Hanno's blog

The 0a000h demoparty just started.

If you don't know what a demoparty is, it's kind of a digital art event about programming stuff that has no meaning beside »looking good«. The 0a000h is a small demoscene party where I'm part of the organizing.

Pictures here.

I just arrived on the Alternative Party in Helsinki. The AltParty is a demoscene party in Finland and it's kind of the smaller splitoff from the Assembly. I was on the Assembly some times in the past.

By saying small, I must say that the AltParty still has about 1000 visitors.

I haven't visited any demoparties for quite a long time and thought it'd be time again as I'm currently involved in the organization of the 0a000h, which will happen again in december.

More pictures and reports will follow.

I'm currently on a ferry trip to Helsinki.

The next days, I'll be on the Nuclear weekEND near the finnish nuclear plant Loviisa. It's a meeting of anti nuclear activists with international participation. Finland is currently trying to build the first nuclear plant since many years in a western country (I say trying, because the Olkiluoto plant is about two years behind it's time table).
There's a german press release about the event.

A week later, I'll visit the Alternative Party, a small demoscene party in Finland. I was on the Assembly some times in the past and always wanted to take the chance some day to see the AltParty.

Crest, bekanntes Mitglied der Demoszene, hat wohl in den letzten Tagen Selbstmord begangen. Ich kannte ihn nicht wirklich, außer eben dass man Crest halt kannte, weil er auf fast allen Parties rumlief und dort Demoshows organisierte. Grund waren nach eigener Aussage soziale Schwierigkeiten und langjährige Arbeitslosigkeit.

Ich erinnere mich, dass er mir vor einigen Jahren einen Geburtstagsgruß sandte (vermutlich weil Orange Juice damals so eine Geburtstagserinnerungsfunktion hatte). Wann genau weiss ich nicht mehr, hatte auch nicht weiter darauf reagiert. Ohne große Bedeutung, einfach weil man halt »in der Szene« sich kennt.

Paul schreibt drüber und hat ihn wohl in jüngerer Zeit noch gesehen, Pouet schreibt drüber und Crests Netz-Präsenz ist im Moment auch noch online.

Just a very short note, we managed to finish our gpn5-project for creating an asmsource to find the entry-points of preloaded libraries.
More doc and details to follow, just get it for now: smallelf-0.1.tar.bz2

Back from Breakpoint, uploaded rest of images. My submissions this year were quite limited: One Photo that didn't make it through the preselection and one effect for the Never-Demo (which made place 28 out of 29, n0y asked at a very late time »hey, can you code us some effect, the interface is really simple?«, so I did some ascii-art-shading).

I didn't manage to visit all seminars I wanted to see, I hope they'll get the recordings up soon.

One I find worth mentioning:
Peci from Scoopex managed to get a dos-COM-file running windows-code without any win32/PE-headers (smaller, good for 4k intros). What he's doing is basically abusing an api for attaching drivers to the DOS-Emulation (VDD). It is able to call initialization-functions of DLLs from within DOS with invalid Opcodes. Calling it without initializing a library causes to jump to position 0. The memory from the DOS-process is mapped 1:1, so this is a valid adress, where you can put a jmp in the COM-file before calling. Very weird, but seems to work fine.
(I hope they'll put up the seminar-slides on the ftp, I'll link them when they're available)

First two days at breakpoint, everything quite okay, beside the usual chaotic organization (it wouldn't be a demoparty without that). The network sucks, so I don't know when I can publish what I'm writing right now.

Yesterday evening was a live-act called Ultrasound, they played guitar-music to demos shown on the screen. The beam-team didn't manage to show second reality (probably they don't have any real DOS any more...). Quite nice.

On Saturday I missed most of the compos because I did something very unscenish and got some fresh air and light (ok, not so much light, it was cloudy), visited Bingen city, took a ship to the other side of the rhine and walked around there a bit. I like this landscape, I did some bicycle-trips here in the past.

Next was the Welle:Erdball concert. They're doing electronic music with old computer sounds like C64-SID with a (imho) great live-show.

First set of pictures are here, more to come.

In a few minutes I'll head off to the Breakpoint in Bingen, one of the biggest events of the demoscene.

This year I'm especially looking forward that there are a couple of interesting seminars, I'll probably write some reports about that. And have a look at their website, I like this years design very much.

As there is not much information available about this subject, I started writing a tutorial about how to create 4k intros in linux. The sections about executable packing and using gcc are finished, assembler-section will follow.
Get it here

Friday, about 16.00 we (StyX, TS and me, in the scene known as Ctulhu) arrived at the Evoke, after a railway trip with the deutsche bahn and a reservation in a waggon that didn't exist (but that wasn't a real problem, we found a nice place with an electricity plug in the train).
Well, usually gamers are not wanted on demoparties. But on evoke, you can see people playing all the time violent games. REALLY violent. The PainStation. It's basically an advanced Pong-game, but the special gimmick is, if you miss your ball, you'll be hurt by heat, electro shocks or hits. Really fun.
Well, later the evening, it seems that some evil hackers took over the evoke-webserver (I surely have nothing to do with that ;-).
To be continued...