Germany
	Timelord		Italy
	Necrotoad		Canada
	Nitrifik		Sweden
	Spinsane	SP	n/a
	Xeek	XK	n/a
	PODZI		n/a								Podzi = PDZ
	Stylez		Germany								Styles = S!?
	Serges		n/a								Serges = S!?
	Sick Doctor		n/a								Serges = Sick Doctor?
	Rahzel		n/a								Rahzel = RZ?
	Shady		Germany								Shady = S!?

Explanation of Columns
PPE = PCBoard BBS Tools Programmer (using PPL-PCBoard Programming Language, which are compiled to PPE’s)
PRG = Programmer/Coder of Intros, tools etc. such as the SACtros for SAC artpack releases.
VGA = Pixel Art Graphician and later also hi-res art via Photoshop etc.
MFX = Musician, mainly old-school tracker MOD modules (or FastTracker, ScreamTracker etc.)
ANS = ANSI text artist (like the image below)
ASC = ASCII text artist, 7-Bit and/or “high ASCII” (Block ASCII)
ADM = Administrative work, Internet Coordinator, Bot-Master (IRC) and those sorts of things)

I am feeling that we come slowly but surely closer to the goal of having a complete and correct all-time Superior Art Creations member list that I can post on the SAC section of the site as I promised to do so already two or some more years ago.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Interesting SAC Art Packs Statistics, Figures and Downloads

I am still working on sorting through the Superior Art Creations (SAC) art packs and to make them easy accessible via the web (e.g. my web site and elsewhere). The sorting brings up some interesting facts about the art pack releases that I want to share with you. All SAC Art Packs are available for download here and also here at my site.  

Facts, Stats and Figures

• 2 of the 35 art packs included  no music release at all, packs 18 and 19. All art packs included ANSI, ASCII and VGA pixel art work, but it was once  close to the release of an art pack without pixel art. Pack 08 from September 1996 was 2 files in size, but it only included one piece of pixel art, a small SAC logo by Hetero that he created for the packs SACtro (SAC0996A.ZIP and SAC0996B.ZIP). I guess we were lucky hehe.
• 2 pixel art images in pack 33 by Asphyx/SAC were a dupe (asx-madhat-final.jpg and asx-warlords-logo.png). The two images had been released already in SAC Pack 32 five months earlier that same year. It almost looked like as if Pasha duped a picture for art pack 27, but the images are different (p-abs.png). He just named the file for another logo the same as he did a logo for the same group that he created in the past (funny, he obviously had no directory with all his art work in it, like the rest of us hehe).
• 2 Tracker Modules were dupes. But also the musicians duped once. Two of them, one song each in the same art pack. Crome (CRM) and Maktone (MT) included a song in pack 28, which they already released in a previous pack (crm_dustinmyeyes.XM and mt_FLT01.MOD).
• 2 art packs did not include a File_ID.diz file to describe the content of the ZIP archive, pack 21 and 22 (shame on you Ferrex ;)).  Since art pack 29 was no member list or FTP/BBS list included in the NFO files, which makes it hard to impossible to complete my "All-Time SAC Member List".
• 2 members, both pixel artists, used the same file prefix for some time, creating confusion, not just back then, but also today (I know, because I got confused too). Kenet and [K] used both the file prefix "k-" in various art packs. "[K]" also used "K_", with the underscore instead of the dash and Kenet used his full name as prefix in his file names. I have not checked who used which prefix when, but it surely created a big mess, when I aggregated the artwork, because you files from both with the prefix "K-" in the file name.

• 484 ANSI art pieces were released in 35 art packs between December 1994 and March 2007. The packs also included the following ....
• 3,023 ASCII art logos, file_id.diz, NFO layouts, FTP site designs etc. Not including the SAC releases File_IDs and NFO files itself.
• 115 Executables (.EXE and .COM files), excluding tools, installers and viewers, but including Cracktros, BBS intros and Still Images that were converted to an executable (e.g. a BBS ad ANSI in a wrapper to show the ANSI without having the need of the ANSI.SYS driver loaded). Also included in this figure are the SACtros that came with some of the art pack releases, especially during the early days. You can watch the video recorded 13 SACtros that were released with the SAC Packs on my web site. I also captured most of the other intros from the packs already. I have not put them up on my web site yet, but on YouTube. You can download all of my recordings and more via this share at Mediafile.com and its subsequent sub directories.
• 534 Pixel Art Images. I converted all images that were not already  in Jpeg or PNG format to PNG (e.g. Deluxe Paint .LBM files, but also old GIF files, BMP, PCX and TGA). I want to put them up on the site one day, but for now Flickr.com must suffice. I created a special collection with a bunch of sets for all the pixel art images there.
• 428 MODs (ProTracker, TakeTracker and NoiseTracker modules), SIDs (Commodore 64 music files), XMs (Fasttracker 2 modules), S3Ms (Scream Tracker 3), ITs (Impulse Tracker), DMFs (X-Tracker) and MP3s (not including the separate music disc releases, which include music from the packs, but maybe also some stuff that wasn't released in a pack yet. I don't know yet. I need to check this.)

Tracker Music Play-back and Conversion to MP3

I just converted all the tracker modules and SIDs to MP3 format for the later use on my web site, to make the music accessible to a broader audience, because you cannot play tracker music without special software or player plug-ins. The conversion was a pain in the neck. I used DeliPlayer2 (no link, because their web site DeliPlayer.com seems to be down, but see this site for more info.) for most of the music, which worked fine, but unfortunately only one module at the time. I ran into some problems with about 15 or so of the over 400 mods. DeliPlayer said that it believes that the files are corrupted and refused to play/convert them. I checked with ModPlug Player for Windows and they played back fine.

I also tried WinAmp with the LifeAMP plug-in and the internal MOD input source plug-in, but the results were mixed. I have not checked the BASS module player plug-in and thus do not know, if it is any good. Also useful is the SidPlay plug-in for WinAmp for playing back the SID music files.

But then I discovered XMPlay, which beats all of the players and tools above. It has tons of plug-ins as well and even supports WinAmp plug-ins as well. With XMPlay was it a breeze to convert tracker music to MP3, WAV or other formats, including in batch mode and the option to save the results in the same folder as the source file. Damn, if I only had known earlier. It would have saved me hours of time that I wasted on manually converting one song at a time.

More Download Options

If you don't want to download all the art packs, but are interested in some of the stuff, then I have something for you that you might like. I sorted the original content of the packs by content type and put them into individual RAR archives. I did that already for the music files and the pixel art. I have not done yet a archive for the ANSI and ASCII art yet. I already had packages for the Intros and Cracktros available for download directly from my web site here.

• All pixel art releases (534 images) in original format (LBM, PCX, GIF, JPG, TGA and BMP were used by the artists). Total size of the RAR archive = 50 MB. Download via Mediafire.com here.
• 194 XM Fast Tracker 2 Modules (22 MB .RAR File) + it also includes the 47 modules from the two music disk releases by Svenzzon and Crome. Download via Mediafire.com here.
• 156 MOD Pro Tracker, Take Tracker and Noise Tracker Modules (2.4 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• 26 SID Commodore 64 Music Files (50 KB, yeah, kilobytes :), .RAR File). Download here.
• 22 S3M Scream Tracker 3 Modules (2.8 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• 14 DMF X-Tracker Modules (3.1 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• 12 MP3 Mpeg-1 Layer 3 music files (35 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• 4 IT Impulse Tracker Modules (1.5 MB .RAR File). Download here.
• more Downloads ...
• and even more Downloads ...

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Scene Pixel Art Font Sets Collection

My last post was about legendary pixel art logos of the PC and Commodore Amiga scenes and the collection with over 25 sets of logo images that I created at my Flickr.com account to share them with everybody who is also interested in this stuff.

I did now also uploaded my collection of scene pixel art font sets to Flickr.com. I created a special collection for the font set images, which includes today 8 different sets with over 500 font sets overall. I have a bunch more, but in raw format or sliced up with individual images for each character and not the appropriate format to upload and share on a social media web site like Flickr.com.

Handmade, with No Filters to Polish

The fonts were pixeled by hand, just like the logos were. Many of them on the Commodore Amiga with image editing tools like Deluxe Paint and others on the IBM PC with MS DOS, using tools like the PC adaptation of Deluxe Paint (Deluxe Paint 2 enhanced or Deluxe Paint Animation), Autodesk Animator Pro or similar tools (you can find download links to the mentioned MS DOS editors at my download page).

No Adobe Photoshop or similar modern day editors were used by the artist. Everything had to be done manually. VGA art was painstaking work back in those days and required more fundamental skills of design and visual perception and lighting than you need today, where some stuff is done automatically by the tool (e.g. anti-aliasing) or you have a filter plug-in that does the desired effect for you. Those editors also had no "undo" or "history" features. "Undo" was more like a "re-do", at least for everything that you did since you created a backup copy of the image you are working on and not overwrote with newer versions since then.

Difference between Fonts Today and Oldskool Pixel Fonts

Unlike most fonts used today on the computer, which are commonly True Type fonts, which is a vector format allowing the fonts to be scalable and remain smooth regardless of the size you choose, pixel fonts are fixed size and cannot be scaled. They are basically an image. You can create pixel or bitmap fonts for the use on a Windows PC or Macintosh, if you have the right tools (here is a tutorial how to do that),  but that is not the type of font that you will find in my collection.

The Purpose of those Fonts

The fonts in my collection were never meant to be used as a font in an operating system by different applications, such as Word processors or image editing programs. Those fonts were usually designed for a specific purpose that was known to the artist before he even started to create one. That purpose was typically a "demo" or "Intro" project, or maybe a computer game development project.

