Roy/SAC Intro Development

When I decided to pack my collections of scene art logos and pixel art fonts to make them public for others to download, I got the idea to create a nice little intro that comes with the packages. Following an ancient tradition in the scene, an intro does serve the purpose to announce the release and to relay greetings and messages to fellow sceners. The intro (or Cracktro), which is short for "Crack Intro") pre-dates the text NFO files by many years. In fact, NFO files are something that was developed pretty late in the game and was only extensively used for releases on the PC.

NFO files were pretty much a novelty on machines like the Commodore 64 and also not common for the use in releases on the Commodore Amiga. I created a NFO file and file_id.diz for my collections releases of course.

Anyhow, I created an Intro with the help of the OSDM (OldSkool Demo Maker) intro engine developed by the fellow German scener with the name Peace/Testaware and released my collections with that new intro of mine.

As always, I was not 100% happy with the results and started tweaking, changing and expanding things. Here are the results of that tweaking and one intermediate version that will probably never be used for a release ever. The current version will most likely be used for any update to the current packages or for some new collections (I have a lot more stuff floating around here than just logos and fonts hehe).

Current Version 4.5 of the Intro

Code: Peace/Testaware
Design, Graphics, Concept & Direction: Roy/SAC
Music: Mantronix/Razor 1911

• Watch on Vimeo
• Watch on YouTube
• Download Video Version in AVI Format (263 MB)
• Download Win32 Executable (370 KB)

Previous Versions of the Intro

The credits for the previous versions of the intro are slightly different. I used a different intro tune there.

Code: Peace/Testaware
Graphics, Design and Concept: Roy/SAC
Music: track "Cognition" by Jozz/TRSI

Version 1	Version 3
Watch on Vimeo Watch on YouTube Download Video in AVI Format (63 MB) Download Win32 Executables	Watch on Vimeo Watch on YouTube Download Video in AVI Format (54 MB) Download Win32 Executables
Note: You can always download the AVI version of the intro at VIMEO.com. Look to the lover right of the detail page for each of my videos there.

I thought it was a nice idea to include greetings to most of the guys that I knew and dealt with in the scene and still remember, so I started creating a list to collect all the handles of those folks and included them in the second scroller (the smaller copper-bars scroller at the bottom). Most folks are from Germany, especially Berlin, where I grew up, but it also includes some folks from other countries in Europe, Israel, Canada and the United States.

Long List of Personal Greeting (Alphabetically)

Ace , Acen , Ados , Akim , Alf/ACC , Alf/Melmac , Alien/Nostromo , Alphatron , Amblin , Amok , Angel Death , Antibody , Argon Factor , Asphyx , Axess , Bacchus , Bad Boy , Beatmaster , Ben Garrett/Defacto2 , Bionic , Black Spyrit , Blacklord , Blaster , Brian O Neil , Brockhaus , Bug Lord , Busy Bee , Buttcher (Berlin) , Bymn , Caihai , Camel Joe , Capone , CC Catch , CeeJay , Censored , Cercyon , Chester , chub DrUid , Coast , Cosmic , Count Zero (Berlin) , Crackfield , Creator of Hell , Crypton , Cyber Brain , Cyric/DOD , Cyz , DAC , Dalezy , Darkside , Datacrime , Deathbringer , Deathwalker , Deleter , Deryll , Dipswitch , Dr.Acid , Dr.Lazy , Dragnet , Dream Design , Dusty , Elvin , Elvin Knox , Elwood , Exterminator , Fan Fan Latulipe , Fatman , Feldmann , Ferrex , FFC , Firebird (Berlin) , Fli7e , Fox , Frank Borally , Frog , Fulcrum , Garfield , Gee , Giovanni , Glink , Goonie , Grap , Gregory , Grymmjack , Guiver/EXS , Gumbo , Hagman , Hetero , Iceman , Iceman/WOF , iD MUD , Idefix , Idiana , Intruder , Jagor , Jaset , Jason Scott/Textfiles.com , Jester Radics , Jkowall , Johnny Cyberpunk , Kaethe , KC Kid , Killer , Kobold , Kral , Krazy Nomad , Larry ILG , LBM , Leecher JTC , Lemming , Logic , Lord MX , Lord Scarlett/SixteenColors.net , LTD/BLH , Mach One , Mad Danger , Mad Mac , Madmax (Berlin) , Madmax/CPI , Magician , Magnum , Marky , Matador , Matt , Maverick , Max/DOM , McLoud , Mefis , Menion Leah , Mitfit , Monday , Monster , Mozart , Mr.Axxess , Mr.Diesel , Mr.Lightning , Mr.Mad/NRG , Mr.Mixx , Mr.Rox , Mr.Swapper , Mr.Twister , Neon , Neophyte , O-Dog , Oliver Stone , OSHO , Overdoze , Palladin , Paragon , Paso , Pennywize , Pilot , Pitbull/RZR , Pitty , Poldi , Proton , Psychofox , Puschel , Quickmix , Rad Man/ACID , Radiocity , Rainer/AFL , Rainer/SAC , Raiser , Ramses , Ranx , Ratso , Rave , Rescue 911 , Retaliator , Rhett Jones , Ripwave , Roach , Rowdy , Royal Knight , Salty , Sextronix , Shamen , Shockwave , Shot , Skin , Sky , Slash , SLE , Snoop , Snoopy , Sonic , Spacerat , Sparky , Speedlock , Spoon , Sporky , Squizzy , SSC , Starx , STB , Stone , Stonehedge , Stryker , Suicide , Svenzzon , Synec , Term , Termi , The Barrier , The Driver , The Outlaws , The Punisher , The Shark , The Syndicate , Thunder , Thunderhawk , Tic , Toast , Toony , Toth , Toxic Trancer , Trans/BF , Trinitron , Trixter , Tronics , Trouble , Twin! , Twinbit , Twister , UCI , Ufonaut , Ultimate , Ultimate Warrior , Uridius , Urmel , Vax , VFast , Vincent , Virago , Werner , Wessi , Whiteheat EXLC , Wilkins , Wing , Wizard , Xan , Xeek , Xerxes , XLR8OR , XOX , Z80 , Zerovision , Zippoid , Znake , Zyrix

If you have any comments or feedback to the intros, let me know and post a comment below.

Thanks and Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

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´ 

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

Time for Another ASCII and More

It has only been two months, a bit less actually, since I created my last piece of ASCII text art.

Well, I did it again. Actually more than just a logo as I did the last time for CPI. I also design the NFO file body and more. I will show you the details further down below. I am pretty proud of myself, because I did not use any of my old styles for this new ASCII. I tried something different. I think that the result is very good, but it will be for others to decide if that is the case or not.

I also created a FILE_ID.DIZ logo for them in oldskool ASCII (Amiga style), which I do not consider myself particular good at. I actually said always that oldskool ASCII's should stay where they belong, on the Amiga, where they look right and not on the PC, which displays them much different as you can see at my article about the different art styles in the underground text art scene.

While I had the creative urge going, I also created VGA pixel logos for the same group. It must have been their lucky weekend I guess. hehe.  It could also be that the release that they announced where this artwork will be used was highly motivating for me :)

The second VGA logo. Simple and much smaller than the first one. It can also be read much easier.

The VGA logos were used for a cracktro, together with an old pixel art font of mine, which I highlighted in a blog post last December. The font took me hours to create and I was a little bit disappointed that it was only used for one Genesis intro, coded by Synec, which was only used for one or two releases and that's it. That particular intro is also one of the few that I have problems with to capture and publish in video format :(

I am glad that it was now used again. The music is also cool. It was created by Paso from Berlin and Dytec (and Dynamix & Remedy, the Sysop of Ice Cream and the coder & musician of the Cebit1993 party winning Amiga 500 dentro called Vaginal Massacre).

The tune was also used on the PC once, also for a Genesis intro by Hetero, with graphics by Dream Design, together with a second song, which IMO sucked. A randomizer determined which of the two songs was played and it appeared to me that the shitty song was played much more often than this cool one by Paso. I am sure that he will be glad that one of his tunes was used again in a cracktro.

Okay, here is the screen capture video of the new cracktro:

RoORS Cracktro 2009 V2 from Carsten Cumbrowski on Vimeo.

You can download the video in AVI format (76 MB) here at Mediafire.com 

I hope that you like my new stuff. Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

How to Package a Scene Release?

Scene releases, particular the pirate or warez scene, publishes their releases in a certain way, which is done pretty much consistent and is done so for many years.

Back to ASCII Art Academy

File Format

The final release format is ZIP. This became the de-facto standard sometimes during the early 1990s. Back then programs were usually not that large and provided via floppy disks. Each floppy disk was usually compressed into one PkZip archive. If the program used multiple floppy disks, then the ZIP file names were numbered.

With the arrival of CD-ROM, release sizes increased. Also, a CD-ROM does not fit on a floppy disk and often the individual files on the CD-ROM were also too large to fit on a single floppy disk. ZIP did not offer the capability to break up archives into multiple files, with each file having a pre-set size to make sure that it fits on to the archive medium that you wanted to use (1.44 MB floppy disks for the most part).

