pouët.net

In 2002 it was. In 2012 is not.


WTF! Why?!



He used lagarith which is lossless ;)

hfr: That one is *really* good! And is the whole thing with the full scroller. Thanks a lot for that!

oasiz: Downloading your capture. Thanks for that too!

Copyright / trademark issues, I suppose.

You're welcome, i'm glad you like it.
If you're looking for anything else check the others or make a wish.

The disc was send to Dolby Labs for certification, to allow for the "Dolby Digital" logo on the case and disc. They asked for the Second Reality "logo" to be removed since the demo itself was never certified (it uses "out of phase stereo", summing the surround-channel samples with their inverted waveforms, for older Pro Logic decoders).

We did the same thing for volume 2, but decided to forego the certification for volume 3, because they required use of encoding software which was out of our price range.

Already downloading them ;)

For a DOS demo in 320x200 it won't make a difference between 480p (DVD), 720p and 1080p (Bluray) resolutions.

Encoding does, watch a DOS demo in 360p youtube :)
The idea with blasting up is to avoid chroma subsampling issues, which in short is a cheap way to get more stuff in the same space. Instead of using all 320x240 pixels as individual chroma values, they halve the chroma by /2 as the human eye is more sensitive to brightness changes rather than color changes. This way the chroma resolution is usually halved per scanline. A way to go around this very-popular limitation present in modern codecs, you can upblast the video by 2x, thus every "pixel" get's it's individual value. Different "chroma-cheat" methods exist, but this seems to be the most common.
In short: To get 1:1 pixel mapping, resolution is doubled because color resolution gets halved during encoding.

There is no proper way to capture Second Reality as parts of it run at 70Hz but all of our video systems are based on 50 or 60. What we did for MindCandy 1 was force the demo to use 60Hz video modes when it didn't crash the demo, and fall back to 70Hz with frame dropping (this was 2001) for the bits that needed it. I then spliced it all together in the video editor. For audio, I took it from the soundcard (see Crystal Dream 1 for an example of why the demo itself is sometimes the only thing that can play the music properly).

A few demos ran slower when forced to 60hz -- all the 70Hz frames were there, they just played back at 60Hz and so the music got out of sync. For those, I converted 60hz (slow) to 60Hz (faster) by using some early motion synthesis (analyzed 8x8 macroblock movement and generated new inbetween frames -- yes, this was before avisynth and mvtools, you're welcome). The place where this worked the best on MindCandy 1 for Dope, specifically the Asteroid scene. I also used the same technique to "cheat" the endscene of Second Reality -- the ship flyby is 2x smoother than it actually is in the demo. At the time I thought that was the right decision; I don't think it is now, sorry about that.

It is possible to use DOSBOX to do all of the above and assemble it together in an editor. Would someone like me to do that for Second Reality? A "2012 treatment", as it were? i can stick the 60fps HD file on ftp.mindcandydvd.com, suitable for blu-ray if you like.

Some of the people in this thread are Doing It Wrong imo. The only proper way to resize a 320x200 demo is to do it nearest-neighbor and only by integral multiples. If it isn't a 1:1 between the target size and the video frame, pad it.

Here's an example of everything I've discussed: http://vimeo.com/13721586 (Vectdemo). I did this as a request for someone, and it used DOSBOX. The original file is 60fps; Vimeo limits to 30, sorry.

I kinda disagree there. As whatever player you'll use will probably do a final resizing pass to fit the screen size anyway (hands up if you've got a native 720p display! Anyone? Bueller?), DON'T pad and set the Pixel Aspect Ratio in a way that you get the original screen aspect. In the case of 320x200 this would be a PAR of 5:6 - The original 320x200@70Hz mode was 4:3, not 16:10. But yes, scaling up by a perfect integer ratio before encoding is key. :)

Yeah, It's a hard thing to get stuff working properly. VGA-DOS fiddled with so many different screen modes.

Huge respect for taking that much trouble and actually hacking the display modes themselves. I guess this hacking might split opinions but "remastering" certainly is the only way to get the best quality from display devices these days in my opinion, of course while trying to alter the production itself as little as possible.

Hopefully I'll get around getting a scaler for low-res soon and I'll be able to do some DOS/amiga RGB/etc.. demo captures from a real machine. Of course getting DOS demos to sync with 50/60fps capture isn't going to be very pretty but it's the closest you can get, especially with these sub-500euro capturing tools (card, scalers, cap machine) :p
Plus side with this is that I can actually get some reference material to do the encodes with.

DOSBox isn't a DOS application, though, and it can also be run in one forced fullscreen resolution, so I wonder if that would somehow be "kkapture-able"...

That would be great! :)

Unless, of course, it doesn't use any of the many vga tweaks.
I remember using one which made the pixel aspect almost square in mode 0x13.


I've got two hardware players, one refuses to play anything with a non-square pixel aspect, the other one simply ignores it.
It's easy to change the pixel aspect ratio by simply remuxing (eg. with yamb).


Unfortunately Dosbox requires a bit more than just updating a timer for each frame.
And it already has enough timing issues on its' own...

What about messing up with a post processing anti-aliasing filter before resizing?

trixter: oh yes PLEASE!

xrl: nah, resizing is ok. VGA cards did 2x nearest neighbor upscaling anyway for 320x2y0 modes, everyone is pretty used to the pixels looking like squares :)

hq3x it!

6xBR it!

thanx for the capture, hellfire, i am absolutely fine with it!
last times i saw second reality i just watched it as a coder (lame, lame, lame, lame, ok, nice vector-world!) ...this time, watching your capture, made me SEE what others so much like about that demo ;)
went to my demoscene/videos/ - folder :D
( in fact its the music(-sync) and transitions that make this demo really kewl! ok, the code aint that lame after all, but i saw better rotozoomerz (etc) on amiga ;) including mine! so been spoiled and saw SR first time in 2005)

Has anyone tried to make DOSbox optimized for demos so they would be perfect like old DOS days?

Oh and MP4, good job! Wow, so many big pixels and yet many details in HQ I forgot about even at 1280x1024 screen resolution (70 Hz).

What on earth do you mean by "DOSbox optimized for demos"? You mean, like DOS was? (because -- big secret -- it wasn't :)

This is taking longer than I thought because DOSBOX is affecting the timing of the demo. Some parts are definitely not like they are on a real 486. I am going to drag out MC1 and use it as a timing reference. Using GUS in dosbox also causes timing issues that aren't present on the original -- it actually matches up better if you choose SBPro. Still thinking about what to do. Several parts (interlaced plasma, end scroller) only look decent if frames are not added or dropped, so I'm going to hack that up in an editor. Finally, some parts need to be reframed to fit 1280x720 and the entire thing needs aspect ratio correction (otherwise the circles part has skinny circles).

Should have something ready tonight. This will be a "widescreen" mindcandy-ish treatment of Second Reality.

Hellfire: Was the plasma section in your capture was post-processed in some way? If not, what DOSBOX version and settings did you use?