I vividly remember FastTracker II, and how intuitive and tactile it felt to get things done in it, despite the minimal user interface real estate. As an example, there were no sound effects. So, I routinely manually created echo effects by copying the sounds from one channel to another one of the available channels, offsetting the notes by a few ticks and lowering the volume. It was simpler times.
I first thought "Elite Sinus Producer" and "The Sinus Creator" were trackers specifically designed for creating nasal-sounding music; but of course the explanation for why the term "sinus" came to be used instead of "sine" is likely because many demosceners were from a native European background, and their language retained the Latin origin word instead of deprecating its usage in favour of "sine", as happened in English.
I swear music trackers had the most impressive UI back then. FastTracker and ImpulseTracker were to me the highest piece of art and engineering at the time. They kind of hold up even to this day. Especially ImpulseTracker's instruments and sample editor.
Doesn't mention ScreamTracker. A good example of demo group dogfooding. Unique text based UI too. As far as I can remember this was the first dos tracker.
Never been into building tracks, always the coder (assembler on 6502 and MC68000). Somebody should do a similar article about all the demo build tools like kkrieger, or modern ones like Tixl. Anyway…good old times :)
A nice, somewhat nostalgic read. I had X-Copy and D-Copy both, although I'm more familiar with the later X-Copy editions that were quite purple [0] [1]. It was also my first contact with the concept of disk defrag.
> When a copy was finished (which could take some time), the program helpfully played a little "boing" sound.
And how that "boing" sound worked is interesting in itself. It's one of the few uses of Paula's "attached" mode, where the output of one sound channel is used to modulate the volume or pitch of another.
I suspect that it, like the "sinus" mentioned elsewhere, may well be a result of the scene (at least at the start) being dominated by people natively speaking Northern European Germanic languages.
I started learning English about 43 years ago, and I still struggle with when words are combined or separate in English because it largely follows no logic while in Norwegian it carries meaning.
ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts were as complicated as vim.
For me, Fasttracker II still remains the most nostalgic, intuitive, immersive DAW ever made. Aslo, one of the best thought-out pieces of software in general.
I wrote so many tracks on it, some of which played on local FM radio and in clubs. Fondest memories circa 1996-2001.
Only many years later, Ableton managed to create another DAW that got close to FT in spirit, which is don't impede the creative flow. A DAW written by actual musicians for musicians (hail Robert Henke aka Monolake!).
And recently, Bitwig pulled another stunt and married Ableton Live's simplicity with feature richness more typical of a heavyweight DAW league, without all the inherent clutter.
P.S. This seemingly turned into some kind of advertisement, but it's just gratitude from a devoted user :)
Fasttracker was coded by demoscene people though, namely members of the group Triton (later Starbreeze Studios). It has a couple of demoeffects in its about screen, and even a version of Nibbles (qbasic snake game) you can play.
And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...
My favourite one was on a C64 disk mag called "Input". It looked roughly like this:
menu entry 1
<-> * menu entry 2
menu entry 3
-----------------------------
with
<-> a little space ship
* a projectile
----- the ground
You had to move the spaceship up and down and then fire at the menu entries to select them.
Since the menu entries had gaps between them you could miss. You likely missed by accident even, because control on home-computers was not what we are used to today.
When you missed the projectile was reflected from the opposite wall and if you didn't dodge, it hit your own ship.
The little ship crashed to the ground and a tiny, just a couple of pixels, figure appeared complaining and dragging his broken ship off the screen.
This reminds me why I studied CS. I planned to do something else but one day in school we got the assignment to write a computer program and I wrote an ascii scroller game instead and I realized how fun that is and changed my plans to become a programmer.
I miss the colorful interfaces of DOS, before standardisation and "human interface guidelines" were even a thing.
As a kid, running an .exe from the floppy discs my father was bringing home from work meant being blasted with unknown colours and sounds, never knowing what to expect. Just experiencing random user interfaces from programs and games was great fun.
The demoscene still exists, although it doesn't seem to attain a lot of new members, and most (not all!) of the activity is back on oldschool platforms like Amiga or similar. See e.g. https://www.pouet.net/; Assembly 2026 is this weekend, so there's likely to be new interesting releases coming out.
Another good one is the visual editor of .werkkzeug3 used to make .kkrieger which serves as an alternative interface to the typical node based shader editor.
I mostly just wrote mine by hand unless I needed something complex. E.g. just halving the y delta until 1, then doubling the x delta for however long, then the reverse.
The screenshot of "The Virus Protector 1.0" brings back ancient memories. If I remember right, it played a short jingle from the Queen song "A kind of magic" whenever it had removed a virus. It sure felt very magic at the time.
As should be clear from the screenshots, in the 80's and 90's we were entirely unable to perform without gradients everywhere. Even my school notebooks where full of pencil- and pen-drawn logos full of gradients. At least one submitted essay had a heavily gradient-laden front page.
More seriously, most of the scene were teenage boys who were playing, not doing serious work. While some of the tools were mostly productivity focused (e.g. the assemblers, trackers), perceived cool-factor outweighed productivity for a huge proportion of them.