To solve this problem, release groups utilized other packers like ARJ, RAR and later also ACE that were capable of splitting and then packed the individual ARJ/RAR/ACE archive files once more with ZIP.

Full CD-ROMS (ISO images) were not released at first, due to limitations in available bandwidth and HD sizes, but even the CD-RIP releases grew more and more in size over time. When a release had 10 disks, X was often used for the 10th disk to save precious characters in the file name, but it wasn't for long that number of disks for releases would be way bigger than 10 disks. 30, 40 and 50+ disks for a single release became more and more the norm than being the exception.

While release sizes grew, also the 3.5" floppy disks started to become more and more of a novelty and release groups talked with each other and agreed to allow the use of 2.88 MB size volumes for each "disk" or file of the release.

It was not for long that 2.88 MB would also not cut it anymore and the limitation of volume or file size was abolished entirely. Releases today are still split into volumes of different sizes (usually between 5 and 100 MB), but for other, practical, reasons. If for example the release would be 1 GB in size and be released as one file and you or the server where you are downloading the release from do not support "resume" in case the transfer gets interrupted, then you would probably get very mad, if the download of that 1 GB file breaks up after 990 MB, especially if you did this on dial-up or slow DSL, where it takes many hours or days to download that much data.

You would have to start the download all over again, even though only 10 MB are missing. There are also still a number of different storage media available and used that might have a smaller capacity than the full size of a release.

The practical reasons diminish more and more, but release group will probably continue splitting up releases into multiple files. This would be more out of tradition than anything else, but hey, if you have a major release, then you don't want to put it out there in one file only. Single file releases are usually only used for cracks/keygens only, trainers, patches, product updates, dox/manuals and small applications/tools. A release spanning multiple files usually indicates a full release of some sort.

File Names

Also in the early 1990s it became practice that the release filename starts with a file prefix to identify the release group that published the release. Old MS DOS file name restrictions caused the prefix used by groups to be no more than the first 2, 3 to max. 4 characters of the file name. If you had a release that spans multiple disks, with the DOS limit of 8 characters for the file name, only 3-5 characters remained to somewhat identify the name of the actual release itself. 

Some example of file name prefixes used by release groups:

cls = Class
gns = Genesis
pdx = Paradox
rzr = Razor 1911
tdu = TDU Jam
trsi = Tristar & Red Sector Inc.
x- = X-Force

NFO and File_ID.DIZ

The ZIP release file (and not the archive inside the ZIP) usually also contains two small text files. I won't say much  about the purpose of the file FILE_ID.DIZ. If you do not know what it is and what it was/is used for, see this older blog post of mine to learn more about it.

The NFO file name in the archive is usually called like the name of the group and in rare cases like the ZIP release file, with the file extension .NFO to indicate that it is an NFO file. NFO stands for Info or Information. MS Dos file name restrictions limited the length of a file extension to max. 3 characters length.

At the top of the NFO file is usually a logo with the name of the release group using ASCII art. The logo is usually made up of "block ASCII" characters in MS DOS, which some editors and text file viewers under MS Windows and other operating systems cannot display properly my default. The users only sees some garbage characters instead and unable to make out what those characters try to represent. For how to look at NFO files under Windows, see my article about the underground text art styles.

The NFO file contains information about the release itself, instructions for how to install it, information about the use and purpose of the software/application/program (something were release groups typically do a poor job or not include anything at all), latest news about the release group, greetings to other groups and people in the scene, a member list that shows who is currently part of the group and who is not and a  list of "sites" or "boards", in the pre-Internet past Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and then FTP Servers on the Internet. Contact information might or might not be included in the NFO file as well, such as Email, a web address or an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel where members of the group can be found.

Cracktros, Installers, KeyGens and Cracks

In many cases are those the only files in the release, but depending on the release itself and the group that released it, other files might be included as well. Software Key Generators (KeyGens) and Cracks.

KeyGens

KeyGens are simple programs to generate valid software registration information that you enter within the software itself to unlock any limitation that the unregistered version of the tool has. Those information are typically provided to users who actually paid for a license of the software. KeyGens provide the same, but without paying anything.

Cracks

Cracks are either a program that modifies the installed program to remove any copy protection, or modified files of the original software that the user has to replace after installing the original program on his machine (with the protection still being intact).

Installers

Installers were especially popular during the time when stripped down versions of CD-ROM releases were published by release groups. Those CD-RIPS did not include any original install or setup program that was part of the original software release. Also, archive tools like RAR, ARJ and ACE are not part of the operating system and many users do not have it installed on their computers. To this day, many users do not know and never heard about WinRAR or WinACE, let alone installed it on their system.

The Installer is a tool written by the release group to extract the split archives to the program files folder and might also adds any registry entries required by the software to run, if it was needed.

The installer interface never uses the standard Windows Installer SDK that you are used to from installing "normal" software. The scene installers are completely custom build, often using a flashy and colorful designed user interface with a logo of the group and more noticeable with background music, which can be surprising, if you never used a scene installer before.

Cracktros

Cracktro stands for Crack-Intro, the introduction for a cracked piece of software. A Cracktro does not serve any practical purpose that is required in order to distribute, install and use the release by the warez release group.

The sole purpose of a Cracktro is to showcase the release group itself. You can find a large number of video captures of crack intros at my YouTube channel "SACReleases".

The only reference to the release in a Cracktro is one or two lines of some sort of text within the Cracktro with the name and maybe credits for the supplier, cracker and/or packager. In some cases the Cracktro is used to transmit special messages and information to other people in the scene, but for the most part a cracktros purpose is purely promotional.

A cool Cracktro can be watched and enjoyed independently from the release itself. The Cracktro concept and idea dates back to the earliest widely used home computers like the Commodore 64, Atari 800 or Apple II.

Not surprisingly, cracktros evolved to larger productions, called demos, which spun off to become a huge scene by itself without having ties to the warez scene anymore. To learn more about the history of the demo scene, check out this article of mine.

Beyond All This

That's pretty much all that you can find in scene release files. Wait, there is more. It is more the exception today than it is the norm, but that used to be the other way around in the past.

Release ZIP archives can contain text files and executables (.EXE or .COM files) that are not related to the released software nor the release group itself. Those extra files in the ZIP are advertisements for Bulletin Board Systems, FTP Servers, Trading Groups or individuals that got in contact with the ZIP file before you downloaded it to your machine. BBS and FTP servers used to add to every file uploaded to them such an advertisement for themselves. By looking at those ads, you could tell, which board was among the best and fastest around, because if an ad for that board was in a release file when you downloaded it, then it meant that it passed through that other board before it got to where you downloaded it from.

Preparing a Scene Release

Preparing a scene release without any special tools or scripts is a pain in the neck. You first have to pack the to be released software itself with RAR (which is typically used today) and create multiple volumes, if the release is larger.

After that, you have to use WinZIP to pack each of the volumes ones more. You also have to include the NFO file and file_ID.diz in each of the ZIP archives as well.

If you have a release that spans more than a handful volumes, this job becomes somewhat tedious and time consuming, even if you are using the command line options of the packers and not their graphical interface.

Many release groups developed internally tools and scripts to prepare their releases. Depending on the sophistication of the group and the needs, release preparation tools can become quite a piece of software by itself, beyond just doing the final packaging of the release, including easy to perform updates of the content of the NFO and File_ID.DIZ files, text changes in the Cracktro and ability to recompile it with those changes included etc.

Well, I don't have any release preparation tools that I could or would give out to anybody, but I do have a script that does make the packaging at the end of the release preparation process very easy and automated.

Release Creation Script

Here is a MS DOS Batch Script called !ProcREL.bat. You can download the full script here (you have to rename the downloaded file from !ProcREL.bat.txt back to !ProcREL.bat) Script fixed and extended on March 13, 2009. See notes at the and of the post, after the code.

You require the tools WinZIP and WinRAR to be able to use this script. In the case of WinZIP do you require to have the separate command line version of the tool (WZZIP.EXE). In case of WinRAR, the command line version RAR.EXE is usually included in the general release version of the tool.

You have to make small changes to the script in any case. You can change some other settings there as well, if you like to, but that would not be necessary to make it work in general.

If you installed WinZIP and WinRAR to their typical default location on your C-Drive, changes to the lines 7 and 8 of the batch script won't be necessary. Line 9 however has to be changed in any case, unless your NFO file has the name NFOFILE.NFO, which I don't think to be the case. If you just provide the name of the file, make sure that the NFO file is located in the same directory where you execute the script itself. You could also provide the full path to the file and the file name, if you want to. Line 10 only needs to be changed, if you want to include a File_ID.DIZ file from a different location than the location where you run the batch script from.

The script only has to parameters which are both required. The first parameter is the base name of the file name for the release itself, without any extension. File numbers will be added by the script to the file name automatically. File numbers are always 2 characters, starting at 01 and supporting up to 99 files max.

The second parameter is the specification of the content that make up the release itself. This can be the name and path to an individual file or using the DOS Wildcards *, ? etc. to include multiple files. If your release contains sub folders that also have to be included, a change to line 27 of the script will be necessary.