The programmer had to "slice up" the image with the font characters in it and then use the individual slices that represent a character in his code to do something with it, such as creating a text scroller or apply some other fancy effects to have text messages appear into on the screen or to make them disappear. Those effects range from simple faders, over zoomers to elaborate effects where the letters are twisted and bent and rotated or combination of all or multiple of the mentioned ones.

Here is an example of a font, which also includes maker lines that were added by the artist to make it easier for the coder/programmer to "slice-up" the font and get the individual characters out of the image.

My Pixel Font Creations

Although I was known as an ANSI and ASCII text artist in the "scene" back in those days, I also did some pixel art work. I did not do very much, because I was never more than average doing it. I realized that it is better to stick to what you are best at and leave the pixel stuff to the guys that are really good doing it, such as the former SAC member and personal friend "Dream Design", who was capable of creating astonishing pieces of art within the limitations of colors available to use and screen resolution.

I created 13 pixel art fonts, mostly for some cracktros SAC created for some other release groups. I created a separate set for those fonts at Flickr.com. I did not do that to highlight them and to show how great I am (or was), I separated them, because the legal situation for if and how you could or could not use those fonts today is not clear for the other ones that I did not create myself.

The Legal Issue

Nobody was thinking about Copyright when they created those things. There was also no commercial intention for its use, it was about reputation and getting known and recognized... "fame" basically. In order to do that as good as possible, you not only wanted that your stuff was spreading as far and as fast across the globe as possible, no, you even helped  yourself with spreading as good as you could, or your fellow group mates, some even doing nothing else than "spreading" or "trading" your work, because that was their position and job within the group.

The problem is that because nobody specified in writing if and how the work that you created can be used by others, full copyright protection supposedly is applied by default, meaning that you cannot do anything with it, without the explicit permission of the artist, who is often unknown or only known by his pseudonym or scene handle, thus virtually impossible to contact and ask.

I made the decision for my art to give up the rights on them and made all of it available to anybody to use as he likes, except to create copyright protected derivatives of it. I basically want to make sure that my stuff stays free, even if you take it and add something of your own to it.

My Most Elaborate Font

Here is the most elaborate font that I ever pixeled. It is very large, or better was large at the time when I created it, because you have to keep in mind that the screen resolution for fancy VGA stuff on the PC was only 320x200 pixels and 256 colors. The font looks small today, at least on my screen, where the resolution is 4.5 times as high as the resolution the font was intended for.

It took me over 5 hours to pixel and was used for a Crack Intro for the PC games release group "Genesis" where I was a member of at the time. I cannot show you the cracktro unfortunately, because I am unable to get it to run and capture (video) on my PC today, even with a MS DOS emulator like DOSBox. :(

I am still trying to find a way to get a capture of it. You can download it here (only 55 KB) and send me a video capture of it, if you get it to work. It can also be without the sound, which I have and can add later. I only need the video images.

I hope you liked my little excursion back in time and also the font sets that I made available for you on Flickr.com.

Enjoy!

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Legendary Commodore AMIGA Pixel Art Logos

I collected over the years pixel art of all kinds, especially from the Commodore AMIGA, the Commodore 64 and the PC (when people still "pixeled" there instead of "photoshop" everything).

If you do not know what I mean, have a look at this post of mine about Perspective Projection on the Computer. It touches the subject of hand-made pixel art on the side, but uses some nice examples and illustrations. ...  whoa, what is this background?! :) special occasions? buoahhhh! hehe... okay now serious again ... I was particular a fan of logo art work, because that was something I did myself. I was never good at drawing or painting objects, people or animals. You only have to look at my ANSI/ASCII art galleries and will see that most of the stuff are logos only and if I did anything else, then the results were way below average in quality. Any of my attempts to draw people and faces resulted in something that looked rather funny, although this was rarely my original intention. So I eventually accepted the truth and stuck to what I did best, logos ... styling text/words, so to speak, just as clarification for the "normal" folks out there. I got around to take my logo collection and do as much de-duping as I could, spending several hours on just that and upload my collection to Flickr.com, for everybody to access freely. I did not include my Commodore 64 collection, which is still a mess, but a bunch of C64 pixel art logos sneaked into the Flickr.com sets anyway. I grouped the logos by title and not artist, creating a set for each letter of the alphabet and grouping all the set within one big collection, which you can access via this link. There are over 2,000 logos my friends, in case you asked yourself how I can spend "hours" on de-duping stuff. :) Okay... here are some of the most famous logos of all time... the cream de la cream... the top of the top of the pixel art logos so to speak. Okay, I think you got it, so lets start with the show hehe. FLT- Fairlight logo by Angel Dawn Ultra famous logo, used over and over again, also on the PC later on, where almost nobody ever did a new one for them, because everybody was convinced that you couldn't come up with a better one. If you have never seen this logo before in your life then I am asking myself, how you ended up at this blog reading this post? Seriously! TRSI - Tristar and Red Sector Incorporated logo by J.O.E. Together with the previous logo for Fairlight, probably the most recognized scene logos of all time. Same as for the Fairlight logo... it was used over and over again, also on the PC, but in contradiction to the Fairlight case were some folks confident enough to draw new logos to compete with this one by J.O.E. and I have to admit, some did a damn good job at it. See for example the other TRSI logo by Peachy further down below.    SCX - Scoopex logo by Acid    TSL - The Silents logo by Barock   Kefrens logo by Blizzard from the famous Commodore Amiga 500 demo "Desert Dream" from 1993 Gods logo by Bridgeclaw Sanity logo by Cougar    HLM - Hoodlum logo by Angel Dawn there is also another Hoodlum logo by Angel Dawn, which has a much simpler design, but is probably as equally famous as this one.   Melon Dezign logo by Mack The "zoomed" or "ASCII style" like Melon logo text became somewhat of a trademark for Melon Dezign. They use the same motive over and over again throughout various Melon demo and intro/cracktro projects.   Lemon logo by Facet okay, not so classic, but there is Melon, so I had to add a logo from the "Anti-Melon" group "Lemon". It's like Ying and Yang. Hey, I picked a logo that uses a ripped Melon Dezign style, okay?! hehe TSL - The Silents logo by Mikael Balle    S8 - Shining 8 logo by Newline most famous of the logos of the cracking group Shining 8. Are there any other logos? I am not sure, no joke! TRSI - Tristar and Red Sector Inc. logo by Peachy from the end credits part of the TRSI dentro "Wicked Sensation" from 1992, which featured also a great and equally famous piano track by the musician Romeo Knight called "Boesendorfer" Alcatraz logo by PGCS Logo from the intro of the winning demo of The Part 1991 in Aars, Denmark called "Odyssey" (5 disks long, running about 45 minutes, if you don't skip parts and single handedly responsible for the institution of a running time limit for demos at competitions at demo scene parties :) )      Kefrens logo by R.W.O.   Anarchy logo by Slash Parasite logo by Splatt   Razor 1911 logo (I believe by Sector 9)    okay, this logos is maybe not so famous, but I had to add a Razor 1911 logo to avoid trouble, so I picked a very old logo and not any of the new PC ones by Zebig, Facet or Kenet etc. :) SCX - Scoopex logo by Uno SR - Skid Row logo by Antony That is enough for now! Again, you can find these logos and over 2,000 other and less famous pixel art logos at this Flickr.com collection of mine. Check it out, it's definitely worthwhile to spend some time there.

Uh... what happened to the fancy background? Mhhh ... I suppose that this was a queue for me to signal that this is the end of this blog post. Okay, so be it!

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

What is ASCII Art? What is ANSI? and more!

I added a significant amount of content to my ASCII Art Academy page on my site. I answered there in short what things are. I explain all this stuff in detail in various articles, but I think it is good to have a short and straight forward version on the main Academy home page as well.



Here are some examples:

What is ASCII Art?
ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange and is a text format standard for computers. ASCII art is text art that was created on computers who use this ASCII standard. The text art created on the IBM PC, which use text characters beyond the ASCII standard are also called ASCII, even though it is technically incorrect. The IBM PC become the most widely used computer in the world and people called things ASCII, even if they were not. There is no sense to debate about it, because it won't change what already happened.

What is 7-Bit ASCII?
The difference between 7-bit and 8-bit ASCII is pretty simple, assuming that you have a keyboard with the latin alphabet. 7-bit only uses characters that you can find on the keyboard. 8-bit uses additional characters that you cannot find on your keyboard, but which exist in "text mode" of the old MS DOS operating system. MS DOS hat 256 characters for text mode. Some of them are control chracters and not visible, such as Carriage Return, Line Feed (Line Break), the Tab character or the Escape character. The standard US-ASCII characters are the first 128 chracters of the character set, where 97 of them are usable for text and ASCII art.

What is 8-Bit ASCII?
8-bit ASCII art uses primarily characters after the 128 chracters of the US-ASCII character set. You cannot find those characters on your keyboard and could only generate them via programming code, special editors (like TheDraw or ACiDDraw) or by pressing the ALT-Key and then type the character code (a number between 128 and 255) on your numeric keypad, while keeping the ALT-Key pressed. Those upper or "higher" characters are suitable for basic graphical elements, such as box borders, corners. Those characters are unique to the IBM PC and MS DOS and are not compatible with other operating systems, such as UNIX, Linux or MAC OS.

What is ANSI?
ANSI is unique for MS DOS by Microsoft and the IBM PC. ANSI is a set of control sequences to manipulate the appearance of the text on the screen, to bolden text, making it itallic or blinking and to add some colors to your text. There are 16 pre-defined foreground colors, where 8 of them could also be used as background color.

The use of ANSI control sequences (called Escape sequences, because they all started with the ESC character) required special editing software, because unlike the 8-Bit upper characters, is there no easy way to generate those sequences by hand. In order for MS DOS to process and interpret those control sequences properly, a special driver had to be loaded, which came with the MS DOS operating system by default. The file for this driver was named "ANSI.SYS". This is where ANSI got his name from, which is sometimes confusing, because ANSI also stands for the American National Standards Institute, the organization who defined the US-ASCII standard.