For the trackers in particular, while there were still the embossed metallic look and sometimes gradients, the dense UI is largely a factor of small screens (often down to 14" monitors) and very low resolutions giving you very little to play with. And the thing is, while it's messy, everything is there on one screen, and almost every tracker followed almost exactly the same principles and layout, so you learnt quickly enough.
Productivity was usually excellent once you discovered and learned all the little details of the UI, which could take a while (think of vim versus regular text editors). Most of those tools were basically 'single-page-apps', e.g. all features crammed into a single UI page, but it also meant that all features were only one mouse click away.
Yes but going really far down that path has given us sterilized UIs that have no character and no personality. Every website and app looks more or less the same. I, for one, enjoy a thriving baroque culture of weird interfaces with different levels of usability. Given the nature of the people who write these (usually for themselves or their teams), I'm sure usability was important and good atleast for their own audiences.
I remember FastTracker II pretty well from the gatherings we had with our demoscene friends in Buenos Aires. Many of them worked exclusively with it for our demos.
I like that the demo scene is quite creative. It seems as if the non-demo scene kind of abandoned creativity to a large extent here, at the least with regards to the User Interface. I noticed almost the same with regards to menuet OS. Personally I would not use Assembly, but creativity is still leading to changes: https://menuetos.net/
I vividly remember FastTracker II, and how intuitive and tactile it felt to get things done in it, despite the minimal user interface real estate. As an example, there were no sound effects. So, I routinely manually created echo effects by copying the sounds from one channel to another one of the available channels, offsetting the notes by a few ticks and lowering the volume. It was simpler times.
Maybe I should pick it up again, limited tools are great :) That's why I also love my small Volca collection.
I first thought "Elite Sinus Producer" and "The Sinus Creator" were trackers specifically designed for creating nasal-sounding music; but of course the explanation for why the term "sinus" came to be used instead of "sine" is likely because many demosceners were from a native European background, and their language retained the Latin origin word instead of deprecating its usage in favour of "sine", as happened in English.
Can confirm it's sinus in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, French.
Also in Polish.
Can confirm all sceners call it sinus in Spain :)
German
I swear music trackers had the most impressive UI back then. FastTracker and ImpulseTracker were to me the highest piece of art and engineering at the time. They kind of hold up even to this day. Especially ImpulseTracker's instruments and sample editor.
Doesn't mention ScreamTracker. A good example of demo group dogfooding. Unique text based UI too. As far as I can remember this was the first dos tracker.
Never been into building tracks, always the coder (assembler on 6502 and MC68000). Somebody should do a similar article about all the demo build tools like kkrieger, or modern ones like Tixl. Anyway…good old times :)
.werkkzeug1 was also my first though while scrolling through the article
I loved .kkrieger. The best first person shooter 96kb ever produced! :) [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
A nice, somewhat nostalgic read. I had X-Copy and D-Copy both, although I'm more familiar with the later X-Copy editions that were quite purple [0] [1]. It was also my first contact with the concept of disk defrag.
[0] https://jope.fi/xcopy/releases.html
[1] https://jope.fi/xcopy/img/xcopy/xcopyapr93en.png
> When a copy was finished (which could take some time), the program helpfully played a little "boing" sound.
And how that "boing" sound worked is interesting in itself. It's one of the few uses of Paula's "attached" mode, where the output of one sound channel is used to modulate the volume or pitch of another.
I put the full source code of the boing sound here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174583
Not trying to be a jerk, but demoscene is one word afaik?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
and everyone wrote it as a single word, here in comments to this article.
It can be either. In the demoscene, sceners just call it the scene.
They also like to agglutinate words, e.g. copyparty, sizecoding and so on.
You can split or join the word if you like.
I suspect that it, like the "sinus" mentioned elsewhere, may well be a result of the scene (at least at the start) being dominated by people natively speaking Northern European Germanic languages.
I started learning English about 43 years ago, and I still struggle with when words are combined or separate in English because it largely follows no logic while in Norwegian it carries meaning.
The demoscene is full of funny-English words — ”compo”, ”graphician”…
ahhh, fasttracker. my best friend made albums and albums of "dope industrial" with that in the 90s... I had the cassette tapes in my car. I watched him on it a lot. He was the only one of us who didn't play guitar or bass or keyboards (he was a drummer). I'd say that was a very sophisticated piece of software, small on size though it was, not comparable to a demoscene demo in any way. But iirc the keyboard shortcuts were as complicated as vim.
For me, Fasttracker II still remains the most nostalgic, intuitive, immersive DAW ever made. Aslo, one of the best thought-out pieces of software in general.
I wrote so many tracks on it, some of which played on local FM radio and in clubs. Fondest memories circa 1996-2001.
Only many years later, Ableton managed to create another DAW that got close to FT in spirit, which is don't impede the creative flow. A DAW written by actual musicians for musicians (hail Robert Henke aka Monolake!).
And recently, Bitwig pulled another stunt and married Ableton Live's simplicity with feature richness more typical of a heavyweight DAW league, without all the inherent clutter.