Example:

!ProcREL.bat PRE-RELN C:\RELEASE\*.*

The script would create 98 MB RAR volumes with the Name PRE-RELNXX.RAR from all files in the folder C:\RELEASE, where XX stands for 01 to 99, then create a ZIP file PRE-RELNXX.ZIP for each RAR volume where it also includes the files FILE_ID.DIZ and the specified .NFO file  to each of the ZIP archives.

You have to add the switch "-r"  to the call of RAR.EXE to include sub-folders. Also, the current setting is to create volumes of 98 MB in size, which is pretty much the maximum used by release groups today. You can change that size in line 27 as well, just change the number for "-v98078k" to -vXXk where XX stands for the desired volume size in Kilobytes. If you forget the "k" at the end, the number will be interpreted as bytes instead, creating volumes that would be a bit too small I guess.

Here are the steps the script does perform:

1. Calls RAR to create volumes from your input file or files.
   
   
2. RAR automatically creates file with the name BASENAME.partXX.rar. I do not like the ".part"  in the name and prefer BASENAMEXX.RAR instead, where XX is a number between 01 and 99. So I rename all the files created by step 1. Note: The batch script is case sensitive. Make sure that the extension generated by RAR is ".rar" all lower-case. I then rename it to .RAR (all upper-case)
   
   
3. Generate a list with all RAR files in the directory and create a ZIP file with the name BASENAMEXX.RAR.ZIP where the RAR archive is added to. Then I also add the NFO and FILE_ID.Diz to each of the new ZIP Files
   
   
4. Rename the Files BASENAMEXX.RAR.ZIP to BASENAMEXX.ZIP
   
   
5. Clean up (delete) temporary files that were created by the batch script.

   1:  @ECHO OFF

   2:  CLS

   3:   

   4:  REM =================================================

   5:  REM Please Change Name and Path for the Following Variables

   6:  REM =================================================

   7:  SET ZipExe=C:\PROGRA~1\WinZip\WZZIP.EXE

   8:  SET RARExe=C:\PROGRA~1\WinRAR\RAR.EXE

   9:  SET NFOFile=RoORS.NFO

  10:  SET FILEID=File_ID.DIZ

  11:   

  12:  REM =================================================

  13:   

  14:  IF NOT EXIST %NFOFile% goto NONFO

  15:  IF NOT EXIST %FILEID% goto NODIZ

  16:  IF "%1"=="" goto USAGEINFO

  17:  IF "%2"=="" goto USAGEINFO

  18:  set /a zipf=0

  19:  IF "%4"=="ABORT" (

  20:    FOR %%Z in (%1??.ZIP) DO (

  21:      GOTO ZIPSFOUND

  22:    )

  23:  ) ELSE (

  24:    Del /Q "%1??.zip"

  25:    Echo Delete "%1??.zip"

  26:  )

  27:   

  28:  Echo Delete "%1.part??.rar" (they should not be there though)

  29:  DEL /Q "%1.part??.rar"

  30:   

  31:  REM =================================================

  32:  REM use "rn" instead of "a" to move files into the archive

  33:  REM -v98078k creates volumes of a bit less than 100 MB 

  34:  REM to fit on a ZIP-100 disk

  35:  REM -m5 sets the compression level. 5 is maximum, 

  36:  REM you can also set it to 0,1 .. 4 which is faster

  37:   

  38:  Echo Create RAR Archives %1.partXX.RAR for Data Selection %2

  39:  %RARExe% a -v98078k -m5 "%1" "%2"

  40:   

  41:   

  42:  REM =================================================

  43:  Echo Rename %1.partXX.RAR to %1xx.RAR

  44:  set /a pos=0

  45:  For /f %%x in ('dir /on /b "%1.part*.rar"') do (

  46:   set /a pos+=1

  47:  )

  48:  if %pos%==0 goto NORAR

  49:  For /L %%n in (1,1,%pos%) do (

  50:    if %%n leq 9 (call :RenRAR %1 0%%n ) else (call :RenRAR %1 %%n )

  51:  )

  52:   

  53:  Echo.

  54:  Echo =================================================

  55:  Echo %pos% RAR volumes were created!

  56:  Echo Please make now the necessary adjustments to your

  57:  Echo NFO file and File_ID.DIZ files,

  58:  Echo When you are done with it and ready to create the 

  59:  Echo ZIP release files....

  60:  echo.

  61:  pause

  62:   

  63:   

  64:  REM =================================================

  65:  Echo Build List of RAR Archives in Folder...

  66:  dir /B /A:-D *.RAR >!RARFiles.txt

  67:   

  68:  REM =================================================

  69:  Echo Process RAR Archives...

  70:  FOR /F "delims=|" %%i IN (!RARFiles.txt) DO (

  71:     Echo Processing %%i

  72:     IF EXIST "%%i.ZIP" del "%%i.ZIP"

  73:     %ZipExe% -a "%%i.ZIP" "%%i"

  74:     IF EXIST "%NFOFile%" %ZipExe% -a "%%i.ZIP" "%NFOFile%"

  75:     IF EXIST "%FILEID%" %ZipExe% -a "%%i.ZIP" "%FILEID%"

  76:     IF NOT "%3" == "KEEPRAR" (DEL /Q "%%i")

  77:  )

  78:  REM =================================================

  79:  Echo Build List of TEMP ZIP Files...

  80:  Dir /b *.RAR.ZIP>!ZIPfiles.txt

  81:  REM =================================================

  82:  Echo Rename ZIP Files...

  83:  REM =================================================

  84:  FOR /F "delims=." %%i IN (!ZIPfiles.txt) DO (

  85:     Echo Rename %%i.RAR.ZIP to %%i.ZIP

  86:     IF EXIST "%%i.ZIP" del "%%i.ZIP"

  87:     REN "%%i.RAR.ZIP" "%%i.ZIP"

  88:  )

  89:  REM =================================================

  90:  Echo Deleting TEMP Files...

  91:  IF EXIST !ZIPfiles.txt Del /Q !ZIPfiles.txt

  92:  IF EXIST !RARfiles.txt Del /Q !RARfiles.txt

  93:   

  94:  ECHO =================================================

  95:  ECHO Done!

  96:  ECHO =================================================

  97:  Echo.

  98:  Pause

  99:  goto END

 100:   

 101:  REM =================================================

 102:  :USAGEINFO

 103:  Echo.

 104:  Echo Usage:

 105:  Echo !ProcRel.bat BASEFILENAME InputData (KEEPRAR/DELRAR) (ABORT/OVERWRITE)

 106:  Echo.

 107:  Echo The parameter pairs #3: KEEPRAR / DELRAR and #4: ABORT/OVERWRITE are optional.

 108:  Echo If you want to toggle parameter #4, parameter #3 must be specified as well 

 109:  Echo The default behavior is DELRAR, which means that the RAR archives will be deleted, 

 110:  Echo once they were copied into the release ZIP archive file and OVERWRITE, which means that

 111:  Echo the script deletes any ZIP files that exist in the directory with the same name 

 112:  Echo.

 113:  Echo If you want to keep the copy of the RAR archive in addition to the release ZIP's or if you 

 114:  Echo want the script to abort, if it detects an existing ZIP file with the same name 

 115:  Echo as the script intends to create then you have to set the parameters,

 116:  Echo.

 117:  Echo They are also case sensitive! If they are misspelled, the default behavior is triggered.

 118:  Echo Example:

 119:  Echo !ProcRel.bat X-RELN C:\RELN\*.*

 120:  Echo.

 121:  Echo !ProcRel.bat X-RELN C:\RELN\*.* KEEPRAR ABORT 

 122:  goto END

 123:   

 124:  REM =================================================

 125:  :NORAR

 126:  echo.

 127:  Echo Error!

 128:  echo Error! No RAR Archives with the file names

 129:  echo %1.partXX.RAR

 130:  echo were Created!

 131:  goto END

 132:   

 133:  REM =================================================

 134:  :NONFO

 135:  echo.

 136:  Echo Error!

 137:  echo NFO-File %NFOFile% not found!

 138:  goto END

 139:   

 140:  REM =================================================

 141:  :NODIZ

 142:  echo.

 143:  Echo Error!

 144:  echo File_ID.DIZ file at %FILEID% not found!

 145:  goto END

 146:   

 147:  REM =================================================

 148:  :ZIPSFOUND

 149:  echo.

 150:  Echo Error! (ABORT Parameter specified)

 151:  Echo Current directory contains already one or more ZIP files 

 152:  Echo with the name: %1??.ZIP 

 153:  goto END

 154:   

 155:  REM =================================================

 156:  :RenRAR

 157:   IF EXIST "%1.part%2.rar" ren "%1.part%2.rar" "%1%2.RAR"

 158:   echo ren "%1.part%2.rar" "%1%2.RAR"

 159:   

 160:  REM =================================================

 161:  :END

 162:  REM Finished!

 163:  Echo.

 164:  Goto :eof

 165:   

I hope that you find this little BATCH script useful.