And more...
I also added examples of the character sets 7-bit and 8-bit and the ANSI color schema. I also added a grid with the mapping of ANSI colors to HTML colors and their ESC sequence code.

New ANSI Tutorial
Another goodie that I finally added was a good and detailed ANSI tutorial by the artist Zerovision of the young ANSI art group called "Blocktronics". It uses the example of a picture that shows the movie character "Chucky" and how he re-created the picture in ANSI. It explains shading techniques and more in detail, why ZV decided to do this versus something else, etc. Very useful for beginners.

Group Update
It is funny, but I joined as of today a new computer group. Something that I didn't do for the past 10 years or so. I thought I am too old for this stuff, but then, it is a revival of an very old group by a bunch of very old guys like me (in terms of Scene life). The group is called "Canadan Pirates Inc." or CPI. A group with roots in Canada (duh) and some cracker scene history. The revived group does not do any cracking and warez anymore though. It will focus on Music, Intros, Demos and also scene history preservation, something that I already do for a few years now.



I chatted today on Facebook with Rod aka MadMax, co-founder of CPI and he asked me, if I would join. I was in touch with Rod for a while already and also had multiple lengthy phone calls about verious things, mostly whining about the lost past hehe. I said yes, so here I am... new member of CPI. :)

Well, that's some news.... I hope you will like the new content. I am out of here now.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC (and CPI)

Software Piracy, Abandonware and Today's Messed up Copyright Laws

I was browsing in the Defacto2.net document archive of the PC scene and found a reference to an interesting article written by Stephen Granade titled "Warez, Abandonware, and the Software Industry".

The article discusses in detail the subjects software piracy, copyright with a few on it from a perspective of a new type of software piracy called "Abandonware".

Abandonware provides access to games that are old, out of print and not supported anymore by the software company who created it or owns the copyright. It provides multiple functions; one of which is to provide support for rightful owners of the software to get a replacement, if their copy was damaged or the disk where it was stored on is not readable anymore. It also provides people access to historic games that cannot be acquired legally anymore, since they are not being sold anymore. The third function is to provide current game designers with an archive to study how other game designers in the past worked and how they did things that worked or not.

Abandonwares sites often provide also the means to play the old games, especially if they are for hardware platforms that are also unavailable today, such as Apple II, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Super NES and other old Nintendo consoles, Sega consoles, old Sony Playstations, Atari game consoles and home computers. This means are emulator programs for modern computers (mostly Windows PC) that emulate the old hardware platform and load old game code to run on your computer. Even old PC games for MS DOS that don't run on modern Windows PC anymore require an emulator to make them work.

The problem is that this activity is illegal.

Copyright is valid for 75 years. No computer game has reached this age yet, because computers are not even around that long. 75 years are an eternity in the computer market where virtually nothing survives more than 5 years before it becomes obsolete and unavailable to purchase.

Old stuff is not profitable enough for companies to care about, but when it comes to copyright, some of them actually do care, even though they do not provide anybody the option to obtain the usage rights legally. There is no official body for the preservation of old software. There are some non-profit organizations that concern themselves with the preservation of old computer hardware.

If it wouldn't be for enthusiasts and Abandonware sites, many of the software from the past would already be lost forever and forgotten by most people. Maybe the name mentioned in a magazine and some eyewitnesses who actually played the game in the past would be the only thing that remains. This reminds me of my previous post, which is also about copyright, but specifically about an issue with music and the impossibility of an individual to get the required licenses necessary for a legal re-distribution on a small scale.

The copyright laws need to change IMO.

They are fuzzy when it comes to software anyway. Stephen explained that nicely in his article, quote:

"Intellectual property rights are more nebulous than traditional property rights. If I own something, it's easy to see the harm if my rights regarding it are infringed: I have lost something tangible. Intellectual property rights deal with intangibles, and as with all intangibles it's harder to see the direct harm. If I copy a game you wrote, you still have the code and can sell your game. What exactly have you lost?"

Who is enforcing the copyright anyway?

The two major industry groups are the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Both organizations take software piracy seriously. And they will continue to enforce the current copyright laws as long as its members want them too.

Another good article for further reading about this issue is "New Front in the Copyright Wars: Out-of-Print Computer Games" by Greg Costikyan from May 18, 2000, published at the New York Times Technology Circuit.

Stephens article also talks about Warez and what the difference is between Warez and Abandonwares. When it comes to Warez, I feel that I am also a bit qualified to say something about it. Stephen brought some examples up that were provided by the SIIA and BSA about the damage that software piracy Is causing for the software industry.

Here are some quotes:

Each year for the past six years, the SIIA and BSA have compiled statistics on business software piracy. Their figures show that world-wide piracy has declined over the past six years, from a rate of 49% in 1994 to 36% in 1999. Despite this drop in the piracy rate, the calculated cost of this piracy has remained nearly the same, from $12.3 million in 1994 to $12.2 million in 1999.

How are these figures determined? According to Peter Beruk, the Vice-President of Anti-Piracy for SPA Anti-Piracy, a division of SIIA, the figures are compiled by International Planning and Research (IPR), a Washington, D.C. firm. IPR calculated how many computers were being sold into a country for business purposes and how much software was being sold. IPR then compiled statistics of what software was being used in office settings. From this they could calculate how much software should be sold to match the number of business computers in the country. The deficit between the ideal sales rate and the actual one is the piracy rate. By multiplying that number by the street price of the software in question, they arrive at the figure for lost revenues. This is done on a country-by-country basis.

Peter rejects the argument that, even if you eliminated piracy, software sales would not increase, at least in the business realm. "We believe that actually all of that number [of pirated copies] would have turned into [legally-bought] copies. Why would a copy be made and sitting on a computer if there was no intention to use it?"

This calculation is BS and of course in favor of the software companies. Software licenses are in most cases outlasting the life of a computer. Many software companies also offer free upgrades to existing customers. There is no statistic for the average life time of software and hardware, but I can backup my claim with my own real life experience. Not just computers and software that I purchased, but also friends, families and companies I worked for or provided computer support.

Needless to say are claims that are made in court, if somebody is persecuted for warez distribution, also often totally absurd. Figures like number of downloads or copies made of the software are sometimes used as if everybody who gets a copy for free would (or could) actually buy the software, if no access to the pirated copy would have been available.

Most wouldn't buy the software if it would not be free, many also cannot afford to buy it. Stephen suggests that maybe 1 of 20 would have maybe bought it, but this figure is only an educated guess. I know that this figure is definitely lower when it comes to individual within the wares scene itself who are often not even interested in most of the software they swap around.

The free copies that are spread around also do not harm software companies in every case. The lost sales due to illegal copies are sometimes offset and exceeded by sales that were made thanks to the existence and wide spread of the illegal copy of it. I would like to know how many sales of let's say Adobe Photoshop are a direct cause of somebody using privately a pirated version of the software. Designers who come fresh from college are often experts in the use of the software and I don’t think that the majority of them owned a legal license for it when they were broke students who had no money to spend, but plenty of time to learn to use complicated software such as Photoshop.

When those designers start working professionally, guess what software they demand and get? The same software that they used illegally, but now licenses are purchased by the company because it is used commercially and the cost of it are justifiable, due to the revenue made because of its use.

With games does it work a bit different, but even there does the illegal copy sometimes help to increase sales. I don’t know who owned a legal copy of the original DOOM game by the shareware software firm ID Software, but I know that they made a lot of money with the franchise over the years. Doom 3 sold millions of copies and even a movie was created based on the game series. I wonder if those profits would have been made, if no illegal copies of the game would have been spread all over the world via bulletin board systems and copies made for friends in school. They would probably work today on Commander Keen Episode 54 with a three person team.

But here is the catch that comes with my equation. It does only work for good software titles and not with rip off and low quality junk. Unfortunately, the majority of software does qualify as junk. Did things changed dramatically in the last 10 years and I am wrong with this statement? I can only talk about my own past experience from a time when I saw every software title release that was released on a daily basis.

The laws are so wrong and it is about time for a change.

The recent announcement of a planned lawsuit of the Village People and Price against the Torrent search engine Piratebay.org, Operation Buccaneer and other operations like that by the BSA and SIIA, the suit of Metallica against Napster or the thousands of RIAA Lawsuits against consumers will not make it better for anybody. The issues will not go away and the anger of the consumers will only increase. Companies who make normal people to criminals will find a special place in the heart of their actual customers.

Legislation that allows this to happen is also not free of guilt, but we are only talking about the liberties of the majority of people here. They have of course to take a back seat in the face of interests of a few profit hungry individuals who own software companies and record labels. Democracy would be too nice, if it would actually be practiced, but it's only a word anyway, right?

I have only one thing to add to this and that would be this nice video here.


Backup link to video at YouTube.

What are your thoughts about this issue?
Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

What is ANSI Animation or ANSImation?

People often confuse ASCII animation or ASCIImation with ANSI Animation or ANSImation and believe them to be the same. This is actually wrong.

ASCIImations are created by using programming (code) to move text characters around in a way that makes it apear like an animation or movement. Even text-mode demos that show text characters with ANSI color coding are not really ANSI animations, because they also use programming to make the characters move to get the desired movie or animation visual effects.

Back to ASCII Art Academy

True ANSI animations are not coded, don't use any programming language to create the effect of motion and only make use of some more specific and special escape sequences provided by the ANSI.sys driver of MS DOS. ANSI animations are not executables like text-mode demos, but plain and simple .ANS text files.

Smart Cursor Control
ANSI animation takes advantage of the build-in ESC sequences of the ANSI format to re-position the cursor on the screen to rewrite individual areas in a video-like sequence. ANSI.sys, the MS DOS driver that enabled the support for ANSI codes, also supported a number of other features that were helpful for the creation of ANSI animations.