P.S. This seemingly turned into some kind of advertisement, but it's just gratitude from a devoted user :)
There's also Renoise, which tries to marry the contemporary DAW with a tracker-style timeline.
https://www.renoise.com
Fasttracker was coded by demoscene people though, namely members of the group Triton (later Starbreeze Studios). It has a couple of demoeffects in its about screen, and even a version of Nibbles (qbasic snake game) you can play.
And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...
Oh, the memories!
My favourite one was on a C64 disk mag called "Input". It looked roughly like this:
with You had to move the spaceship up and down and then fire at the menu entries to select them.Since the menu entries had gaps between them you could miss. You likely missed by accident even, because control on home-computers was not what we are used to today.
When you missed the projectile was reflected from the opposite wall and if you didn't dodge, it hit your own ship.
The little ship crashed to the ground and a tiny, just a couple of pixels, figure appeared complaining and dragging his broken ship off the screen.
This reminds me why I studied CS. I planned to do something else but one day in school we got the assignment to write a computer program and I wrote an ascii scroller game instead and I realized how fun that is and changed my plans to become a programmer.
I miss the colorful interfaces of DOS, before standardisation and "human interface guidelines" were even a thing.
As a kid, running an .exe from the floppy discs my father was bringing home from work meant being blasted with unknown colours and sounds, never knowing what to expect. Just experiencing random user interfaces from programs and games was great fun.
I wonder if there still is a demo scene? It is easier than ever to make cool stuff. I wonder in which scenes it happens?
The demoscene still exists, although it doesn't seem to attain a lot of new members, and most (not all!) of the activity is back on oldschool platforms like Amiga or similar. See e.g. https://www.pouet.net/; Assembly 2026 is this weekend, so there's likely to be new interesting releases coming out.
Another good one is the visual editor of .werkkzeug3 used to make .kkrieger which serves as an alternative interface to the typical node based shader editor.
https://media.demozoo.org/screens/o/82/e2/a055.334456.png
Wow this looks like the Unreal Tournament interface somewhat
Yes! The details about trackers in this post are something I've needed straight away for a chiptune-related project. Thanks for sharing
Oh wow, great read! I was an amiga demo scene coder down here in Australia, spent many long nights in asm-one :)
I had no idea there were tools for pre-calc lookup tables back then! Instead I just generated my own from code as I assumed everyone else was :D
Using pre-calc sine tables freed up so many clock cycles.
Big shout to all the sceners on here! I really do miss coding 68k asm sigh :)
Greetings from Spain!
We somehow got a copy of Defy diskmag, started swapping with Cro^Cydonia and got to enjoy Satisfaction Guaranteed by Pearl :)
I always did all my small tools and stuff in blitz basic 2, would dump binary file and incbin them in Devpac.
-- winden^TNC^Network
[ https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=14404 and https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=7645 ]
I mostly just wrote mine by hand unless I needed something complex. E.g. just halving the y delta until 1, then doubling the x delta for however long, then the reverse.
This made me feel old and nastalgic. RIP BBS's
The screenshot of "The Virus Protector 1.0" brings back ancient memories. If I remember right, it played a short jingle from the Queen song "A kind of magic" whenever it had removed a virus. It sure felt very magic at the time.
Performance is important, but developer productivity matters just as much. I'm curious how this balances both.
As should be clear from the screenshots, in the 80's and 90's we were entirely unable to perform without gradients everywhere. Even my school notebooks where full of pencil- and pen-drawn logos full of gradients. At least one submitted essay had a heavily gradient-laden front page.
More seriously, most of the scene were teenage boys who were playing, not doing serious work. While some of the tools were mostly productivity focused (e.g. the assemblers, trackers), perceived cool-factor outweighed productivity for a huge proportion of them.
For the trackers in particular, while there were still the embossed metallic look and sometimes gradients, the dense UI is largely a factor of small screens (often down to 14" monitors) and very low resolutions giving you very little to play with. And the thing is, while it's messy, everything is there on one screen, and almost every tracker followed almost exactly the same principles and layout, so you learnt quickly enough.
Productivity was usually excellent once you discovered and learned all the little details of the UI, which could take a while (think of vim versus regular text editors). Most of those tools were basically 'single-page-apps', e.g. all features crammed into a single UI page, but it also meant that all features were only one mouse click away.
Yes but going really far down that path has given us sterilized UIs that have no character and no personality. Every website and app looks more or less the same. I, for one, enjoy a thriving baroque culture of weird interfaces with different levels of usability. Given the nature of the people who write these (usually for themselves or their teams), I'm sure usability was important and good atleast for their own audiences.
I remember FastTracker II pretty well from the gatherings we had with our demoscene friends in Buenos Aires. Many of them worked exclusively with it for our demos.
I like that the demo scene is quite creative. It seems as if the non-demo scene kind of abandoned creativity to a large extent here, at the least with regards to the User Interface. I noticed almost the same with regards to menuet OS. Personally I would not use Assembly, but creativity is still leading to changes: https://menuetos.net/