NOTE March 13, 2009:

I found a bug in my script, which I fixed in my blog post and in the version for download. While I was fixing the bug I also found another small issue and also thought about some options to give you control over a few behaviors of the batch. 

The first addition is the PAUSE of the script after it created the RAR archive volumes. It will tell you how many RAR files were created that you can make the necessary modifications to your prepared File_ID.diz and NFO file.

Once you did that, simply press enter in the DOS window and the script will continue.

I also added two optional parameters to the batch. The first one lets you specify that you would like to keep the copy of the RAR archive volumes in addition to the ZIP files where the volumes are included, instead of deleting them once zipped. The second parameter lets you specify what you want the batch to do, if it detects ZIP archives with the same file name as the script intends to create. The default is delete and re-create, but if you prefer that the script aborts, you can now specifty it via a command parameter.

Back to ASCII Art Academy

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Roy/SAC Homepage

FILE_ID.DIZ Stories... A Trip Down Memory Lane

I remember the days when there was no such thing as "file_id.diz" and users had to enter a description for every single file that you uploaded manually. A pain in the ass and often causing poor descriptions of your file directory, because most users (especially in the "Warez Scene" or "Software Pirates Scene") did not have the time to enter very long and descriptive details to every file.

Remember, there was no copy-and-paste nor multi-tasking at that time either.

I know that the AMIGA guys had tools that worked similar to the Windows Clipboard. For that reason was the Amiga scene also the first that introduced the mini ASCII logos of release groups that AMIGA couriers used for the BBS file descriptions to make the files more prominent.

Oldskool (AMIGA style) file_id.diz ASCII design for the Elite Warez PC release group Razor 1911

. . Quake III (c)Id–Software final CD–Rip __________ . /________ \ –============– : –[01/99]– : | _\ )__/|______ ____|\ __ _/––– | /___/ _____ / __ \ \/ \ ––\_ \––– | . \ < |/ /____\ | .\_/ ––/ – – | |\______|___________/ | ––– – – | / .:.nineteeneleven.:.\ | roy –== |/ ===================== \| ====– .

Logos were adapted by the PC scene after file_id.diz was introduced by Clark Development Corporation (I believe that was with PC Board V14.5, but I am not 100% sure, it could also been V15.0).

The first ASCII (file_id) logos for PC releases were Amiga style designs, often even the same logos used by the Amiga section of the group, if it had any.

I don't want to show off, but I truly believe that I was the first one who created and used a Block ASCII (PC) style file_id for releases. It was the file_id.diz design for my first PC group that I co-founded called Cardinals in early 1993 and merged entirely into TRSI/Faith in 1994.

Quick Info: What is File_ID.diz?

File_ID.diz is a file name for a small text-file that is added to a compressed archive file (such as ZIP, the de-facto standard for distributing programs via Bulletin Board Systems). The file_id.diz is added by the creator of the program archive file and contains the name of the program and maybe some additional useful information. The sole purpose of the file was the use on bulletin board systems. After a file was uploaded by the user, the BBS software looks for the existence of a file_id.diz file in the archive and uses its content automatically for the description in the file listings, if it finds one. If no file_id.diz was included in the file, the user had to enter a description for it manually.

Cardinals released awesome trainers for PC games with an amount and quality of options never seen before (or after)... Fuck "Dread"! They were "lamer" hehe.

The Cardinals File_ID.DIZ design in Block ASCII Style from early 1993. The First of it's kind? (proof me wrong!) Also see this and here.

. ▄ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▐██ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ ██▀█ ██▀█ ██▀▄ ██▀▄ ▀ ██▀▄ ██▀█ ██ ██▀█ ██ ▀ ██ █ ██ █ ██ █ ██ ██ █ ██ █ ██ ▄ ██▄▄ . ██ ▄ ██▀█ ██▀▄ ██ █ ██ ██ █ ██▀█ ██ █ ▄▄ █ ██▄█ ██ █ ██ █ ██▄▀ ██ ██ █ ██ █ ██▄█ ██▄█ ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▓█ ▄▄▄▄▄trained▄▄▄▄▄▄ ▀ ▓▒ ▀ █ ▒░ █ ▄ ▄ ▀▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▀ . .

Cardinals trainer releases did stick-out on the boards, because the big and bold block ASCII logo was hard to miss among those oldskool ASCII logos and regular text.

Hey, If you don't believe me that the Cardinals file_id was the first one using a Block ASCII logo, fine. If you can show me BBS listings from before that where block ASCII was used, I'd appreciate it (actually not, but for history sake, I'd rather proven wrong than making a false claim).

Anyhow. I used Block ASCII for the Cardinals file_id, because I wanted it to stick out. I also used extensively Block ASCII for the Cardinals NFO ASCII that was also not very typical at that time.

Well, the coders had to learn the ALT + numeric ASCII character code combination for 4 block characters... not too much to ask. ALT-176, ALT-177, ALT-178 and ALT-219 :) It wasn't for long that other groups followed suit and also used Block ASCII for their file_id's and I was thinking about even better ways to make file descriptions stick out more.

Block ASCII Codes 101 :)

                        ░  = ASCII character 176
                        ▒  = ASCII character 177
                        ▓  = ASCII character 178
                        █  = ASCII character 219

In order to generate those characters, you had to press the "ALT" key and enter the ASCII code 
on the numeric keyboard (while holding the ALT-Key pressed) and then release the ALT-Key at which 
moment it would render the character that represents the entered ASCII value.
                 

I thought about ANSI and created the designs that you can see here in my deviation for testing. They were never used of course. First of all, the ESC sequences would have been a problem in many cases.

Also the length of File descriptions (per line) ... I believe it was 42 characters for most BBS systems, would have posed an issue. The color formatting of the ANSI codes (or PC Board color codes, if you would have used those) limited very much the characters that would remain for the logo itself.

AMIGA-Sysop's and traders would also had have some problems with those... It was an interesting concept for a moment, but failed for very practical reasons.

Long, but nice story eh?

I almost forgot about this, but then I found my ANSI file_id.diz designs and it all came back to me :).

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Roy/SAC Homepage

First ASCII Art Piece of Mine in Ages

I cannot believe that I actually managed to create my first piece of block ASCII Art in ages... eons might be the better word to describe the time frame between the creation of this ASCII  and the last ASCII of mine that I created before this one.

The ASCII that I created was a long over-due request by Mad Max, the co-founder of the old scene group CPI, Canadian Pirates Inc., which I actually joined myself in September of last year.

I had this open request on my conscience for way too long and I am glad that I got this off my head now. I also hope that Mad Max will like the NFO file logo. I have to admit, that I got a little bit rusty (old maybe? :( ).

I sent the ASCII to him via email, but did not hear back from him since then. I will find out sooner or later :)

I also Finished Something Else ;) !!!

I wrote about the amount (count) of different SAC releases across all pages earlier this year.  I also made stuff available for download in re-sorted and grouped bundles by content type rather than by SAC artpack.

• Interesting SAC Art Packs Statistics, Figures and Downloads
• Interesting SAC Art Packs Statistics, Figures and Downloads - Part II

More SAC Art Put Up for Access On-Line via Web Browser

That was all nice and good, but does not make the old-school art of ASCII, ANSI or Pixel Art accessible (viewable) online and across platforms.  Okay, so I took it upon myself to convert the thousands of ASCII and ANSI art pieces that several dozen artists produced over a period longer than 10 years and converted all of them into PNG image format, which is compatible with everything today. I also converted the Pixel art that was for a large degree saved in the old IFF (or LBM of Deluxe Paint II) format and other similar depreciated formats, which are today not in use anymore.

1. ASCII ART Collection

All 3,000+ Superior Art Creations ASCII Art Pieces from 30+ artists and all 35 SAC art packs in one Flickr collection with 30 separate picture sets, sorted by artists most of the time.

2. ANSI ART Collection

All 450+ Superior Art Creations ANSI Art Pieces from 25+ artists and all 35 SAC art packs in one Flickr collection with 10 separate picture sets, 9 sets for the nine most productive ANSI artists in SAC and a tens set with various ANSI art by 15+ SAC artists who did not produce very much ANSI art for the packs overall.

I created by far the most ANSI art of all (over 130 ANSI art pieces), followed by Rave with 105 pieces. Hetero did 72, Dark Star aka Puschel did 25, Raiser 24, Shot and Kenet 18 ANSI's each, SL aka Strike Light 16, Webpige0 12 and 56 ANSI art pieces created by over 15 different artists.

