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The official invite is not released yet, but I won't wait for it.

I'm glad to announce the 17th edition of the Text Mode Demo Compo!

Same rules, same deadlines, same goal: make Text Mode look good!

You have from Nov 11th to Dec 12th to submit a production.
For all the details go to http://tmdc.scene.org.

Extra kewl stuffs and useful links:

• mu6k's Text Mode Framework - Demo and its framework, with full sources
  
• Sol's textgl - Lib for GL in Text mode, using TextFX
  
• Sol's TextFX - the lib alone, that does good looking bitmap to ascii convertion
  
• The TMDC Template - Another easy to use demo framework, with full sources.
  
• Moerder's FTW7 - A fullscreen console wrapper, for Win7 (and Vista and Win8, etc)
  
• Fragment's Console Wrapper - another console wrapper
  

For those who don't know, TextMode demos are a good opportunity to make something quick and simple. There just isn't enough resolution to stay stuck on details. Code-wise, there's a tremendous amount of CPU and RAM per pixel. It a good opportunity to try funky rendering techniques like ray-marching, photon-tracing, voxels, etc.

I wish those (stalled) console wrapper projects were open source and in git so other people could "finish" them..

Mine is not stalled. I rewrote it for this year's Demodays and did the Textmode demo Show with it. Still quite whacky (bad GDI renderer, bad OpenGL renderer), but not stalled. I just totally failed to tell anybody about it. And it works. the ftw7_preview.zip is so broken, I can't even compile working binaries with recent VS Versions.

https://github.com/tom42/ftw7

I had completely forgotten about my (stalled) wrapper.. Anyways, I'll try to get a demo together this year :)

@Moerder: do you have a (stable) binary somewhere for lazy/non-coder people?

No, but I guess I can put up a binary release on the github page within the next few days.

At this point I'd like to point out that FTW7 is exactly what its Name means: a Fullscreen Textmode demo viewer for Windows 7. I have no intention of turning it into something like console2.

Also, for new demos people should consider providing their own fullscreen emulation right in the demo binary itself, as e.g. some of the Hedelmae and Brainstorm demos.

I wanted to include the fullscreen emulation into the framework I released but ... yeah that would have taken a lot more time.

I wanted to release something a bit more lightweight and easier to understand instead of something with a massive amount of features.

The textmode framework I released was used to power all the Brainstorm text-mode demos.

It contains
- 320x200 RGBA framebuffer with basic drawing functions
- downscale algorithm to 80x50 RGBA
- color correction and filter applied at 80x50 RGBA
- LUT based RGBA to 16 color textmode conversion (dithering can be enabled/disabled)
you can edit parameters for the converter (which letters to use), hell feel free to take it apart and tweak it
- basic textmode manipulation functions (put character at given X, Y)
- output to a real console through Win32 API

Also bass.dll
Also a basic switch based way to sync your demo!

Some parts of it was coded with OOP considerations, other parts are just hacked together.

Documentation might be scarse in a some files as it was party coded and after some time I said ... ok this is enough and went to eat some gyros with tons of onions, it's good for you!

If anyone has questions about it just drop me a mail mu6k at rocketmail dot com, I'll help out but won't write the demo for you.

thought about entering. however not sure i will be able to focus on this when i have so many other projects. we'll see..

How do you make Text Mode fullscreen in Windows 7, without using the wrappers?

You don't.

Well, you can capture video and then play the video fullscreen.. ^_^

If you can code, no excuse ---> framework!

@Clyde: maybe with an emulator, and win xp on it. But maybe that still counts a wrapper.


In other news: invite == released!

Still a few days left! Luckily the demo is already half way there..

Submitted!