pouët.net

Kusma : misguided by haujobb was the demo that kicked our first cocoon demo at wired 97. I remember it was quite good.

nytrik: there's an real poor streaming-video of misguided right here, if you haven't seen it allready though.

Bump! I have my P120 out at the moment with GUS+capture setup. For the next 48 hours, I'll entertain suggestions of stuff to capture and put on youtube. However, please adhere to the following rules:

- DOSBox must not be able to run it
- YouTube must already not have a capture from real hardware of it

So, any requests?

Here's a couple of oddball ones - I personally never had much luck with either of them in DosBox:

Jump by Public NMI - not really anything remarkable about this but it seems to be an early appearance of some of these effects on PC? I don't think the group did anything else that I know of. I got this one off a local BBS in the mid '90s so it was definitely distributed fairly well.

Tempesta by Soft One - another one-hit wonder. I dunno why, I just like this one. It has a pretty nice 'dot vector' for the time and really tight music/visual sync in the first part. Assembly TV has a capture up but it's really poorly done (half the screen missing in some parts.)

I was also going to suggest Legend by Impact Studios and Gust by Camorra, but they appear to have been put on Youtube recently... I can't d/l the vids to check right now though.

Also Blackglass 1 & 2 by Renaissance?

jmph: Just made a couple of screenshots for Tempesta, so that one works in DosBox, just tick off EMS and UMB in the settings.

Sorry for the slight offtopic but:
Trixter, may I ask what scaler / capture HW you use?
I deal with a lot of older stuff as well when it comes to recording and streaming so I wouldn't mind knowing some of the other solutions out there.

Currently I capture with a SC-512N1-L/DVI when it comes to 15Khz material an use a CP-255I scaler to deal with most of DOS stuff due to screen mode changes, but it has a nasty issue with occasional tearing with certain screen modes as it probably doesn't lock in reliably to all of the modes.

What I am more curious about is something that would handle DOS modes reliably, while the cypress scaler does handle some basic modes really well it still could be better. I know that some old broadcast devices can be got pretty cheap but there are multiple options that excel at certain areas from what I have gathered.

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=289
(has youtube and videocapture, but both lack quality)

If you have a Voodoo card, how about Fucktory by Capsicum Tincture? One of the very few 3DFX DOS demos that I know of.

Dimension by Gods is another one, but it seems to have a software renderer as well and is already on Youtube...

State Of Mind by Bomb has only low quality captures on YT:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=26

Has there been a capture of Fairy Tale yet? I can only get it to run glitchy in DosBox (actually it's glitchy on my real system too.)

I really like the first part of it, but it kind of falls apart after that... Was obviously rushed.

^^ BTW I seem to have the source code for that from somewhere. I uploaded it to scene.org - will add the link when its out of /incoming.

gee. i see my old user-account that started this thread. i asked pouet-masters several years ago if they could append it to my current account, but there still seems to be no progress. if that dont work they should just have deleted it..

Thanks for all the suggestions; I'll start working on those that don't already run in DOSBox ok (some of them do). Black Glass 2 is already on youtube. I'm not set up to do 3D/FX right now but when I am I'll revisit this thread. I'll reply again with youtube links when they're up.

My capture hardware varies based on what the demo is doing. I *prefer* using an ATI Rage II card with Y/C output because all the video modes get initialized at 60Hz which obviously captures great. The drawback is that some tweakmodes or timing doesn't always work this way, so for those I use a Sony DSC-1024 scan converter to produce Y/C and capture with that. The DSC-1024 performs field blending to fit a 30i output, but it's better than nothing. It's what Assembly used for over a decade, if that helps.

I know Y/C is 30i, which also limits resolution to 720x480/576, but most of these are DOS demos that use half that vertical resolution so nothing is lost in the end.

I've tried modern capture methods, like HDMI capture boxes with VGA->HDMI converters, and almost all of them freak out when anything other than a standard mode is passed to them. The only modern variant of this that I haven't tried yet is the XRGB framemeister because it's expensive.

