"Demoscene Collection 4"
Various DOS/Windows conversions by Jonathan Campbell in his spare time.
NTSC region-free DVD ISO image.
Production notes:
Demos were captured using the DOSBox emulator. In some cases, I
had to modify the source code to DOSBox to make the demo work.
One hack added an option to DOSBox's VGA emulation that forced
the fake "refresh rate" to 59.94Hz no matter what the DOS program
did, which was hit-or-miss depending on whether the programmer
assumed the standard refresh rate. When it works it avoids the
need for framerate conversion. In other cases, I had to resort
to using the Bochs emulator and some backend video capture code
I hacked into it. Actual emulation was done on 1) Windows XP
and 2) a Linux KDE desktop.
In some cases, the DOS demo switched VGA modes or had emulation/timing
problems that required additional editing in Final Cut Pro. Interim
titlecards were made in Final Cut Pro.
Some demos included were written for Windows. These demos were
captured on a WinXP SP2 machine with Kkapture v0.6 and a ATI Radeon
R330 PCI-e graphics card.
In cases where I lacked the hardware or platform to run the demo,
I used the available DivX, WMV, or MP4 files already available on
scene.org.
Video was encoded to DVD format using MPlayer 1.0rc2 + some source
code modifications of mine to add high quality framerate conversion.
The DVD is authored with two titles.
First title has demos captured in 16:9 anamorphic format.
Second title has demos in 4:3 format.
The DVD format does not permit one title to have different aspect ratios.
DVD was authored using DVDAuthor (http://www.sf.net/projects/dvdauthor)
DVD contents:
CoC - Halo [16:9 DOS]
* This is one of those demos that both uses fake highcolor
and funny VGA resolutions, fortunately it sticks with one
mode the entire presentation. The actual output is something
like VGA 320x480 256-color mode, but all of the action is
drawn in the center leaving the top and bottom blank.
So it made sense to me to just crop the top and bottom off
and encode it as 16:9 footage. A box blur filter was applied
to avoid artifacts when converted to NTSC. This is so far
the one and only DOS program I've converted to 16:9 anamorphic.
Complex - XTAL [4:3 DOS]
* Nice! Runs your VGA output fixed at 50Hz and something like
320x160. Uses some of the same VGA palette blending techniques
seen in the fire clouds in Dope. I assumed the demo actually
ran like this on real hardware, until I found several YouTube videos
that showed the demo and effects running at about twice the
speed shown here, but I kind of like it this slow anyway so
I didn't bother reconverting.
Doomsday - Complex [4:3 XBox]
* Nice! Unfortunately I don't have an XBox to run this on, so
I used the DivX available on scene.org.
EMF - Verses [4:3 DOS]
Impact Studios - Legend [4:3 DOS]
* Somehow I can't imagine any other reason than this demo for
putting a Gravis Ultrasound into a 286 :) It runs fine in
DOSBox, but some builds of DOSBox cause the "Legend" lens
part to run at half-speed (and then loop forever in that
part). The rotating 3D dots render but do not clear in
DOSBox (you incorrectly get a flickering "ball"
of vertical lines). This is the first demo I know of that has
random VGA palette glitches in DOSBox. At most, the demo
manages to make it 80% of the way through before it corrupts
the VGA palette (if you're lucky). Parts that could not be
captured in DOSBox were captured by pulling out an old
486/33MHz and capturing the VGA output through a scan converter
and the S-Video input of my capture card.
Limp Ninja - Farbrausch [4:3 XBox]
* I don't have an XBox, so I used the capture from scene.org.
PWP - Robotic Liberation [4:3 VIC 20]
* I don't have a VIC 20, but a high quality DivX was found on PwP's
website, which was used here (by converting PwP's 720x576 PAL 25fps
DivX to 720x480 NTSC 29.97fps).
COMA - Washing machine [4:3 DOS]
COMA - Washing machine encore [4:3 DOS]
* Some parts are CPU speed sensitive.
CoC - Egg'O Trip [4:3 DOS]