3. Pixel Art Collection

All 500+ of Superior Art Creations oldskool pixel VGA art pieces, logos for the most part, created by 30+ artists and all 35 SAC art packs in one Flickr collection with 16 picture sets. The largest number of pixel art contribution was done by the following SAC artists (alphabetically): Asphyx (ASX), Cokine (COK), Creator (CRE), Creator of Hell (CH/CoH), Desolation Angel (DA), Dream Design (DD), Eboy (EB), Fefst (FST), Ferrex (FX), HKultra (HKU), [K], Kenet, Moolok (MOO), Nerv (N,NR), Pasha (P), Puschel (PL), Roy, Sergeon, Senser (SNS) and Webpige0 (W0)

SAC artists who contributed to pixel art, but only very little were: Antibody (AB), B5, Bazilla (BAZ), ED, Flames, FX, GTI, Hetero (HT), IX, Marky (M), Mattey, Mr.Jezus, n]-[wa, Poldi (PD), Rave (RV), Silent (SiL), Sprocket , Techbit (TB), TPK

Putting over 400 MP3 Songs Up for Play-Back in Browser

All MP3 files are stored in a single "Directory" at Amazon S3 - Help Wanted and Appreciated

I already uploaded most of the 400+ tracker music files converted to MP3 to my Amazon S3 Account. I need to check and then upload if I missed any song and then think up a way to put them up somewhere for easy accessibility and play-back capabilities via web browser, without too long load-times or requirement for setting up another browser plug-in, which would have to be downloaded first. All this should of course take as little as time as possible, without sacrificing the accessibility of the music by platform restrictions.

Ideas and suggestions are welcome and appreciated. Whatever the suggestion might be, it has to run on MS IIS6 on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server, Classic ASP and/or ASP.NET and/or PHP 4. If it requires MySQL 5 and/or MS SQL Server 2005 portable or developer edition, fine. Also MS Access 2007 as database storage for some settings and catalog content would be alright.

Thanks and Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Roy/SAC Homepage

Interesting SAC Art Packs Statistics, Figures and Downloads - Part II

I posted yesterday Part I of my findings about the Superior Art Creations (SAC) Art Pack Releases.

I was sorting today through the ANSI and ASCII releases and also uploaded all the music files converted to MP3 to Mediafire.com for download by anybody who is interested and not able to play back the music in its original format (MOD, XM, S3M, DMF, IT and SID). You can find them all at this web address. More download links can be found at the end of this post.

I shouldn't have made jokes about the file duplications by some of the SAC pixel artists by saying "funny, he obviously had no directory with all his art work in it, like the rest of us hehe", because it appears that I made the same error myself a few times when it comes to my ASCII art releases. I file name duped pretty often actually so I should have kept my mouth shut, because it seems that I am the worst offender of them all hehe.

But more to that a but later. Lets start with some additional music dupes that I found. I believe the following facts might not be as interesting as the stuff in my previous post, but it is interesting for me and maybe a few folks out there and that is enough for me to publish it on my blog hehe. Sorry :)

File Name          Pk   MP3 File Name      MP3 MD5 Check Sum
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
mt_addi.sid        27 mt_addi.mp3        1aca2c2191c2173e2d5dc858ec9d6a21
mt_holba.sid       27 mt_holba_beer.mp3  dc14a3fc3a5ac670e4b3e2313a546055
mt_addiction.sid   28 mt_addiction.mp3   1aca2c2191c2173e2d5dc858ec9d6a21
mt_holba_beer.sid  28 mt_holba_beer.mp3  dc14a3fc3a5ac670e4b3e2313a546055

I did not catch it myself. It was Mediafire.com who does automatically a de-duping based on the MD5 hash (obviously). The fact that the files have the same size in MP3 and SID format (MP3: 4,799,520 bytes, SID: 6,142 bytes) made me wonder, because I noticed this during the conversion.

There are in fact 25 unique SID songs by Maktone, MRD and Crome that have the same size. I tried a few to see if there are dupes, but the ones I checked were fine. Below is the list of the 25 songs that I mentioned.

Obviously not, because there were two real dupes actually.

MD5 Check Sum                    *File Name
-----------------------------------------------------------------
1aca2c2191c2173e2d5dc858ec9d6a21 *mt_addi.mp3
dc14a3fc3a5ac670e4b3e2313a546055 *mt_holba_beer.mp3

5e3319cd92b5229dcfd36455d5a7a598 *mrd_lazyrainydays.mp3
441187bae1564e4cf97f998adc92ee36 *mrd_graduationseasonfinal.mp3
ae4f190f150a6acb48d2fcb61aec08d8 *mrd_wondersoftheworldfinal.mp3
d407917b591cd2f4fdebdaadd6ca3c0a *MRD_RCM.mp3
654449199e164bbecc0c4e2ff11f6955 *mt_white_s.mp3
dc14a3fc3a5ac670e4b3e2313a546055 *mt_holba.mp3
a5aefa7e2c7a6cba1ce93a36cb059c67 *MRD-Airikka_High_Kick.mp3
3e3c9255d4bd5873474e1ca7346a84dd *MRD-Knark_I_Karusellen.mp3
ebf7397b9fb8a004a5d0eff788c71ed4 *mt_nag_cham.mp3
f428fbeb5742cae559a3ea53ef53ff61 *mt_kingsize.mp3
ea4c9a758e5c2972d1478be35516b8fa *mt_mortal.mp3
52a4565a7a6418d15743ae915a5b4abe *mt_hansa.mp3
1aca2c2191c2173e2d5dc858ec9d6a21 *mt_addiction.mp3
673c85d6306a3e9db345b9bbd6f7cf9b *MRD-Disco_Night.mp3
ba58e84da350b367c533901fcf49c11e *MRD_SG.mp3
c021cfeafa008da75308a026060ccf6c *crome-For_the_Years.mp3
e0aa086df18ff8892f10cfacc0c28a3c *crome-Bleib_wie_du_bist.mp3
dc91edc0775ef95f87c14cf50984b06e *!bla.bat
854553bcdf4fe85b59fdc515c1ad03b0 *mt_druid2rmx.mp3
33bb3b7b044bb8d0e8adb826e96b534b *MRD-Good_Bad_Necrotoad.mp3
25c6b194fd33085baa6fe851a42e2346 *mt_gob_king.mp3
7eaed33fd861fe5b8767ca36fc512774 *mt_fltdemo1.mp3
908997a8b0ed342b5b4f8eeab747f422 *mt_3ankare.mp3
b9c509d805eedaca308631770a8e4676 *MRD-Polymatrix.mp3
3661d853298174e0d301dfc104021924 *mrd_questoflightfinal.mp3

Btw. Just for clarification, in the case that you didn't get it already, File Name Dupe means that the two files have the same name, but differ in size and/or modified date. Full Dupe means that not only the file name is the same, but the size and last modified date as well.

ANSI File Name Dupes: 5
ASCII Full Dupes: 22
ASCII File Name Dupes: 45

ANSI File Name Dupes
------------------------------------
Pack 7               Pack 14
HT-PC2.ans           GTI-AR.ANS 
    
Pack 8               Pack 30
RV-RAY.ANS           w0-sacns.ANS 
RV-ULBY.ANS    
    

ASCII Full Dupes
------------------------------------
Pack 13              Pack 20                 Pack 33
SL-CO.ASC            CH-ACE.ASC              asx-bmf.txt 
                     CH-CLASS.ASC            dip-dsco.asc 
Pack 16              CH-DE3.ASC              asx-dsm.nfo 
SL-SUB2.ASC          CH-ESTRA.ASC            asx-dsm2.diz 
                     ch-mw2.asc              asx-sven.txt 
Pack 17              CH-MW.ASC               asx-svn2.txt 
ARL-SS.ASC           CH-PNC.ASC              S!-trd.diz 
ARL-FLOO.ASC         CH-REUNI.ASC    
                     CH-RISE2.ASC    
                     CH-RNDIZ.ASC    
                     CH-RNS3.ASC   

   
ASCII File Name Dupes
--------------------------------------
Pack 6               Pack 18                 Pack 25
ROY-DTCD.ASC         RV-CNC2.ASC             CH-RISE.ASC 
                     RV-CNC3.ASC             CH-RNS2.ASC 
Pack 8               ROY-CNCD.ASC    
ROY-PNSD.ASC         ROY-LSWA.ASC            Pack 27
ROY-IMPD.ASC                                 aln-solskogen.txt 
                     Pack 19                 scr-vite.nfo 
Pack 10              ARL-HIJA.ASC   
ROY-PNS3.ASC         sns-sacd.asc            Pack 28
                                             ROY-DEVN.ASC 
Pack 13              Pack 20   
ROY-SDMD.ASC         CH-DE.ASC               Pack 30
                     CH-RNS.ASC              cDr-soh.asc 
Pack 14              CH-MOTV8.ASC    
ROY-IMP.ASC          roy-phs.asc             Pack 32
HLX-SAC2.ASC         sns-eur.asc             dip-dark.asc 
HLX-SAC3.ASC         sns-pdx.asc    
                     SQZ-DST.ASC             Pack 33
Pack 16                                      nr-sac.asc 
ARL-PVM.ASC          Pack 21   
HLX-SAC.ASC          sns-stc.asc             Pack 34
ROY-PCY.ASC          frx-stc1.asc            cDr-sweatshop.asc 
ROY-NBD.ASC          frx-mth3.asc    
                     sl-ref.nfo    
Pack 17      
ARL-DREA.ASC         Pack 24   
ARL-NGT.ASC          scr-sac.nfo    
RV-CNC.ASC           sns-stat.asc    
ROY-PHC.ASC       
scr-cms.nfo       

Special ASCII Packs (which were already included in my original count)

Pack 32
cDr-glftpd: 75 files

Pack 34
nerv-purpleous: 33 files
S!-phus9: 7 files

Total ASCII: 3,001 (instead of 3,023)

Found another music dupe, Crm_Turr.xm Pack 21 and crm_turrica1.xm from pack 23 are the same. I discovered this one by accident.