Set cursor-position; move up/down/forward/backward for a set number of characters, save current cursor position, restore cursor position and erase line are the most important of those features. For a full description of the ANSI escape sequences supported by ANSI.sys, check out this text file.

Only few editors that supported ANSI animation are available. One of those editors is TheDraw, which is also my ANSI editor of choice for most ASCII and ANSI art pieces that I created. I use it since 1993 and still use it today once in a while. You can download the editor on my website and play around with its ANSI animation features, if you’d like to.

The "Speed Issue"
ANSI animations have one significant issue. The artist has no means to control the speed at which the animation is "played back". ANSI does not support fix time delays that are linked to the internal clock of the computer to wait for a set number of milliseconds, something most third generation programming languages support. The playback speed is entirely determined by how fast the system can read and display the ANSI escape sequences of the ANSI file. The speed if you load an ANSI from your hard disk by using the "type" command for example (with ANSI.sys driver loaded), is virtually instant. Even large ANSI files will be displayed within a fraction of a second.

In order to make the ANSI animation look like an animation is it necessary to throttle down the speed with which the ANSI codes and ASCII characters are loaded and then displayed on the screen.

The natural way to throttle down the loading speed of an ANSI at that time was the transfer speed of the modems of that era. The top speed of modems around the early 1990s was 9.6KBit to 14.4KBit. An 100KB ANSI animation would take a few seconds to download and just cause the necessary delays to bring the animation to life.

To show the effects of the longer loading time on an ANSI, caused by the slower download speed of a modem from that era, see this video. It shows a long ANSI downloaded with a simulated speed of a 14.4KB modem. It's not an animation and only a very long static ANSI, but it is perfect for the illustration of how ANSI animations were only made possible, because of the existance of the combination of available and needed ANSI.sys escape sequences for cursor movement and control plus the slow download speed of modems at that time to cause the necessary delays by which ANSI animations are being loaded and displayed.



The biggest takeaway from this simple fact is that creators of ANSI animations did not only have to consider which characters to re-write, overwrite and delete etc., but also for which download speed the animation will be optimized. If the animation was optimized for a download speed of 2,400 baud and downloaded with a 14.4KB modem, the animation would play much too fast. If the animation was optimized for 14.4KB and downloaded with a 2,400 Baud modem, the animation would appear like in slow motion.

ANSI Animation Artists Tracer/ACiD and Jed/ACiD
One artist who kind of specialized in this special area of ANSI art were the famous ACiD artists Tracer and Jed. They created a number of ANSI animations and were in my opinion the best ANSI animation artists who ever existed. They worked on some pieces together.

Tracer optimized most of his ANSI animations to be downloaded and watched by a user with a 14.4KB modem or at least 9.6KB for optimum playback speed.

Here is the video recording of one ANSI animation that was created for the BBS "The Bog" by Tracer/ACiD and Jed/ACiD in 1992.



Other ACiD artists who created ANSI animation were Tank, Fusion, Cerberus and Blade Runner. They created also some remarkable pieces of ANSI animation (they called it ANSI Movies back in the old days), but fell a bit short of the quality and ingenuity of the works by their group mates Tracer and Jed (IMHO).

Although ANSI was capable of some sounds, which caused the development of a small specialized scene, which created ANSI music, am I unaware of the existence of ANSI animations that also use ANSI music for sound effects and/or background music. I am also not aware of any editor that supported both of those features to help artists with the creation of such ANSI animations.

I dug up a number of old ANSI animation pieces (over a dozen of them) and currently work on converting them to video. Watch out for the ANSI Movies/ANSI Animation gallery here at RoySAC.com.

Update! Here are 21 ANSI Animations from various ACiD Production members. I did not embed the YouTube video for all of the 21 videos, because that would screw up some browsers. I added small thumbnail images with a direct link to the video at YouTube for each of the ANSI animations instead. Enjoy the show!

Tracer/ACiD ACiD Productions	Tracer/ACiD The Elders Craft World	Tracer/ACiD SDA
Tracer/ACiD Body Count	Jed and Tracer/ACiD The Bog	Tank/ACiD Agents of Fortune
Tank/ACiD Inn of the Last Home	Sonic/ACiD Why does iCE has so many members?	Sonic/ACiD Spyrits Crypt
Jed/ACiD Surburbia	Jed/ACiD So-Krates BBS	Jed/ACiD Midnite Oil 3
Jed/ACiD Beyond the Realm of Reality	Jed/ACiD Barter Town	Jed and Spectral Illusion/ACiD Nuclear Wastelandz
Jed and RaD Man/ACiD Street Spydrs	Fusion/ACiD Badlands	Cerberus/ACiD Evil Palace
Blade Runner/ACiD The Cartel	Blade Runner/ACiD Korova Milkbar	Jed/ACiD ANSI Toons 2

And here is another fun bonus. I provided one of the ANSI animations with a voiceover including foley FX and all that hehe. I hope you like it.



Backup link to video at YouTube.com.


Back to ASCII Art Academy

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

SAC Updates and Site Content Additions

This post is already over one week overdue, but I just didn’t find the time for it until now. I have several news that I like to share.

SACtros Complete
When I was writing about the SACtros video section here on my site, did I mention that I was not able to get one SACtro to work and asked for help. Well, I got help and thanks have to go to Ben Garret from Defacto2.net (the PC warez scene archive). He created a video capture of the missing intro for me and I was able to produce the final video with music and all and put it up on the site.

I also found a few more SAC VGA logos, which I put up on the designated gallery for them. The logos I included were created by Kenet, Dream Design and Hetero.

Complete All-Time SAC Member List
I got 2 weeks ago in contact with an active SAC member with the name Dipswitch who is a musician and ANSI artist who joined SAC around April 2002. I got in touch with him via Facebook.com and hope that he will be able to help me with my complete SAC member list. I already spent a bunch of time on collecting data and information. The member list is suppose to contain everybody who used to be a member of SAC during its 14+ years history with information about what they did, where they were from and optional contact information etc. From what I collected so far, were 115-120 people members of the group over time. Not bad, eh?

Dipswitch is also pretty busy at the moment, but I hope to get something going by early next year. If you are a current or former SAC member who wants to help with that list, contact me. I created a spreadsheet at Google Docs and Spreadsheets where I can enable access to other Google accounts for collaborate editing.

ASCII Art Academy Additions
I also extended the ASCII Art Academy by two more articles.

The first article is called "ASCII Art Frequently Asked Questions v3.0.3.19" and is a very comprehensive guide to ASCII art on Usenet. It is limited to 7-bit ASCII art for that reason.

The second article is called "The File_ID.diz File Frequently Asked Questions" v1.9 by Richard Holler. It explains in great detail the origin and usage of the file_id.diz file in file archives for bulletin board systems. I chuckled a bit when I read that only 7 bit ASCII characters are allowed for the file_id.diz, because the PC warez scene ignored this and started using block/high ASCII characters in their file_id.diz files as early as 1993.

I am still looking for tutorials for Block/High ASCII art and ANSI art. If you know about or have any good tutorials about this somewhere, please let me know.

For my German Friends
I also added two more pages to the site, but they are quite hidden and not easy to find. Somebody at deviantART.com brought up the subject and I knew that I have it flying around as text files somewhere. So I decided to put them up.



What am I talking about? The infamous "Szenebeobachter" disk mags for the German warez scene from 1997. They are written in German language, but you have to be somebody from Germany who was active at that time anyway to get the humor. The SB was not taking things too serious. I put up issue 1 and issue 2 on the site. I am not sure if they ever released more than those two.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Vaginal Massacre and Dream Design

I know, the title is stupid, but the first part is the name of a dentro and the second part is the name of a guy who called himself that. I am sure that the name for the dentro was chosen to get the attention of people. I guess it worked, because this Amiga Dentro won the demo competition at Scoopex's CeBit'1993 demoparty held in Hannover/Germany in... right, 1993.

I am sure that many of you also just checked this post only out because of the title of it. The funny thing is that it does not use any offending slang words at all. Did you notice that? "Vaginal" is a perfectly fine term used in human biology and "Massacre" is also not slang. It's not a nice word, but so is "murder" or "war".

Just FYI for the non-geeks who are not familar with the demoscene. A dentro is the short version for "disk intro" and is basically something in between a full "demo" and a basic "intro" in computer scene terms. A dentro is more than just an intro, but less than a full blown demo. What a "demo" and "intro" is, you have to find out for yourself :)

Here is the video of the dentro "Vaginal Massacre".


Alternatives: Link to the video at YouTube.com and Link to the video at Facebook.com this one has a better quality and higher resolution, but requires a Facebook account to view it. You don't have to be a friend of mine via FB to see it.

Now that wasn't too bad, right?

Okay, here are some backgrounds to this dentro.

The prize for the winner of the demo competition was a brand new Commodore Amiga 600 that just came out that year. The winning of the dentro was a surprise, considering the fact that the "Elite" boys from Masque/TRSi showed up and presented their "Misery Dentro Part II" (links to the video at YouTube), which boasted a lot more effects than this dentro. I guess the marketing plot worked for this dentro, because it beat the technically superior dentro to the punch.

U.D.O. is an abbreviation for "Unsere Doofen Ossis" (roughly translated "Our Stupid East Germans"). It's a fake group that did not exist. The people who did this were actually the members of the East German Amiga group called Remedy. How do I know this? I happen to know the guys personally :).

This was actually the place and time when and where I met one of the (then) future SAC (Superior Art Creations) founding members, the pixel graphics artist Dream Design. He did most of the graphics for the dentro, specifically the most memorable splash page, which is shown below.



He also pixeled this picture using less than 32 colors. Its around 16 colors only. Amazing, isn't it?

Anyhow, I did not know him, but saw him having this image loaded, staring at it and checking stuff with the lens feature of Deluxe Paint.

