What is the Demoscene? An obscure but influential art form

• 3DMaskDemo1997

  2 13 10.0 C

  Real-Time 3D Texture Bump Reflection Mapping on a Mask. 16-bit DOS, Demo Scene 1997

Like many others, I was also first a demo scene coder, because what else was one to do if you were good at math and computer science but still stuck in high school?

My 1996 era renderer did reflections, bump, color textures, etc all in 16 bit using x86 assembler rasterizers with 256 color palette:

https://twitter.com/benhouston3d/status/1260346800176877571

Source code here: https://github.com/bhouston/3DMaskDemo1997

Nearly 30 years later I am still doing 3D graphics, contributing to Threejs and have run a computer-graphics company for the last ~20 years: https://threekit.com

• three.js

  449 98,873 9.9 JavaScript

  JavaScript 3D Library.

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• demomaking

  3 9 2.6 C

Agreed! I had so much fun as a teen-ager doing this!

I implemented real-time Phong rendering on 486SX (no FPU) with a chrome-like effect (see https://github.com/thbar/demomaking#obez-1995) and this still gives me chills.

I met great people back then, and had a ton of fun.

My only regret is that source code is lost, and decompiling properly is not easy!

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