Adjusted Music Files: 425 (instead of 428)

I had the music disks not in my original count. I used the dedupe feature by Mediafire.com for the MP3 to find out, which songs in the MDs where new or new versions of older songs that were already released in SAC art packs.

Crome's I Miss You Amiga: 25 files, 5 dupes = 20 original
SvenZZon's Chip Disk: 22 files, 5 dupes = 17 Original
Total = 37 Originals

Music Total: 463 Files

SvenZZon included a little intro with his music disk. I did not realize that until yesterday. Here is a capture of this mini intro. It's from 2004 as his music disk. Code by Red and Graphics by Webpige0/SAC. Music by SV of course hehe.

Backup Link to Video on YouTube.com
Download the video in AVI format from Mediafire.com

I then also found an intro with the same file name (except SACtros where it is expected).

File Name Dupe Executable: FRX-CRO1.EXE

in Pack 18
Date Created: Saturday, May 29, 1999, 00:03:38
Size: 26,063 bytes

in Pack 19
Date Created: Monday, September 06, 1999, 14:09:58
Size: 26,331 bytes

The date and size of the executables are different so I count the re-release as a file duplicate only although its not an entirely new intro (borderline cheat hehe).

More Downloads

• SAC Original NFO Files and File_IDs-!nfo.rar (286 KB)
• SAC Original PPEs - !PPE.rar (132 KB)
• SAC Original ANSI Art - !ANSI.ORG.rar (616 KB)
• SAC Original ASCII Art - !ASCII.Org.rar (2 MB)
• SAC Original Exe and Tools - !Exe.ORG.rar (7,4 MB)
• SAC Music in MP3 Format (over 400 individual files)

Okay, that's it for now.

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

INC Rules! Flame War ANSI Animation from 1992

Okay, I changed my mind. I wrote yesterday that it will be my last post during the holidays and here I am now, writing another post hehe.

I did in the past already some sound-overs for ANSI animations, which come by default without any sound effects or music. I posted one of them with my post about ANSI animation, the Korova Milkbar ANSImation by Blade Runner/ACiD (Ansi Creators in Demand) . I didn't write a post about the other, but I also did a sound update of the ANSImation "The Bog" by Tracer and Jed of ACiD. Since I did not post about it, I also included it in this post further down.

For the Korova Milkbar video I even recorded my own voice for the spoken dialogs (something that I didn't do really for the others. The "The Bog" video has voice-overs, but heavily distorted, making my voice unrecognizable.

The ANSI animation that I just dug up recently is titled "INC Rules!" ("rulez" in "leet-speak" hehe). It is long, very long for this type of stuff, over 1 minute. The ANSI animation (ANSImation) was created by Amroth/iCE (Insane Creators Enterprise) for the pirate (Warez) game release group INC (International Network of Crackers) on the MS DOS PC in 1992.

INC had some "Flame War" going with its rival FLT, Fairlight, which is the subject of this ANSI animation. As I mentioned already, the original ANSI animation had no sound whatsoever. I added foley (sound) effects and the background ambience music to pep it up a little and make it more enjoyable.

Have a good laugh!

Disclaimer: This video tries to depict images of severe graphic violence in really bad resolution (text mode), not suitable for illiterate persons and folks with too much imagination or fantasy, who tend to see more in things than everybody else (= than there are). ;-)

INC Rules video backup link, YouTube.com

Download video in AVI format at Mediafire.com

And here is my older "The Bog" ANSI animation by Jed and Tank/ACiD from 1992 with full "voice-over". My previous disclaimer applies to this video as well hehe.

The Bog video backup link, YouTube.com

Download video in WMV format at Mediafire.com

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

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

ANSI Animations Part Deux

I posted in January a detailed post about what ANSI animation is, hence the "part deux" for the title of this post. If you want to know what ANSI animations are and how they are created, check out my previous post.

I discovered some additional ANSI animations thanks to PabloView. ACiDView for Windows obviously did not show them properly or I just never looked at those ANSI's right, which could also be the case. Anyhow, I was using PabloView to browse some old art packs and realized that the AAA art packs from 1991 consisted mostly of ANSI animations. The majority of the animations were pretty short, they also look a bit "rough", but you have to keep in mind that this stuff is pre-ACiD and pre-iCE material, so give the artists a break. They were kind of pioneers back then and had no clue where this whole thing would lead to one day.

At the same time I decided to make a video that highlights some of the ANSI animations from my last post, but also a bunch of really great (and long) still ANSI pictures with hundreds of lines in length.

So I ended up creating two videos. :) Here is the first one ... Background music is by Jeroen Tel from the C64.

It starts off with a bunch of ASCII and ANSI logos by myself. It shows the ASCII version of a logo first and then peels it away to show the ANSI version of the exact same logo. I thought it would be nice. Then follow a bunch of really long and really cool ANSI images by various artists (from ACiD, iCE and other groups) and then shows ANSI animations from 1992 by members of ACiD (ANSI Creators in Demand, in case you forgot)

Backup Link to video on Google Video.

You can download this video in AVI format at Mediafire.com

About the second video ...

Classic ANSI Animations from 1991 by Members of the first PC ANSI Art Scene Group, AAA - Aces of ANSI Art, Mondoman, RaD Man (founder of ACiD in 1992), Shadow Demon and Willie. I warned you already that they are a little bit more rough, but that's how it started man. Remember your history! a smart man once said. ;)

Creating thumb nail images, uploading all captures of the ANSI animations manually to YouTube and then creating a table grid in my blog post was a pain in the neck to do and I decided not to do it again for this post, sorry folks.

I made instead one video where I also added some nice music by Jeroen Tel, Rob Hubbard and JCH/Vibrants. The Individual pieces included in the video are...

• Mondoman: Above the Law, Astral Plane, ICE Castle, Lost Castle, Seven Heaven, Shadow Gate, The Inner City 1 & 2, The Pits, Total Recall, Tower of High Society
• RaD Man: Hamburger Heaven, Hard Kod, Logix Probe, Louder Than Bombs
• Shadow Demon: Final Frontier, Hamburger Heaven, Hard Kod, The Pits
• Willie: Pistol, Rush

Voila, the video...

Backup link to video on Google Video.

You can download this video in AVI format at Mediafire.com

You are still able to download the individual video captures of each animation individually in the original resolution as I recorded them in. Check out this shared folder at Mediafire.com for the individual videos. This folder also contains the previous captures of ANSI animations by ACiD and iCE.

You can also download the original AAA art packs in zip format, with the old school .ANS files included.
Aces of ANSI Art packs: aaa-8991.zip (382 KB) and aaa-vol2.zip (11 KB)

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

Custom ASCII Art Prints

While I was at DefCon in Las Vegas did I check out a vendor who did custom t-shirts. This stuff is often very cheaply done and the t-shirts don't last very long. Three times washing it and the print would fade out. What caught my interest was the fact that they actually did very professional and high quality print and that for a reasonable price.

I always wanted to have some nice ASCII or ANSI printed on a shirt so I showed them a few ASCIIs and asked them, if they could do it. I am not an expert in this kind of stuff, but it turned out that block ASCII was actually very hard for them to do, because they convert the image to vector graphics first and use that pattern when they do the actual print. They said that the creation of that vector pattern will take forever, because it has to break down all the individual lines. And there are a lot of lines in Block ASCII hehe.

I agreed for the higher price tag, if I can get in return the vector file, which will allow me to do additional copies fairly easy without spending a lot of money. They agreed and said that it will take a while and that it will be impossible to do it right there at the conference and be done the same day. No problem, the conference was still on for another two days so I agreed to give them time until the last day of the show.

The Results
... were pretty amazing. I had them make me two t-shirts, one with a SAC ASCII logo by Hetero and another one with my own Dytec ASCII logo. Here are two photos showing me wearing the t-shirts. The Dytec logo color is a gray, like the original font color in MS DOS. The SAC logo is in bright and shiny white.

Below each photo is a link to the original ASCII art piece on my website for comparison.


See original ASCII


See original ASCII
Pretty cool eh? I was thinking about creating some more t-shirts and may be sell them off my site, but I don't know if there is any interest in that kind of stuff. If you are interested, leave a comment here at my blog to let me know. If enough people are interested, I will consider it. If you can't wait and would like to get the same t-shirts, which I am wearing in those pictures, read the next paragraph.

A Little Gift
I was thinking about it and said to myself "what the heck!". Here are the vectorized versions of the two ASCIIs, which were used for the prints and were the most time consuming and expensive part of the whole process. I zipped them up and the file is about 2 MB in size. The file format is ".ai" whatever that might be, but the shop I used for the prints is able to use them and print additional t-shirts very easily and cheap, because they can load it right into their printing machine without any pre-processing.