I said to him: "nice photograph". He turned around with a red face, looked at me and yelled: "I was drawing this and I worked over 3 full days on it!!!".

Ooops.. Well, somebody else might have taken my comment as a compliment hehe. The picture uses only 32 colors, remarkable.

I was looking for a video version of this dentro for a while and could not find it anywhere, maybe because of its name, who knows.

I have to thank "pgtyunbderf", a user at YouTube.com, for capturing the dentro for me. I only had to edit it and also replaced the sound with the original MOD music for better quality.

I thought that this is an interesting story and an interesting video (and picture) as well. Enjoy!

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

SACtros - The Intros for SAC Art Packs

It took me a while, but finally are (almost) all SACtros available in video format on the site.

What are SACtros?
SACtros are the intros that were created specifically for SAC art pack releases only. In contradiction to cracktros or BBStros were SACtros only used for one release, the individual SAC pack it was created for.

Features and Interface
You can watch the videos directly on my website via embedded Flash video player. I also provided a link to the video at YouTube, just in case the player on the site is not working for somebody for unknown reasons. You are also able to download the video for each SACtro in .AVI format to your hard disk.

Goodies for Old School Geeks
For the old school folks are links to the original MS DOS executable and to the original MOD file (sound tracker music) available.

The Bad News
That were the good news, now to the bad ones. There is no video for SACtro #2. The reason for this is not that I forgot or neglected it, but the fact that I was unable to get it to work on a modern Windows PC to capture the video.



I used DOSBOX x86 Emu for old PC emulation and unpacked and unprotected the DOS executable. I also found out that there was a bug in Borland Pascal that causes programs written in old BP (this intro was, BP and in-line Assembler) to crash on modern day CPUs. I fixed the executable so that this bug is not a problem anymore, but it still does not work.

Asking for Help
If you are a geek and know some more options or alternatives for getting this intro to run in a DOS Window for video capturing, let me know.

If you can produce a video capture and send it to me, even better. Here is the executable (zipped) in the current stage (unpacked/unprotected/BP fix applied). Just in case, here is the original one, which used to work fine on old machines (just in case I messed something up during my fixing attempts).

Don't worry about the sound. I would mix that in afterwards manually anyway, just for sound quality reasons. Also if the intro runs very very slow, no problem. I had that with several of the other videos too. I did a lot of editing to get them to look like on good old MS DOS machines.

Thanks in advance and enjoy the other SACtros that I were able to record and edit at my website. I also hope that you like the interactive AJAX interface for the SACtro selection.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

It Was Time Again For A Clean-Up

As the title of this post already said, it was time again for a clean-up of my site RoySAC.com. Its content was growing significantely over the past months, which resulted in a very user unfriendly navigation and gave folks a hard time to find stuff on the site.



Homepage
The first thing you will notice is a much more cleaner, shorter and straight forward homepage of RoySAC.com. Old content from the homepage was moved to existing pages (SAC homepage, About Me page), to its own page (Closed Society BBS) or simply deleted.

ASCII Art Academy
The ASCII art primer and the three styles of the underground text art scene articles can not be found in the top navigation anymore. I created a whole new section call the ASCII Art Academy. The academy refers to those two articles and to a lot more stuff, including the existing ASCII art tutorials by Solid and DiamonDie plus five new ASCII art tutorials and the History of ASCII Art article by Joan G. Stark.

The new ASCII Art Academy can also be reached via the simple URL RoySAC.com/learn/.

Art Galleries
I had already four art galleries for my own stuff. Three more were added when my site took over as Superior Art Creations homepage. Then I added two more with ASCII and ANSI art from other artists and don't forget the special ASCII Nudes gallery and the ASCII morph pieces by Skylined.

Stuff was all over the place.

The galleries got a new "splash page" called... right, Art Galleries, which provides easy access to all the galleries and art pieces mentioned above.

Contact Page
In the case that you did not notice, I also have a contact form available now where you can send me a message without the need to dig for my email address and using your email client.

Site Navigation
The top navigation and additional text navigation in the footer of the site reflect the new structure of my site. I hope it makes things less confusing and make people actually find all the nice stuff, which I made available on my website.

Unchanged
The SAC section grew in size a little, the same is true for my About Me page, but the rest remained pretty much the same as it was before. Also the online shop, downloads page and links section did not require to be changed.

Feedback Wanted
Let me know what you think. I am open for any comments, suggestions, praise, complaints and other feedback about the new site structure and navigation. Contact me directly or leave a comment here at my blog. Thanks, I appreciate that.

Enjoy the site! Cheers!
Carsten aja Roy/SAC

Welcome to the ASCII Art Videos

I added a new page to my site, which is dedicated to show videos that are about or related to text art and the subject that surrounds it, including the BBS scene, the demoscene and of course SAC, Superior Art Creations.

Visit the new ASCII Art Videos Section at RoySAC.com/videos/.

The section launched with 10 videos.

The first one is "The Art of Textmode" - Text Art History, a presentation at the Assembly 2004 Demo party in Helsinki, Finland by Christian Wirth aka RaD Man. I referred to that video earlier already in a blog post of mine from February and decided to put it somewhere on the site where it can be found more easily.

The second one is a short video by Creature of Hell/SAC - The Movie from 2001, showing off some of his pixel art skills.

The main part of the section is made up by the six videos, which represent the complete content of Jason Scott's 3 DVD long documentary titled "BBS - The Documentary". No, it's not an illegal copy of the DVD's. Jason put them up himself on Google Video, because he released the documentary under the creative commons licensing model to make its content easier accessible. Jason does of course appreciate support for his cause(s), which are surrounding the subject of BBS and actually were the triggers for him to create the documentary in the first place. You can support him via buying the real DVDs, pressed, not burned, with nice wrapping and paper box for example. You can get it via his website here or from Amazon.com, if you prefer them for any reasons.



Then I also put up two good examples of ASCIImation, which means animated ASCII or ASCII animation. The examples show two songs by more or less famous musicians who used ASCIImation for their music videos.

More videos will be added over time, especially videos of the old SACtros and cracktros the group did for others and which can not be started and watched on modern PCs without emulation of the old MS DOS operating system.

Btw. I extended the SAC section of RoySAC.com a little bit as well. I added more content and also found two music-disks that were released by SAC members when I was not part of the group anymore. I found them by accident and put them up on my site of course. :)

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Major Site Expansion and New SAC Section with Art Packs Page

I spent quite some time to update content at my RoySAC.com Website. I wrote a whole ASCII art primer article to give you an idea what I am talking about in general. It is for people who do know little or nothing about ASCII/ANSI art, the artscene and the warez scene it operated in.

The biggest addition is the new SAC section, which is dedicated solely to everything related to Superior Art Creations, the art group, which I founded in 1994.

You can find there SAC VGA logos created by SAC members for the group, as well as ANSI logos and ASCII logos, which were created for internal purposes of the group.

The largest addition overall was the new SAC art packs releases page. It shows all 34 SAC art packs, which were released betweeen December 1994 and December 2005, the packs File_ID.diz, download links to the pack files, links to the SAC.NFO files for detailed information about each pack and a brief description for every release.

The descriptions are more detailed than I had originally planned. Because of that, does the page act as SAC history page for now, until a better SAC history page is being created one day. There are some "holes" in it, but I hope to get the missing information and will then update the page accordingly.

I updated pretty much every page of the site, including the home page, the Roy/SAC art page, the shop, the downloads section, the links page and the gallery pages (ASCII Art, ANSI Art, Best Of and VGA Art). The Website navigation was overhauled and has now a much slicker look than before. Here is a partial screen shot of how the navigation of the site looks today.



I hope you will enjoy the "renovated" and massive expanded RoySAC.com site. Let me know what you think about it, negative feedback is as welcome as possitive.

Thank you and Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Text Art Google Group

I created today a Google Group titled "ASCII and ANSI Text Art", but it is open to anything and anybody who and which is related to Text Art.

For that reason is the short name and URL to the group "textart" instead of "asciiart" or "ansiart".

ASCII and ANSI text art Visit this group

Subscribe to ASCII and ANSI text art Email: Visit this group

Those templates were provided by Google hehe.

I created already a little resources page and also started a discussion about something that has always been a controversy. I will not tell you what that is, go check out the group and find out for yourself.

A number of XML feeds are also available for anybody who can not live without.

	Atom 1.0 15 New messages 50 New messages 15 New topics 50 New topics		RSS 2.0 15 New messages 50 New messages 15 New topics 50 New topics

Lets see how it goes. Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

PCBoard BBS Software

Something else was even longer on my to-do list than the post about leveraging sites like deviantART for online marketing.

It has been on my list for over one year now and I also got finally around to do it. What am I talking about? The article to the PCBoard BBS Software at Wikipedia.

I extended the article significantly and also added a photo of the box of the software, which I took myself with my digital camera. You can see the picture here in the post as well. For the folks who don't know, I used to run a BBS myself called "Closed Society". I wrote about it on the homepage of my RoySAC.com website.

I used as BBS Software PCBoard. First via multiple PC's under MS DOS and then all Notes on one machine running under IBM OS/2 Warp. The BBS was up 24/7 for over 2 years in my one bedroom studio. Did the noise of the running computers bother me when I was asleep? Actually quite the opposite.
I had a problem sleeping when the BBS was shut down and offline.

PCBoard was a great software and the best thing about it was the availability of its own script language to change the look, feel and behavior of the BBS. I wrote and published a bunch of tools myself. You can download all of them here.

I launched the BBS shorty after SAC was founded. The existence of the BBS did cause me to create more ANSI art than I would probably have done without it. So it was kind of a good thing to have a BBS of your own and do ANSI text art. It also did not make me depend on the time and talents of other artists hehe.



