User Interfaces of the Demo Scene

(datagubbe.se)

51 points | by zdw 1 hour ago

4 comments

  • userbinator 24 minutes ago
    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.
  • weinzierl 48 minutes ago
    Oh, the memories!

    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.

  • madhu_ghalame 23 minutes ago
    Performance is important, but developer productivity matters just as much. I'm curious how this balances both.
    • noufalibrahim 7 minutes ago
      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.
  • truemotive 57 minutes ago
    Yes! The details about trackers in this post are something I've needed straight away for a chiptune-related project. Thanks for sharing