pouët.net

omg, thank you, this is a perfectly executed dos demo, how i wish that there would be more to come.

Meh, simple name voting. No risk, nothing new in the category. Looks a bit like unpolished 1995 demo.

A valid 3rd or 4th place.. if a risk was rewarded the Chernobil demo should have won.

this is a very nice tribute to the old era
thank you very much

what a smooth operation!

Not my cup of tea, but it does have some nice effects. The music is going to cure insomnia.

Nicely done!

The Radix-like music reminds me of some really great demos of the past. Soothing and well done. Congrats on filling your (and our) gap!

everything a proper DOS demo should be, stellar soundtrack too!

i like the colors and esp. the design. well done and congrat for the 1st place

My party favorite.

Oh what, Perec isn't a "proper" demo? :)

Definitely full of 2001 Haujobb/Replay-style vibes. As the demo you wanted to make 20 years ago, it's a direct hit.

oh, you completely hit me again. first with piledriver, and now with this.

i'm out of words now. this is THE dos demo we've waiting for so long :)

and one last word: for the scene god's sake, please make a SB version anyway :D

Sparks joy <3

THIS THIS THIS

really worth the wait for a proper dos demo with the early2k numedia vibes that i’m a fan of, and this is what is all what i wanted in one package :D

is this 1998 again and gargaj just joined replay?

Very nice.

Design, effects, and soundtrack are all fabulous. Rulez!

machine

The world that produced demos like this no longer exists.

Absolutely magnificent. I love the ambience and that track is beautyful.

THIS DEMOZOO HAS VERY NICE SOURCECODE! REMINDS ME OF ZILOG

Very nice!

very well executed tribute to this area.

Maybe I am too emotional, but I had very good feelings from my childhood while watching it yesterday. And I think that's one of the purposes of art. Moreover, the idea itself is brilliant. So you deserve your first place (really... oh and congratulations again)

Nice, reminds me musically of Radix and visually also very close to Haujobb style.
Not sure if the lack of subpixel/texel accuracy is intentional, but it is quite prominent in some of the slow shots :)

Mazel tov!

Absolutely fucking perfect execution. Took me right back to the era of greatest software renderer demos. Thank you for that! cdc

kewl

damn you gargaj. is there anything you cant pull off? ;P

even tho this seems like an "oldschool" dos demo it picks up just the right spots and puts them into a perfect pace - the music obviously serves it well.
in a way its was most demos back then wanted to be but didnt quite manage to...

respect for doing a DOS demo in 2021, but it all felt quite derivative from random late 90s influences but lacking coherence to give it a character of it's own, ended up not feeling very memorable to me, sorry gargaj.

Perfect soundtrack. Kinda agree with ps on the graphics side of things, but still it was an enjoyable late-90s ride.

the

Lots of Radix, a bit of Replay, Purple, Haujobb, Threestate or Woorlic... it's all there. You seem to lack subpixel accuracy though (or is it the capture?) and it's a bit incoherent. But hey, a nice, relaxing DOS demo in 2021. You have my thumb!

Very nicely done. Nice effects, good timing, great song, everything others have said. :)

Great tribute.

Moar, moar, moar! (And add the antialiasing, pleeeeese)

Doing 600MB demos with Unreal and Unity is completely wrong and uninteresting for me. After watching the old school demos and the size-limited pc entries I went to bed. Luckily I stumbled on this one by fortune to find there is still hope in saving the pc demo category. :)

A faithful imitation of what was 'in' 20 years ago.
Has quite some rewatch value to find all the demos which were referenced.

really, really well designed and sync'd. glad to see oldschool effects run this way.

nice design, music & sync!

time travel, executed with great style

What a nice cöncept, with nice speechsynth and effect and MS-DOS with GUS winning the PC demo compo

Nice demo with great track!

If you people like this style of demos so much and think it was the apex of the PC demoscene that no longer exists then why don't you make some ? It's no rocket science.
Hell, there could even be some compos where competitors would have to reproduce a given style of an era of demos (hint) instead of just "oldschool" categories.

(Could use some anti-aliasing on the objects).

There are more people who do it that way, G simply joined the band wagon because in my humble opinion it is consistent with his thesis introduced during Pile Diver. Nothing new can be invented so we turn back the wheel of the time machine.

feeeels

Reminds me of Replay and DCS demos which is a good thing.

Back to the 90s :)

Ticks all the boxes :D

Nice to see a demo targeting the late DOS era, not too many of those releases nowadays. Solid execution.
Also extra thumbs up for the story behind it - the drive to go back to a certain epoch of demos and scratch that "what if" itch!