Clark Development, who created the software did unfortunately go bankrupt in 1997, the year when I shut down my BBS. They saw the reign of the BBS coming before most sysops at the time (including me) and started development on a product called PCBoard Metaworks, which was the attempt of the creation of a BBS like environment on the internet. The product was not finished to save the company. It died together with the company and never saw the light of day.

That's fate I guess, but no whining will change anything and we have to move on.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Search for ANSI and ASCII Artists and Bloggers

Except for some activities at deviantART was I not successful after over one year of searching to find much (if any) other blogs that are related to the old ANSI and ASCII underground artscene.

Fellow artists who created ASCII art for group NFO files, File_ID.diz or ANSI art for BBS Layouts and Login pictures and logos back in the early to mid 1990's.

It's sad and frustrating. The lack of community makes me spin off with my blog into other subjects, such as deviantART, Wikipedia and Cirque Du Soleil (or Internet Marketing and in a few cases about video games). I also was writing about internet video and music. Nice stuff, but not text art related.

I recenty created a new "Demoscene and Text Art Community" over at BUMPzee!

BUMPzee! is a blogger community / feed reader / networking site with some Digg features. I added another blog to the community, which I found at Blogspot, but that blog does not see much activity anymore either.



Where are you guys (and few girls) of the text art scene, demo scene and BBS warez scene? Nobody blogging? Nobody writing about things that were forgotten by most people and never learned by todays youth? Come on over and contact me and join the community.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

How Did I Become a Wikipedian?

I would like to share my experiences of becoming a Wikipedia editor and contributor, which is also referred to as "Wikipedian". Let it entertain you and also teach you some lessons at the same time. I hope it will encourage you to start contributing to Wikipedia as well and also be a warning about possible pitfalls you should try to avoid.

1st Edit
My first Article at Wikipedia, which I edited via my Wikipedia account (and not anonymously. Which I never did, at least not on purpose :)) was the article for "Superior Art Creations" on 12/31/2005.

Realizing What Wikipedia Is
The article was already there, which amazed me (the sheer fact that it existed in Wikipedia). It also made me realize what Wikipedia is and what makes it so great compared to oldschool Encyclopedias like the Encyclopedia Britannica or the German Brockhaus. Wikipedia was not limited in size, like the printed encyclopedias and also not by the finite limit of knowledge and resources the creators and editors of classic encyclopedias have. SAC did not impact the course of world history, but it played a role for thousands of people around the globe at a specific time of the history of Bulletin Board Systems, the Warez Scene and Text Art (ASCII art in particular).

I found the article by accident. I decided to write down and make public my activities and experiences, primarily between 1992-1998, in the world of BBS, warez, demoscene, scene art, ASCII art, ANSI art, cracking and cracktros etc. I realized that knowledge about this history was fading and will continue so, if people who were eyewitnesses of it, not start to record it and archive, before they will forget about it themselves or die. The events back then did play a role in events that followed, including major events like the parallel development and growth of the Internet as we know it today, namely the World Wide Web and the introduction of the first commercial web browser called "Mosaic" in 1993 who was developed by people who later in 1994 founded the company with the name "Netscape", and made Mosaic to become better known as the Netscape Navigator web browser.

I wrote some stuff down. A large percentage was about Superior Art Creations, which I founded together with Hetero in December 1994. I made all releases ever made by SAC available online to the public. I remembered about some material and events which I did not have or in some cases did not have anymore. I was trying to find material online, in the hope that somebody else was more forward thinking than I was and kept those documents and maybe even made them public.

Before my first "real" edit, did I only make two edits in Wikipedia with my user account. Both were edits of the Wikipedia:Sandbox where I tested how to create links, external links that is.

My Start as a "Spammer"
My first "contribution" to Wikipedia was a link to my new pages I created about me, SAC and the Scene back then. If it would have been a highly trafficked article and commercial in nature, my contribution would have been most likely being deleted because of WP:EL (External Links). The content was going beyond the material provided by the article in Wikipedia and was a valid contribution. Fortunately was the edit not reverted, which would probably have caused me to abandon Wikipedia and not continue to contribute to it and have by April 2007 over 2,000 edits of over 300 unique pages, with over 800 of them in the Wikipedia Mainspace.

I continued to edit the article the same day. I first corrected the categories the article was in and added references (internal Wiki links) to relevant related subjects. THEN I started editing the main content of the article and updated and extended it. Since I was the founder of the group, did the edits all fall under the category WP:COI (Conflict of Interest). If you want to check the article to make sure that it follows WP:NPOV (Neutral Point of View), feel free to do so.

Case Study Idea
I continued with adding references to SAC to the "Computer art scene" and "ASCII art" articles. I was a "bad" editor who provided only little value to Wikipedia, but to my defense must I say that most people dont start big. I would even bet that most editors got their start at Wikipedia by doing an COI edit. COI articles tend to have the power to motivate that person strong enough to take the big step and actually EDIT a live article at Wikipedia. The rest are probably only people that are picky when it comes to correct grammar and punctuation. :) Changing the spelling of a word or add/remove a comma etc. requires a lot less courage and motivation than adding actual content to the article, be it a link or a sentence.

It would be interesting to make a case study and look at the very first contributions of a subset of Wikipedia editors at all levels, veterans, newbies and administrators and active, little active and occasional active editors. This case study does not exist so my statements are at this point nothing more than speculation and the believe that my experiences and motivations to create an editor account at Wikipedia and start editing stuff, are not that unique and rather typical.

Getting into Trouble
Two month after my first edits of Wikipedia did I have my first "run into the locals". I edited an article that was getting a lot of attention and also a lot of spam. I did not know that back then. I was still a rookie and did not know about any rules and guidelines and organization of Wikipedia. I just finished a very detailed article about Blogs, Blogging, XML, ATOM and RSS. I wrote that thing, because I tried to explain to a non-Geek already two times without success what blogs are, what they are for and how they are different from simple News pages that are being created by a news module of a content management system. I also tried to make that person understand what so cool is about content syndication via RSS. I spent a lot of time on that thing and was actually pretty proud of myself and the result.

I thought that the version of the article about "Blogs" at Wikipedia failed to explain what a Blog really is. I still think that it lacks that ability, but I have too much on my table already to even start messing with that article. Anyhow, I decided to add a link to my article, which was originally posted as a blog post at another site of mine, to the "Blog" article at Wikipedia. All hell broke loose after I did it. See the discussion at the articles talk page and also at the talk page of one of the editors called "Monkeyman" who is part of the Wikipedia: Spam project that fights the countless more or less successful attempts to spam Wikipedia.

Reflection
Looking back, I admit that I was wrong. I learned a lot from it though, because it was the first time that I had interaction with other Wikipedians. Others that cared about Wikipedia. I'd like to highlight the statements of one particular editor with the name Rhobite. I will have another contention with him in a dispute about the content of another article.

He is a perfect example of a very fair, honest and caring Wikipedian, which you should take as an example to follow. It might sounds funny after all the "nice" conversations we had. What shows his character the best are the facts that he edited and improved content, which I added to an article with a subject, which he is certainly not a big fan of and a great example of WP:WFTE (Writing for the enemy) and also his ability to change his opinion about something after some changes to the environment surrounding the subject.

He did teach me back in February 2006 a valuable lesson, which I would to share, because it is a very good explanation of some aspects of what Wikipedia is and what it is not (WP:NOT)

"Nobody is forcing you to contribute to Wikipedia or support the cause of free content, but please dont expect to write external content and add it to Wikipedia as a link. Wikipedia has almost a million articles, which shows that many people do not mind contributing to free content projects. Your criticisms are similar to the ways that Microsoft and other commercial software vendors criticized open source software.. they said that no good developer would ever work for free. But the success of projects like Firefox and Apache -- and Wikipedia -- shows that the open source model has merit. I hope youll consider sticking around and improving Wikipedia."

I did ask him to do an Editor Review on me. I hope he will do me that favor.

Other Influential People
The second person that had strong influence on me regarding Wikipedia was the editor and Wikipedia admin that created the Superior Art Creations article. His name is Christian Wirth aka RaD Man who was the founder of the big and popular artscene group called ANSI Creators in Demand (ACiD).

He noticed my edits of the Superior Art Creations article and found my contact information via references from my Wikipedia user pages. I wrote about this already in February 2006 in this blog post.

He did teach me a lot about how Wikipedia works and also gave me tips to specific issues I encountered. Our paths never crossed at Wikipedia itself as far as I know, except for the fact that we edited both the SAC article. I showed him discussions I was involved in, but never entered them to support me. I guess he is a good admin, because he did not help me by joining discussions, but by showing me guides and mechanisms available at Wikipedia. He knows that joining a discussion only because I am involved would be full of bias and personal conflicts. He could not be fair and neutral, if one of his "buddies" is part of a group that represents one side of the argument.

I edited to-date a large number of articles, which are with a few exceptions all either related to internet marketing or to text art and my scene days as Roy/SAC. I also created 9 new articles already and plan to create more in the future.

Conclusion and Encouragement
I hope that my story will encourage you to consider to contribute to Wikipedia yourself. I strongly recommend to get started by working on articles to a subject that are not commercial. Dont start editing articles about your business or company. That can go awfully wrong. Start with something you like and do as a hobby. Always remember the little tab labeled "edit" at the top of each article at Wikipedia, the encyclopedia anybody can edit.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

History of Text Art Video by RaD Man / ACiD

I "messed around" with the Wikipedia article to ASCII art today. Okay, I did not mess with it, but rather cleaned it up and extended it a bit.

This was triggered by a video of a friend of mine who is a well known figure in the underground text art scene with the name Christian Wirth.

Back to ASCII Art Academy

Okay, he is not known by that name, but by his scene "Handle" which is RaD Man. RaD Man was a senior member of the art group Aces of ANSI art in 1989, which is the first known underground text art group on the PC and founded a year after, in 1990, the probably best known and respected ANSI art group with the name ACiD. ACiD stands for ANSI Creators in Demand.