ASCII-VectorImages-Print.zip

You can thank me for it by linking to RoySAC.com, making a donation (see any of my arts detail pages) or buying some of my mouse pads or something like that. I nice thank you and a drink (if we ever get a chance to meet in person) will also do I guess hehe.

Where Can You Get Something Like This?
The shop that did the t-shirts also does other types of custom prints. I was asked a few times where you could get ANSI art as a poster or large picture to hang it on to your wall. Here is the answer to that question: custom print. It is not cheap, but it also does not cost an arm and a leg. You also have to worry about a frame. You might want to ask them if they would take care of the framing for you. Keep in mind that a framed picture is harder to ship and would increase the cost for that.

I can recommend the print shop that did the t-shirts for me, it is called LBGFX Solutions. You can visit their website at LBGFX.com. They are located in National City in California. You can also contact the owner directly via email. His name is Liz Dela Cruz and his email is lizdcruz at gmail dot com. Tell them that I recommended him. He will not remember my name, just tell him "the guy with the ASCII prints at DefCon 15" and he will remember :).

Another print shop I know who does this kind of print and also understands what you are talking about if you ask for an "ANSI" to get printed are the guys from ShadowVex for whom I created the custom DefCon ANSI. They are located in Oregon and their website is more or less under construction and promotes their DJ'ing and not their custom printing. They organized the sound and music for one of the official DefCon parties btw. and they do sell t-shirts and a lot of other custom printed merchandizing for DefCon at the conference for over 10 years now. I talked with them about the need of a website and maybe some ecommerce features while I was in Vegas. It is on their to-do list. In the meantime is the best way to contact them via email. The name of the guy is Kevin Whitesmith and his email is Kevin at shadowvex dot com. Say "Hi" from me, if you decide to email him.

Cheaper Alternatives
For simpler prints do you not have to get fancy. I used deviantART for some stuff, like my ASCII and ANSI mouse pads and postcards. I blogged about them last November in greater detail.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Buy ANSI Print	Buy ASCII Print

Another alternative for this kind of stuff would also be CafePress. They also do t-shirts, but be careful and keep in mind that the quality of those t-shirts is probably not getting even close to the quality print done by a professional custom print shop.

Good luck and happy printing :). Cheers!
Carsten aka 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

Introduction to the World of Demos

The demoscene is huge. The demoscene is international. The demoscene spans across all computer platforms, including game consols.

However, the existence of something like the demoscene is unknown to most people.

Table of Contents

• Introduction


• 1. The Commodore 64


• 2. The Commodore Amiga 500


• 3. The Old School IBM PC (MS DOS)


• 4. Remakes

Introduction

Let me introduce this vast scene to you via a few hand picked examples of the releases produced by the demoscene during its early days and prime.

The demoscene is active to this day and produces exciting entertainment even on platforms that are not available today anymore. Most current productions are nowadays for the IBM PC and run on any standard Windows XP machine with DirectX and Direct3D compatible Graphics Cards with 3D Accelleation and DirectSound compatible Soundcard.

The Demos presented here are for much older platforms and can not be replayed without special software and some special computer knowledge on modern PCs; but thanks to Google Video and YouTube is that not a big problem today, because it enables me to show you the Video recordings of those old productions as if you were running it on those old machines yourself.

The Videos were created by other Demosceners and are available on DVD for purchase. The Commodore 64 production was taken from the "Digital Memories" DVD, the Commodore Amiga productions were taken from the Mindcandy DVD Volume 2 and the oldschool PC Demos were taken from the Mindcandy DVD Volume 1.

Enjoy!

1. The Commodore 64

The following C64 Demo and more can be found on the DVD titled "Digital Memories", which can be purchased at Amazon.com. There is no need to get an original Commodore 64 computer with Floppy Drive and original Demo Diskettes.

For people who want to learn more about C64 Demo releases, the Groups that created them and more, visit the CSDB - The Commodore 64 Release Database created by C64.org.

Tower Power by Camelot

Release Year: 1994
More Information: CSDB entry
Download original demo: Zip archive

The 1994 Commodore 64 Demo Tower Power by Camelot, who are legendary in the C-64 demoscene. The Demo was first presented at The Party 4 in Herning Denmark. Slammer of Camelot was the coder of this great The Party release. The Demo won first place in the C64 Demo Competition.

Credits
Coder: Slammer
Music: Jeff
Graphics, Charset: Kring
Graphics, Charset: Neptune
Graphics, Charset: Rob
Graphics: Vic
Loader: Glasnost

2. The Commodore Amiga 500

The following Amiga 500 demos were taken from the Mindcandy DVD Volume 2 - Amiga Demos. The DVD contains a lot more Amiga Demos and can be purchased at Amazon.com without the need to get an old Amiga 500 computer and floppy discs to enjoy the best demos from this platform.

For people who want to learn more about the Amiga demoscene and its releases, check out Amigascene.org, the Amiga Demoscene Archive (ADA) or the Amiga Demos Podcast.

Hardwired by The Silents & Crionics

Release Year: 1991
More Information: Pouet.net entry
Download original demo: Disk 1 & Disk 2

Legendary Commodore Amiga 500 demo from the year 1991. Silents and Crionics created the demo Hardwired in a joint partnership project and presented it at The Party 1 in 1991 in the Amiga demo competition. It won 2nd place, right behind the demo "Odyssey" from Alcatraz. The Alcatraz demo might have won the competition, but most people do like Hardwired much more than they do Odysey. The reason for that is simple: While Odyssey was a 45 minutes long curiosity (which is very repetitive), is Hardwired an well designed piece of hard-core coding and pleasant entertainment.

Credits
Coder: The Spy
Coder: Deftronics
Coder: Guzzler
Coder: Murphy
Coder: Saxs
Graphics: Mikael Bale
Graphics: Sionic
Graphics: Zycho
Music: Jesper Kyd



State of the Art by Spaceballs

Release Year: 1992
More Information: Pouet.net entry
Download original demo (DMS File): Amigascene.org

The demoscene newcomers Spaceballs surprised the visitors of The Party 2 at Aars, Denmark in 1992 with their music video like looking techno track demo for the Commodore Amiga 500 and won the first place in the Amiga demo competition. The Demo became even that popular outside the realm of the Demoscene that it was shown on the popular Music TV Channel MTV.

Credits
Coder: Lone Star
Coder: Major Asshole
Graphics: TBM Designs
Music: Travolta



Desert Dream by Kefrens

Release Year: 1993
More Information: Pouet.net entry
Download original demo (DMS files): Disk 1 & Disk 2

Desert Dream by the demo grouup Krefrens, the legendary demo for the Commodore Amiga 500 computer from 1993. It is considered by many to be one of the best demos ever made for the Amiga 500. Better Amiga demos followed, but those were created on the more powerful Amiga 1200 and compatible.

Credits
Coder, Musician, Gfx: Laxity
Graphics: Airwalk
Graphics: R.W.O.

3. The Old School IBM PC (MS DOS)

Without 3D Accelleration!

The PC Demo videos were taken from the Mindcandy DVD Volume 1 - PC Demos 2 DVD Discs Set, which is available for purchase at Amazon.com.

For people who want to learn more about the IBM PC Demoscene visit Scene.org, which has a huge File archive, scene and Demoparty news and much more. Also check out the Demoscene releases database and community at Pouet.net.

Somewhat releated, which is the reason why I mention it here, is the Defacto2.net Scene Archive for the IBM PC Warez Scene, which includes information about the individual Warez scene groups, Cracktros, Artpacks (ANSI and ASCII) as well as NFO files from Game releases.

Further Information about the PC Demoscene

• Introduction to the Demoscene by Adok/Hugi


• PC Demoscene FAQ by Thomas Gruetzmacher (aka Tomaes)


• More Links are available at my Website

Second Reality by Future Crew

Release Year: 1993
Hardware for Original Demo Presentation: Intel 486 33Mhz, 4 MB Ram, 1 MB Graphics Card (ET400 by Tseng Labs), 1 MB Gravis Ultrasound Soundcard
More Information: Pouet.net entry
Download original demo: File 1 & File 2

This is the world famous PC Demo "second Reality" by the Finish Demo group legend "Future Crew". The Demo won with huge distance to its next competitor the Assembly 1993 demo competition in Finland. The Demo was not available for download right at the party, which caused rumors that Future Crew was cheating by adding extra hardware to the presentation computer (FC was one of the organizers of the demo party). That was of course not true and the rest is history

Credits
Coder: PSI
Coder: Trug
Coder: Wildfire
Graphics: Marvel
Graphics: Pixel
Music: Purple Motion
Music: Skaven



Verses by Electromotive Force

Release Year: 1994
More Information: Pouet.net entry
Download original demo: Scene.org

Machine requirements for original demo
- a 386sx CPU; 486 or faster recommended
- a VGA card; VLB or PCI recommended
- a hard disk; RAM disk recommended
- a Gravis Ultrasound card for music
- 400 kB of free base memory
- 1 MB of free high memory

PC Demo "Verses" by the Finish demo group EMF - Electromotive Force, which won the 1994 demo competition at the Assembly 1994 demo party held in Finland. The demo included some funny image manipulations of a picture of Microsofts Co-Founder and Chairman Bill Gates. Everybody but Bill Gates himself had a good laugh. After all, he deserved it, especially after making (in)famous statements like "640 KB (Memory) is enough for everybody". The last parts of the demo include some of the best phong shading at the time.

