h0ffman | A life in The Demoscene & Music Production | Legends in The Cave



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The demoscene is rich with creativity, talent and tales of the people who contribute to it. Veteren “scener” h0ffman tells us his story today from the origins of the scene to modern day demo parties and all that’s involved in being a part of it.

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● Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:12 Book a visit at https://retrocollective.co.uk
09:34 Amigaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
10:23 h0ffman on Discovering the demoscene
11:33 Where did the demoscene come from?
14:47 Our first productions
21:27 Unethical methods of sharing data!
28:14 Further releases
36:40 What is a demoparty & returning to demos?
53:49 First album release
1:00:55 Making my own demos
1:11:11 Anything can be a demo platform
1:19:00 Game development

● Episode Links
DJ Set: https://youtu.be/wVyK_fTuVCU
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28 thoughts on “h0ffman | A life in The Demoscene & Music Production | Legends in The Cave”

  1. Extremely enjoyable! thanks for posting this up. Brings back a lot of memories from the 90s, I remember watching a lot of demos and playing a lot of mod files. Lot of messing around in Turbo Pascal to try and replicate some of the effects, and remember swapping a lot of code on fidonet and BBSes.

    Reply
  2. I had the same curiosity if I could make a demo, being a musician aswell, so I made a Javascript demo (using p5.js). But since I'm an Amigascener by heart I now found it very intriguing to make something with the Rose Engine 😀
    .. got to finish my album first though. (for real xD)

    Reply
  3. Great talk, like a lot of us of a certain age, we really liked the demo scene. I ran along similar lines for the first part of the talk, ZX81, Spectrum 48K, Spectrum 128K but then went Atari ST but I also bought an Amiga. Moving house in 1993 killed things for me and I didn't really carry on.

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  4. Splendid auto-bio presentation, Ian. And a teary eye view back over a decade now (ooold) when we first crossed paths at said Revision, competed against each other in the Amiga 64k compo, had lots of cheers together and even spun the good old "Ardcore on one of those late nights, even though I couldn't manage the half-a-second delay of the PA and basically (almost literally) threw records at you to make 'em sweat. Since Revision WILL be a real thing this year again, I hope to finally crack a beer again with you!

    Cheers mate

    p.s. they changed the rules for the Tracked Music compo because of you hooligans. No more "demo fx on patterns" ;D

    Reply
  5. I have a similar story to the “do not use VHS as a backup” one, but minus the VHS part!

    My Amiga 1200 was in storage for years along with the disks. One day I became all nostalgic and set it up. I had a small internal hard drive at this point so had some stuff, but the majority of my coding, mod music and graphics were all on disks.

    I tried loading some stuff from one disk, didn’t read properly.

    Tried another, same issue. And another and another and another …

    Eventually I decided all the disks must be so old that they’d demagnetized or were just damaged.

    So I took every disk and threw them away, heart-breaking.

    It was only about a year later I discovered it was probably only the disk drive that was faulty.

    I was gutted.

    Reply

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