RaD Man was in Finland a couple years ago at the Assembly Demo party and was doing a presentation about the History of Text art.

The presentation is about 1 hour long and covers the early forms of text art starting at the ancient Rome, to Typewriter art, Radio Teletype or RTTY, Atari ATASCII art and C-64 PETSCII art to Amiga 500+ Oldskool art and PC Block or High ASCII art and Newskool. The climax is the presentation of some impressive Textmode demos that are of relative young age (2002 and later).

You can get the video, gigabytes of Text art and related material such as Tools and Editors, DiscMags and Source Code on DVD.

RaD Man published his extensive collection.

The DVD is called "Dark Domain" and you can order it directly from here.

It is only $12.99 plus $4.55 (US) - $9.55 (International) shipping. Quite a bargin considering the amount of content on it.

Here is the full video for free. I still recommend getting the DVD, because the Video is only a very small part of the DVD (which are actually 2 DVDs). To get your head around how much content it is, visit the Art Scene Text Files Archive and look for yourself how much stuff is out there.

There were some glitches during the presentation, but RaD Man is not a professional presenter. So, be a bit forgiving. Great stuff though and worth showing to other folks that are interested in this kind of stuff.

Enjoy the Video! (Backup URL to Video)

Presentation full credits and details.

The ASSEMBLY 2004 demoparty was held at Hartwall Areena in Helsinki, Finland from 5th to 8th of August 2004. The presentation was part of the ASSEMBLY '04 ARTtech seminars.

Presenter: Christian Wirth
Presentation Title: "The Art of Textmode"
Organization: ACID
Position: Founder and President
Homepage: http://www.acid.org
Dark Domain DVD: http://www.darkdomain.org (released 2004)
Email: radman@acid.org
Scene alias: Rad Man




Christian Wirth during an interview by Jason Scott (textfiles.com) for the BBS Documentary film DVD











Back to ASCII Art Academy

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Year 2006 Review and Apologies

The year 2006 is history now and I am not sure If I did more than I did not do, but wanted to. The final count is not in yet, well, I might just add it to my to-do list for 2007 and let it slip into the 2007 "things I did not do, but wanted to" list. That would solve the problem just nicely.

My appologies to:

• "Buzifer" for not doing the requested "KiDS" ASCII


• "Messiah" for not doing the requested "HiDDDEN RAGE" ASCII art


• "Ian" for not doing the requested "MisterH" ASCII


• "Volcom V" for not doing the requested "Volcom V" ANSI


• Michael for not doing the requested "BUMSEN" ASCII (for all the Germans out there, it is not what you think. They are danish and the word "Bumsen" has a different meaning there :) )

I am also sorry for having turned down the requests for ShAdY, iCU and Synthetica OrganizationSee it from the bright side boys, you did not make it on to the list of people I have to apologize to :)

I also apologize to "Idiana" who is doing a great job at kicking some lazy butts over at SAC and keep the boys going somehow. I have all SAC NFO's already added to the SAC WIKI and then the damn thing crashed on me. I just did not get around to check what the problem is. Actually I did for 1 hour or so, but was not able to figure it out. I did not want to wipe it because of the content I already created.

But hang in there. We will get the content for a new official SAC Website with detailed Group and Member history together somehow. I only feel half as bad because of the fact, that things seemed to be "slow" on your end as well. There was not much movement on the current site, design-wise and other content.

It was great that I got the RoySAC.com site up and all my artwork. That is at least something. The design of the site has a lot of room for improvements and I will do something for it when I get around to it.
I got around to create the cRO article at Wikipedia. At least something that was finished :)

Lets see how 2007 turns out. I still feel like being robbed of a few months in 2006. I still can't believe that the whole year is already over.

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Mindcandy Volume 2: Amiga Demos Finally Here!

It has been 4 years now since the release of Mindcandy Vol.I, which featured PC Demos and was a huge success.

The waiting is over and it was absolutely worth it.

Mindcandy II - Amiga Demos - is now finally finished as well. I was on their notification list for years and didn't trust my eyes at first when I got the email that it is available to order now ... at last.

The Demos were originally written for the Commodore Amiga Computer and are available for download on the Internet for free.

You can enjoy them paying absolutely nothing, if you have the hardware to run them. Most people don't, including myself and even the ones that used to have one don't have a working one anymore (that includes myself too hehe).

The Demos

1. Megademo by Red Sector Inc.


2. Mental Hangover by Scoopex


3. Enigma by Phenomena


4. Voyage by Razor 1911


5. Hardwired by Silents & Crionics


6. Human Target by Melon Dezign


7. World of Commodore by Sanity


8. State of the Art by Spaceballs


9. Desert Dream by Kefrens


10. Groovy by Lemon


11. 242 by Virtual Dreams (Fairlight)


12. 9 Fingers by Spaceballs


13. Arte by Sanity


14. Friday At Eight by Polka Brothers


15. Love by Virtual Dreams (Fairlight)


16. Nexus 7 by Andromeda


17. Deep - The Psilocybin Mix by CNCD & Parallax


18. Closer by CNCD


19. Tint by The Black Lotus


20. Sumea by Virtual Dreams (Fairlight)


21. Captured Dreams by The Black Lotus


22. Killer by CNCD


23. Relic by Nerve Axis


24. Smokebomb by Ozone


25. Klone by Dual Crew - Shining


26. Concrete by Ephidrena


27. Perfect Circle by The Black Lotus


28. Lapsuus by Maturefurk


29. Fate Fits Karma by MadWizards


30. Silkcut by The Black Lotus

The two demos I care about the most are on the disk. I was probably not the only one that was demanding to have them on the disk during the pre-selection process 3 years or so ago. The two demos are my alltime favorite: "Hardwired" by Silents & Crionics and "Desert Dream" by Kefrens.

"Hardwired" won the 3rd prize at the very first "The Party" Demoparty in Denmark in 1991. The Demo "Odyssey" by Alcatraz won 1st prize but did not make the disc (you will understand why, if you get the chance to see this 40+ minute demo ;) and "Voyage" by Razor 1911 was second. "Voyage" made it on to this disc as well.

"Desert Dream" was the last great Demo on the Amiga 500 IMO, after that did the AGA Demos on the then brand new Amiga 1200 dominate the Amiga Demo Landscape. Ironically was "Desert Dream" only released a bit before "Second Reality" from Future Crew was released for the PC and closed the huge gap in quality between AMIGA and PC Demo Scene. For a period after that were Amiga and PC Demos head by head in quality but the PC eventually surpased the Amiga Demos and eventually dominated the scene.

When Commodore closed computer production at the end of the ninetees a lot of great Amiga Demosceners switched to the PC which was more and more becoming a normal household item and continued their great creative work there.

The only minor "bummer" is the fact that "9 Fingers" by Spaceballs was selected instead of the surprise winner of "The Party 1992" - "State of the Art", also by Spaceballs. "State of the Art" was new and different. "9 Fingers" is maybe better than "State of the Art", but it was only a naturally improved version using the same concept as "State of the Art" and thus less revolutionary. I will be able to live with that though.

Update 12/26/2006: The DVD finally arrived today. The List of Demos on the Mindcandy Website is incomplete and so was the List in this blog post. The disc has 30 demos and not 29. I fixed the list above. The missing demo is "State of the Art" by "Spaceballs" :D . Yeah! Okay, that means: No Bummmer anymore as stated in the previous paragraph ... Now it is only A.W.E.S.O.M.E!

The Disc was made for the Demosceners of the early and mid nineties, but that does not mean that it is only something they will be able to enjoy. No, for them is this DVD a "must buy" (or they were no real scener anyway).

For everybody else is this a small piece of computer history. Pleasant designed with matching music running in the background. Not a boring book that gives you the tech details like "imagine this, the computer this was designed for had less than 10 Mega Hertz tact frequency and was 8 bit. Today's home PC's have 2, even 3 GIGA Hertz and are 64 bit" ... yeah, whatever that means :).

If you watch the DVD together with a old school scener and you see him suddenly overly excited about a specific part of a demo that might not get you excitement up to the next level don't worry. It only means that it was hard to do back then. Say something nice like "fascinating" and continue to watch the show.

If you are still undecided, download for free the Trailer and/or the preview disc for free to get a glimpse of the complete disc which is packed to the roof with OVER 3 HOURS of old school entertainment.

If you are from the US, then you can order the Mindcandy Volume 2: Amiga Demos DVD from Amazon.com, Germany Go64.de, UK David Poves, Canada SceneStuff and Hungary Tomcat's T-shirt Shop.

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Chemical Reaction (cRO)

It took me 5 months, but I finally managed to create the Wikipedia entry for the fellow Artscene group cHEMICAL rEACTION or simply cRO.

I talked with Dennis aka Radiators, the founder and ex-leader of the group and Amgits at the #cRO channel at EFNet about this in June. Dennis sent me some graphics and Amgits found an old cRO history in the Google cache. The current cRO Website does unfortunately not have a history page to draw information from.

I am glad that I finally managed to get this done and of my very long list of things to do and I am sure that it will be appreciated by the ex- and current cRO members as well as other old-school sceners who remember the creations of this fine art group.



The cRO entry is a good addition to the already existing artscene groups entries at Wikipedia. They are now recognized along with other famous art groups like ACiD (ANSI creators in demand) and of course SAC (Superior art creations).

If you see any errors or missing information in the article, don't hesitate and simply change the wikipedia entry yourself. If you do not feel comfortable doing so, shoot me an email and I will do it for you.

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Dream Design 16-32 Colors Pixel Art (Amiga 500)

I had over the last few days a chitchat with a fellow deviant about his deviantion which required him to do work manually without fancy tools, like it used to be in the old days when gfx on the computer was still pixeled by hand.

