The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes itself on producing demos, non-interactive audio-visual presentations, which are run real-time on a computer. The main aim of a demo is to show off better programming, artistic and musical skills over other demogroups.
The demoscene first appeared during the 8-bit era on computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, and came to prominence during the rise of the 16/32-bit micros (the Atari ST and the Amiga). In the early years, demos had a strong connection with software cracking. When a cracked program was started, the cracker or his team would take credit via an increasingly impressive-looking graphical introduction called a "crack intro". Later, the making of intros and standalone demos evolved into a new subculture independent of the software piracy scene. Quite a few of the young talents that spent their time "coding" demos and thus gaining in-depth experience programming computer graphics later ended up working in the games industry, whose products they had initially cracked.
Computer Animation
Digital Arts
Computers :: Music
Hacking :: Computers

Orange Juice - The demoscene information center, featuring news, information on people and parties, and a search engine.
Meta Description: [ Nectarine radio is an Internet radio station broadcasting more than 19000 demoscene songs. Nectarine is a free web radio. However the music you can listen to may be kept under various copyrights! You can in NO CIRCUMSTANCE either sell this music nor include any part of it in a commercial or free ... ]
The Demo Scene - Demos are cool. They exist to move you, just as any other art form moves you. But demos are built by programmers, artists, and composers who live and breathe technology. [Gamasutra]
256b.com - An archive of demos of 256 bytes or less.
Meta Description: [ 256bytes demos archive | featuring news and demoscene productions of 256 bytes maximum on all platforms. ]
Defacto 2 - Portal for the underground scene, covering all areas from gaming through emulation to arts. Included is an extensive search engine, a scene portal, international news, a translator and hosted pages.
Meta Description: [ Defacto2.net is the premier site for the underground scene. We cover all areas from gaming, art, music, emulation and old school. Included with in our pages is the extensive Scene Portal, the regularly updated The Scene News and the now famous The Scene Archives. ]
Defence-Force: Demos page - Description of what demos are, some common effects, who makes demos. Available in English and French.
Demoscene Outreach Group - Builds awareness by presenting at the SIGGRAPH and Game Developers Conferences, as well as other events.
Naid.net - Demoscene information source for North America.
Pouet - Multi-platform database of news, groups and productions. Register here and get your own avatar and the chance to appear in a chart table which rewards uploading and commenting others' work. Nice, cute design.
Meta Description: [ pouët.net - your online demoscene resource ]
Scene.org - A site dedicated to the demoscene. At the moment it's oriented in demoscene productions, but promises to provide news, articles, interviews with demoscene people and up-to-date information about upcoming demoparties.
Scenery - A guide to groups, parties and releases on the C64/Amiga demoscene.
Scenet - News and articles, mainly about the non-mainstream scene, from the Amiga to the Amstrad CPC. Also provides a large listing of scener's e-mails and homepages.
Meta Description: [ Scenet ]
Slengpung - The scene photo gallery.
The Hacker Demo Scene and its Cultural Artifacts - A paper that reports on a study undertaken into vernacular forms of multimedia production referred to as demos or intros and variants of these terms among adherents of a computer oriented subculture identifying itself as the scene
Meta Description: [ Explination of what demos are ]
The Story So Far - An introduction to world of computer demos with pictures and links to further information, albeit partly biased towards the Atari ST scene.
Meta Description: [ An overall introduction to computer demos,
demo scene and related issues with lots of links to further information ]
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