Credits
Coder, Graphics: Saracen
Coder, Graphics: The Grim Reaper (TGR)
Coder: Devastator
Coder: Saint
Music, Graphics: Whalebone
Graphics: Shaman & Kerberos
Graphics: Vortex



Dope by Complex

Release Year: 1995
More Information: Pouet.net entry
Download original demo: Scene.org

PC Demo by the legendary demogroup Complex from 1995. The Demo won the first place at The Gathering 1995 demo competion. The statement "Complex, World Domination" might have been true when the demo was shown, but that domination was only very short lived. The Demo "Stars" by Noon took over that position only a few months after the release of "Dope" in the Summer of the same year.

Credits
Coder: JMagic
Music: Jugi
Graphics: Reward



Stars: Wonders of the World by Noon

Release Year: 1995
More Information: Pouet.net entry
Download original demo: Scene.org

"Stars" by the French demo group with the name "Noon" is a PC demo that was created in 1995. The demo has a weird sound, but the effects were top notch at the time. The demo won 1st place at the Assembly 1995 demo competition in Helsinki, Finland.

Credits
Coder: Karl
Coder: Barti
Graphics: Ra
Music: Groo

4. Remakes

It is said: Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.

Proof for this statement are the following productions, which are remakes of famous demos from the Amiga 500 and IBM PC (the originals were introduced above). Two of the remakes were done on the much slower and powerless Commodore 64 computer and the other one is a high end and top of the line animation that was just recently done. Each remake tried to remain as close as possible to the look, feel and sound of the original as possible. Those remakes are not attempts of creating a cheap knock-off, they were created because of true and pure appreciation of the original works.

Second Reality

Original Demo by: Future Crew
Original Platform: IBM PC
Original Release Year: 1993

Remake by: Smash Design
Platform: Commodore 64
Remake Release Year: 1997
More Information: CSDB entry



Desert Dream

Original Demo by: Kefrens
Original Platform: Amiga 500
Original Release Year: 1993

Remake by: Mat Recardo and Chris Crusher
Platform: ALL (Animation)
Remake Relase Year: 2007



and another remake of Desert Dream

Remake by: Resource and Chorus
Platform: Commodore 64
Remake Release Year: 2007
More Information: CSDB entry



Conclusion
The demoscene produced thousands of releases for all computer platforms that ever existed, including game consols. There is a vast and rich world to explore out there. I tried to provide you with a small glimpse of it and hope that I was able to spark some interest into this hidden world that is unknown to most people. I hope that you were at least entertained by the productions I presented to you today.

Demoscene Resources

• Scene.org


• Defacto2.net Scene Archive


• Pouet.net


• C64.org


• CSDB - The Commodore 64 Release Database


• Amigascene.org


• Amiga Demoscene Archive (ADA)

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

Official Re-Launch of RoySAC.com

I made the final touches on the site today. Everything related to ASCII and ANSI Text art is now moved to its new home. In addition to the move were several design changes made and more content was added as well. Existing content was updated and in some cases cconsiderably extended.

I am proud to announce today the official Re-Launch of RoySAC.com.

The new site is completely dedicated to oldskool BBS and underground ASCII and ANSI art. Online galleries with hundreds of art pieces, articles, ascii tutorial, ascii editor and viewer downloads, related DVDs and books and background information.

I submit the news about the Re-Launch to Digg.com. If you like the Site and have a Digg.com account, go to the entry about the launch at digg and digg the news story.

Parallel did I launch an AdCast Campaign at deviantART.com. An Ad that promotes the new Site will be displayed 1,250,000 times across the deviantART Website during the next week.

If you have any comments or suggestion for the new site, let me know. I am open to any suggestions. Is there anything that is missing that you would like to see on the site in the future?

Thank you for your interest in oldskool ASCII and ANSI Text art
I appreciate that

Cheers,
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

ASCIIs that are NOT ASCIIs - or are they?

It wasn't the first time that somebody said to me, that one of my "ASCIIs" is labeled wrong as such and should be labeled "ANSI".

He was referring to what is also called a "Block ASCII". He is right and wrong with his comment and I will try to explain that.

The Extended IBM Code Pages (Code page 437 in the US and 850 in Germany) are part of the 8-Bit DOS character set and a proprietary (ANSI) standard by IBM.

The Extended Code pages include several special Graphical Characters that go beyond the 7-bit US-Character set of 128 characters supported by any other Operating System on the PC and Mainframe including MAC, Unix and Linux.

Those special Characters are considered ASCII by most people that owned and used a PC (especially the PC Demo, Underground Art and Warez Scenes). It was referred to them as "High ASCII" or "Block ASCII" although they are technically not ASCII. Only the 128 characters that are part of the 7-bit US-Character set are truly ASCII.

ANSIs on the other hand were called documents (are called) that used special Escape Sequences for color coding and other features.

These documents require the ANSI.sys driver being loaded in order to view the document correctly. ANSI.sys was not required to display "plain" "High ASCII" characters.

Because of that and the stupid name Microsoft gave the driver to display .ANS files (ANSI.sys), did Tens of thousand (if not more) of people on the IBM PC and compatible classify ASCII and ANSI the way they did for over 2 decades. Yes, labeled incorrectly.

No scientific debate will change the past and I won't start changing it either . The mislabeling was never corrected when there was the chance and when it became known, was it already too late. The incorrect terminology got already stuck in the mind of the users and could not be corrected anymore. Live with it!

Example. Here is a Logo that is indisputably an ASCII by all standards and definitions. This is the same Logo, the "Energy" NFO ASCII using "Block ASCII" or ""High ASCII" Style and now look at the "ANSI" Version of the "ASCII" using Escape Sequences for Color Coding.

I guess you have to live with this incorrectness as much as I did for over 15 years. If you want to learn more about the Styles used on the PC by the "Underground", have a look at my article "The three Styles of the Underground Text Art Scene".

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.

31 Pieces of Art added to my deviantART Page

I spent several hours today on my home page at deviantART. I added 31 ASCII's, ANSI's and VGA's from my personal "best of" collection.

It wasn't the upload of the art that took so much of my time. What took the time was writing comments for every single uploaded piece of my art. Some Comments were quite detailed and have some inside details about the Group, BBS, FTP Server (etc.) the Art Work was created for.Also some interesting stories about the actual circumstances that lead to the creation of the individual piece. It's often not only interesting to read for the people that were also part of the scene at those times and can personally relate to the things I am talking about. It is also interesting for the viewer who never had anything to do with the whole thing and is just interested in the classic art of ASCII and ANSI Text Art and Low-Res VGA (320x200 256 Colors or 640x480 16 Colors).

Whatever the case, I believe it will be worthwhile for you to stop by and have a look for yourself. Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

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

Sample ANSI and ASCII Screen Shots

Here are two sample screenshots of my work to give you an idea what you are dealing with here. One is an ASCII (in "Block" or "High" ASCII Style) and the other a classic BBS ANSI. Between the 2 passed almost 8 years, most of it dedicated to SAC. I produced all in all over 700 pieces of ASCII, ANSI and VGA Art between 1992 and now.

Deviance NFO File Ascii Logo (2002)
I created this ASCII in 2002 after I retired from SAC. I used to play HOMM3 (Heroes of Might and Magic 3) a lot and Deviance released HOMM4, the sequel which I appreciated very much and decided to do an Ascii for them, because I did not like the one they used for the HOMM4 release. Since I did not have any active contacts with the "scene" delivery of the Ascii became somewhat of a problem. I am not sure until this day, if they ever got it or not.
My pre-ordered copy of HOMM4 arrived a few days later via mail which I sadly never played as much as the previous Version. HOMM5 is coming out soon and I might get to play that one a bit.





Skylight BBS Ansi Logo (1994)
I created this ANSI for my friend and fellow Sysop Gee who operated the BBS called Skylight in Berlin/Germany. I did not founded SAC yet (happened a few months later), which is the reason why the ANSI is not signed Roy/SAC, but Roy/TRSI-Faith of which I was a member of at the time. Although it's one of my older ANSI's, it's still one of my all time favorites.

I did spend a lot time on it and also revised it multiple times. It was also a bit of an experiment for me, because it was not a "classic Roy Style" ANSI. The burning dot of the lower-case "i" became a motive I would re-use in various other ASCII's and ANSI's, but it was this ANSI where I used it first.

You might wonder why the 2 examples posted first in this blog are each from a time outside of SAC. I have to tell you, that I realized that after I posted it. The Text to the samples did I add at a later time, when I realized who this post with just the images was looking like in the RSS Feed of the Blog. Well, It got me thinking. I will let you know, if I find the answer .... :)