pouët.net

That's quite informative, thanks!

Oh, like using a pen and paper for drawing? :-D /half-s

if you really want a challenge, make a modern pc demo that's actually good. :)

I cannot even acknowledge that a PC is a proper demo platform. It's some kind of weirdo shapeshifting wild compo machine, and you're sinking your production into the youtube ocean in the very moment it is created :-/

Gargaj doesn't seem to be able answering the question either...

well you did say "if you wish"

and mind you, this can be ANY effects you want, in ANY scope, at ANY resolution at ANY framerate

You're never going to let me forget that ever, are you? :)

Havoc: So Gargaj wishes to spout nonsense and then crawl under a rock.
Can you send him a message? It's very short, only five letters. :-)

A M I G A

LOVE U

PIZZA?

Ok who is going to make that t-shirt, its great! Foebane72 don't worry, not the first time :D

P E N I S

venom, haven't thought about that one, very good :)

yes, very good penis, venom!

"maybe"

Or maybe V 3 N O M?

FWIW my 2p (2c) on the topic. Pretty much the only spare time I get to do my retro demo coding is whilst on the train during my long daily commute. If I were unable to use an emulator then, well basically I wouldn’t have released any prods at all for the last few years. Which seems a shame. :) I guess I won’t be hitting dogma level 1 any time soon. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That said, I like farfar and others’ suggestions of different types of creative limitations (beyond the existing technical limitations of an oldschool platform and decreasing size constraints like 64Kb, 4Kb etc.) For example, I very much enjoyed making a prod for the Deadline Three Dee demo last year, obviously the requirement to be viewed correctly with red/cyan anaglyph glasses provided a whole extra dimension to both the technical & creative challenge.

Our prod for Revision this year was an attempt to follow a creative seam that we found interesting whilst resisting some of the usual conventions for modern oldschool demos [no cracktro energy and scrollers here!], although it still has the regular tropes of credits, greets and calling out the party. Hard to resist. :)

Over on CSDb there use to be what i call "esoteric compos".

Things like restricting demos to a specific display mode, sprites only (no bitmap nor character graphics), or, the most esoteric one so far in my book: using only the border (overscan) area (while the regular screen interior remains empty).

(These aren't restricted to demos, there are compos for music with specific waveforms/styles only and such.)

Emulators can be nice programs, and they sometimes give hefty advantages in some areas, so it might be unrealistic to weed them out entirely. :-)

Consider this like an additional challenge for yourself, and marker for effort. Like for example, given two equally likeable productions, people tend to vote for the one which wasn't handed in remotely - and for a good reason, I think.

Emulator aficionados should also remember that nothing supports an emulator more than programming for the real hardware.

Or using a program that would wrap emulator-defeating protection around your executable. =)

But then emulators seem to be an evil(-ish) thing mainly in Amiga world these days, where hastily-created emulator captures of current demos abound.

(And quite a few productions seem to have never been tested on real hardware by their creators.)

There are deliberate and inadvertent emulator checks in some of our productions which give hints (too subtle for the occasional viewer) if it'is run on an emulator or from real hardware. So we could often laugh our asses off when another emu capture showed up on wanktube. :-)

Yes, and seeing the nag message that would tell you to upgrade your 1541U's (C-64 Gotek equivalent in this context) faulty firmware for years at C-64 compos never failed to give me a smile. =) (Still, glad those bugs were eventually fixed... temporarily... and then for good.)

Just wondering: Would you put the dogma (1-3) compliant demos in a separate category/categories, or you’d just have a dogma rating logo™ at the start and rely on the audience to adjust their votes accordingly?