Also: I'm going to attempt DOSBox captures first before resorting to analog capture... if DOSBox works, the capture is second to none so it makes sense to try that first. Case in point: Black Glass works fine, so that capture will be done with DOSBox.

The problem I have with Dosbox is that all instructions are 'single-cycle'. This gives many demos unrealistic performance. No matter how you try to tune the speed of Dosbox, some parts run much faster than they would on real hardware, others run much slower.
Also, some optimizations that are faster on real hardware, are slower on Dosbox (eg, using approximations for mul/div with tables), simply because they use more instructions.

Call me a purist, but I think demos should be captured on the actual hardware that they were targeting. Then you can see the demo with the actual performance it was running at.
But well, perhaps that's because I'm a C64/Amiga guy, and 'running in 1 frame' was the holy grail. With most PC captures, everything runs at 60 fps, because the hardware is much faster than what the demo was originally targeted at. This means you can no longer judge the quality/performance of the code properly, so the demo loses part of its context/significance.

I'm pretty sure both would result in an equal database mess.

Some of these demos are just bugged or require specific hardware, kinda nice to play around with though. Getting Dosbox timing accurate with bus, cache, pipelining would be nasty though. But would give a nicer overview about the quality of certain demos.
Elianda is having a busy time capturing some as well on somewhat period accurate hardware so there should be some more youtube links from that coming soon.

PCem tries to emulate instruction timings, bus, cache etc somewhat.
Sadly it is not as compatible as Dosbox is, so I've had trouble getting demos to run (1991 donut works obviously).
Oh well, they might meet somewhere in the middle eventually.

Some demos only run properly on the coder's hardware. In those cases, there is no "real hardware" to capture from other than what the coder had.

When I do a DOSBox capture, I do my best to match the speed of the intended target. Sometimes this results in a not 100% accurate representation of the demo, but I don't put it online unless it looks 95% close enough. If something captures way too fast, obviously I don't use DOSbox.

Here's a capture I just made using real hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PMkEMwtVGw&list=UU49y2dyVZ6_V3dJxrFuzinA
Compare that to the demo running in DOSBox and it is hard to spot the differences. The only reason I had to use real hardware is because of the text/graphics tweakmode at the end.

Well, the problem I describe would mostly manifest itself on a part-by-part basis. So in theory you could do multiple captures of the demo, each time tuning the cycles to make a certain part run at a realistic speed.

That's the fun thing about emulators like Dosbox anyway: you can turn down the speed dynamically, to see just how slow you can set the emulator, while the demo still runs acceptably. Try it with Crystal Dream, and be amazed :)

It's not theory, it's what I do when necessary.

Just got State of Mind working on P120, that will be a real hardware capture. Working on Void 3 but it doesn't like my video card, working on alternative. The others were dumped with DOSBox and will go up soon.

I have made a few captures. Also Void 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrmklYbz5oU

to get it running:
Get the source package from http://www.active-web.cc/html/research/bin/v3src.zip
Use stub.com in a Win9x doswindow. The demo uses DPMI and seems to require exactly the dpmi host present in the dos window of Win9x. It even recommends it when no dpmi host is detected. It did not work in plain DOS with cwsdpmi/qdpmi a.s.o.

Also did:
Black Glass, Black Glass 2, Jump Misguided, Tempesta, Gust and Fucktory.

A few are still uploading, so if you miss one check back later
https://www.youtube.com/user/elianda

Résurrection now from jamm

@Enigma: Next time you're going to do that, it would be nice if you announced it. I spent my entire Sunday afternoon doing most of the requested captures... not happy to know most of those 8 hours were wasted.

So that leaves Fairy Tale, Resurrection Now, and State of Mind, the latter of which I captured from real hardware. I'll upload those three later and submit additions to the pouet pages.

I abandoned Jump because it runs too fast in DOSBox. It's not worth capturing because it runs "good enough" in dosbox and you can see what it is (infinibolls, dot landscape, shadebobs, ripped mods).

Uni by mfx (demozoo / pouet) apparently does not work in dosbox - see the trivia note on demozoo.