About this site

What a demo is

A demo is a program that plays music and graphics in real time, written to show what its makers could squeeze out of a computer. Groups of coders, musicians and artists released them for free and entered them in competitions at demo parties such as Assembly and The Party. An intro is a demo with a size limit: 64 kilobytes, or even 4.

How they run here

Nothing on this site is a recording. Each page downloads the files of the original release and starts them in DOSBox, an emulator of an early-1990s PC, compiled to WebAssembly by the js-dos project. The emulator executes the demo's own machine code and imitates the hardware it talks to: a 386/486 processor, a VGA card, and a Sound Blaster or Gravis Ultrasound sound card.

Emulation is not perfect. Timing depends on how fast your device is, sound comes out in mono, and a few effects that leaned on the quirks of real hardware can look different from how they did on a 486.

Where the files come from

All 26 productions are the freely distributed original releases from scene.org, the demoscene's file archive. Each demo page links to the exact file that was used and to its entry on Pouët, the scene's production database.

The Hornet Archive. The Hornet Archive was the main internet home of the PC demoscene in the 1990s: an FTP site started in 1992 and run by a small volunteer crew, collecting demos, intros, tracked music, graphics, source code and party results, and publishing the DemoNews newsletter alongside it. Its maintainers reviewed incoming productions and gave each a star rating of up to five in the directory indexes. The archive stopped taking new files in 1998 and is preserved as a read-only mirror by scene.org. Browse it.

Rights

The productions remain the work of the groups credited on each page; this site only makes them easy to watch. If you made one of them and would rather it was not shown here, write to privacy@atlesque.dev and it will be taken down. js-dos and DOSBox are free software under the GNU GPL version 2.