We talked about that and I made a comment about my Friend Dream Design who was one of the 5 first SAC Members when we founded the Group back in December 1994. We was still using his Amiga 500 for his pixel art.

He was more restricted that we were on the PC. He had to work with only 32 colors and a resolution of 320x256 (PC VGA 320x200 256 Colors).

I still have his stuff on my computer and decided to show some of his best work, remember max. 32 colors, pixeled. No Filters, so Special brushes, no digital camera, no scanners, no graphic tablet (he used the mouse).

Dream Design made the top 10 best pixel artists on the Amiga 500 at some point. There were a lot more and better artists on the Amiga than on the PC at the time, I just say J.O.E. , Peachy and Angeldawn. He teached me some lessons what I really appreciated.

DD was flat out what you call a Genius. He understood perspective, lighting and shading like nobody else I ever met.

Its funny how I met him. He almost wanted to hit me for a comment about one of his best pieces he finalized on a small Demo party. I looked at his screen with a picture of a chick with her Ass hanging out of her pants and said "nice photograph". He turned around red and said, I pixeled 3 days on that!!!! hehehe... great stuff , using 32 freaking colors only. Here it is, the one on the left. The one on the right is only 16 colors.



To the left is a gorgeous pic that won the gfx compo of a small local demo party in Berlin/Germany and to the right are a few more logos.


Take a look at the logo to the right. This is a Great TRSI Logo. Almost as beautiful as the legendary "melting metal" TRSI Logo by J.O.E.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. I might publish some more of his stuff in the future. If you don't believe that it is pixeled, download it, open your favorite gfx program, zoom in and check for yourself.

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC
Deviant at deviantART.com

My Art Galleries Launched - Over 700 pieces of Text Art

I came across a nice php script called AnsiLove last week. The Script converts original ANSI and ASCII files to an Image in real-time. The characters are rendered correctly and the DOS Ansi colors are correct as well. The Font used is true to the original MS DOS font. I was delighted.

The Script is also easy to use and I was able to add it to my Website in no time at all.

I spent in the past a lot of time making screen shots of my ANSI's and ASCII's with a Screen Capture Tool and the ANSI/ASCII Viewer ACiDView for Windows (which can be found at my download page). All my sample art on my Roy/SAC Text Artist Homepage and my "deviations" at my deviantARTArtist Page were done this way.

I have to continue using this method for my deviantART pieces for two reasons though. First because I have to upload my Art to their Servers and second am I also adding some comments with background information for each piece of Art. I believe this to be a good thing to do, because it gives the viewer a bit more insight about the times and events surrounding the creation of the Art Work.

Okay, I can't use it for my deviantART stuff, but I was able to put all my 700+ pieces of ASCII and ANSI Art on to my Website with a very small amount of effort. This is great!

When I was working on the Scripts to display my Text Art did I realize, that I can do the same for my VGA Art as well, without AnsiLove.

I finalized the new Pages today and would like you to check them out. I created several Galleries, an ASCII Gallery with all my ASCII Art, an ANSI Gallery with all my ANSI Art, a "Best Of" Gallery with all my favorite Text Art pieces (ANSI and ASCII mixed), a "Latest Text Art" Gallery where I simply copy my recent creations to, a VGA Art Gallery with my SAC VGA Work and finally my Web Graphic Gallery which shows some stuff I did for my Websites.

Here is an Example of how AnsiLove renders an ASCII. The Image is based on an ASCII File and is rendered in real-time. Great, isn't it?

Roy/SAC Blog Redesigned - Tribute to Text Art

Anybody who is an active blogger could recognize the default blogger template layout which I used for my Roy/SAC Blog when I launched it at the beginning of February.

I did some changes to it to have it at least look a bit different, but that was not enough, the basic design of the blogger template was still clearly visible.

I used this weekend to take care of that issue for good and redesigned the Blog. The Blog continues to use black as the general background. The MS DOS background was black and ASCII's look best with white font on dark background which made me pick the template with the black background in the first place.

I did not want to change anything about that concept, because I liked at back then and I still like it today.

In incorporated some "fake" and "real" Block ANSI elements into the design. I will probably continue doing some fine tuning over the next months for those elements, especially the text borders.

Over all does my Blog now look much better and you can tell, that it is primarily about me, Roy/SAC and what I did and do using that nick name, ASCII and ANSI Text Art and some Pixel VGA Art.

Please come and have a look for yourself and tell me what you think about it. If you have any ideas, generic or specific or even criticism, do not hesitate and just add a comment to this post. You can do so anonymously, if you do not want to tell me your name.

Cheers,
Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

Here is a sample, that you get an idea. Click on the Image to open a full size screen shot.

How things happen such as this Blog

It is sometimes funny how things happen in life and take unexpected turns, trigger a chain reaction you did not expect to happen when you started something for a complete different reason. Exactly this happened when I did the redesign of my families Homepage Cumbrowski.com between Christmas and New Year.

It was only a single page with a family photo, Family Members Names and contact Information plus some text talking a bit about me, my move to the United States and my private business Venture ConsumerMatch.com. I decided to create a separate page for every member of the family including a page just about me. I put on my page the content I already had and started extending it a bit to include more about my past and the time when I was still living in Germany.

My time as ASCII & ANSI Artist with the pseudonym "Roy/SAC", my BBS Closed Society suddenly came back into my mind. It was back then "my life" and not just a "hobby". I was very serious about it and dedicated not only the biggest piece of my spare time for it but also a big chunk of my income as student and later salary. I realized that this was a topic I should create at least one page just for itself. So I started one at www.Cumbrowski.com/RoySAC/ which was moved to its own website in 07/2006 to RoySAC.com (edited 12/2006)

When I started writing the content, talking about people, groups and locations a began to do searching for them on the Net to see if I can find useful related stuff, Screenshots, Dates etc. and also to see what people I knew from back then are doing today. It was all very interesting and exiting. A trip back in time bringing back more and more memories. The dedicated Page became oviously a bit bigger than intended.

Since the Internet and how to make other people that are interested find your stuff was nothing new to me did I start looking for appropriate places to get a link added to my new Page that I did not have to wait that mighty Google will be so kind to add it to its index in 3-6 months, maybe.

I started at Wikipedia because somebody already created an entry there about "my" Group Superior Art Creations.

Heck, I was the founder of it so I had no problem to add a Link to the me, the Founders Homepage there. I also updated the content of the Wikipedia entry with some information that were missing. I also updated Topics like "ASCII Art", "ANSI Art", "Bulletin Board System" and "Computer Art Scene". I was amazed about the Amount of Inforation already collected and provided by Wikipedia. New sites like Wikipedia which are based on "folksonomy*" are a great thing because its a living thing created by millions of people and not a "Algorythm" based or "Business" driven collection of information.

* Folksonomy - "a portmanteau word combining "folk" and "taxonomy," refers to the collaborative but unsophisticated way in which information is being categorized on the web" (from Wikipedia).

I then turned to DMOZ (OPT or Open Directory Project). I made only bad experiences with them in the past when it came to register my commercial website projects because of the general hate of most DMOZ Editors towards anything that smells like commerce and marketing. I felt more confident this time, because my page was as NOT commercial as one can be.

I registered the page at the "ASCII Art" category at DMOZ and got surprisingly fast a response back from the editor responsible for this category with the name "shedragon" and real name Laura. "Where is the ASCII art?" was the question. I only had some thumbs with links to the bigger image of ASCII & ANSI "Screenshots" on my page until then and responded that to Laura (who probably had images turned off when browing my page). I also added some real ASCII's of mine to the email to prove that I know what I am talking about and do know my stuff when it comes to ASCII, something I took great pride in and nothing to fool around with.

We began an email conversation about ASCII in general. She was doing some ASCII herself but was involved in a different area of the Text Art Scene than I was. I was active in the what's called "Underground Art Scene" and she in the more "public" Scene with known Spokespersons like Joan G. Stark and others. Those email conversation made me extending the content of my page to talk also about the "Underground Art Scene" in gerneral and their distinct styles which differ significantly from the styles of the public Text Art Scene due to the different applications of each type of Art. She added my Page eventually to the Artist Category, which is a subcategory at /Arts/Visual Arts/ASCII Art/Artists/

I went of to spread the knowldge about Underground Text Art and created a Lense dedicated to it at Squidoo http://www.squidoo.com/ascii/ which allows people to create "Lenses". Lenses are "one person's (lensmaster's) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It's a place to start, not finish. (from Squidoo.com)"

I also put Art Examples up at Flickr, a great place where you can store pictures for free and make them available to be searched for and looked at by anybody if you want to.

All this activities drove of course some highly targeted traffic from people intersted in ASCII Art and people that where active in that Scene as I was. This was great, because this was the original intention and purpose of the whole thing. I got an email one day from Christian Wirth with subject "so..." and one sentence without introduction or signature "you do realize, that you live like 60 min from me now.".

I was thinking "who is this?" and checked the email header in Outlook. Sender Email: radman@acid.org. Radman, the Founder of the fellow and biggest underground Art Group ever called ACID - Ansi Creators In Demand (ACiD.org). I did not realize that he was living in San Jose (2 hours from where I am living now btw. hehe). We only had brief communication before once, years back on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat). We planned to get personally in touch when I get to go to San Jose or if he passes by Fresno one day. I am already looking forward to this. It's always a good thing to be able to share memories with people who experienced the same thing and treasure those memories as much as you do.

All this eventually made me start this blog and I hope that this blog and my Site will allow me to connect to more and more people from the past who I mostly only got to know by their nick name and never met in person and outside the activities of the "Scene". I also hope this will help me to re-connect with friends in Germany and Europe I actually did meet and got to know personally more or less well.

cu around
Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

Note: Updated 12/22/2006 - Moved Site mentioned and links fixed