I feel the strong urge to revisit a lot of beloved demos from the numedia age, to make a screenshot comparison of each scene. Clearly a lot of research, and love went into this.
It's the essence of these demos, distilled to a... cöncept of a demo of that time.
Thanks <3

looks solid.

Wasn't following scene in that mid to late 90's era really but i do know at least some of Replay's stuff etc. of course. Solid work but doesn't really do anything for me. Still, nice to see DOS stuff instead of "unlimited" platforms...

Very nice music and very stylish. Love it.

Nice öne! I've to rewatch hplus and sunflower now.

This is the best example of demoscene eating its own tail. Want 99-01 nostalgia? Check anything with Visualice in credits, which probably would blow Function audience minds in 2021. Quite sad, actually. As for the demo - nice tune, some cool 3d and suicidal color schemes.

After 145 prods, I think Gargaj has earned the right to make one nostalgic demo.

not the FUCKING DEMO but quite cool

I like this demo and am happy to see it on YouTube because I don't have a GUS card and, anyway... my MS-DOS computer is a 486DX2.
I'm even happier to know that it won the Function Demo Compo this year.

Congrats, Gargaj!

Just the music alone ticks all the right boxes for me. Really nice demo, and always happy to see older PC's getting some love.

Awesome to see true/real demos (software rendering) for the PC still being made! The only thing lacking is subpixel accuracy, it would have made such a difference in this demo! Nevertheless, highly enjoyable! Thanks!

Lmao, have you SEEN all the pandering garbage nostalgia amiga demos and even amiga/retro style pc demos?

Also 99-01 is more than 20 years ago, so hella nostalgia worthy. ahahaa

Also i'm implying this demo is better than the 80s pandering shit

What are those, then?

a blast from the past

it's DOS and looks like it

Yes

Thank you.

Music cures cancer :)

very nice demo, love it!



I feel attacked :'(

Decent. :)

One man band does it again! Charming presentation. And the music is a tribute to Radix I guess?:]

Aww.. don't be Rez! You do it with style <3

I don't think this demo is either mindless pandering aka the downfall of the demoscene as-is, or in the same vein as Piledriver. On the contrary. I love how intimately personal and authentic it is - a genuine expression of an author who always wanted to make this, even if it's 20 years late.

It's not screaming "hey scene, look at me!", it just is what it is.

And as a demo itself it easily keeps up with the Replays and Haujobbs of yore. The soundtrack, while not entirely up to eg. Radix' level of proficiency and detail, fits perfectly and sticks in your mind for days, and the visuals and direction not only evoke that end-90s feel but also, personally, are welcome in the current times for how gentle they are :)

some good old vibes in here

This seems like it's trying to be one of those late 90s / early 2000s design demos, along with Blasphemy, Purple and Replay demos. But sadly, it fails pretty hard for me to do just that.

The design bits are not cohesive and just ends up looking kinda derivative to me. It's not at all terrible, but it's still miles behind what we saw from the best demos of that era.

But much worse, the successful design demos of that era also had pretty good technical legs to stand on, and that's what really rubs me the wrong way here. The polygon fillers have terrible precision, yet animations move slowly which doesn't help to cover that up. And there's pretty bad z-fighting and even gaps between polygons going on.

...Also, the combination of code and design working together in perfect harmony is what was so magical with some of the demos of that era. And again this doesn't always work out well here. Some of the scenes looks like they were made in a 3d modelling program without having any idea of the limitations of the engine and how it would end up looking in the end. And as a one-man production, that just makes no sense to me.

On the plus-side, the music works really well for me, especially as an era-piece.

I'm sorry if this is overly harsh criticism, but I have an especially big love for that era, and this feels a bit like it tries to appeal to that without succeeding. It's certainly not bad as a whole, it's just my standards that are probably too high here ;)

Neat idea, but also what Kusma said.

decent!

I don't think you need to justify anything tbh. This is very much a love letter to the late 1990s demos. It is not perfect (they weren't either). It is nostalgic, the reference is clear and the standard of visuals is actually comparable to the majority of demos from the era. This would be one of the remembered ones if it was released back than, so I do not really understand the criticism of insufficient technicality.

I love multilayered design from this era, and was tempted to replicate it on several occasions. It is not that hard to replicate. Two real issues with these demos are 1. while they are consistent stylistically, they are rarely coherent, and 2. somehow, the vast majority of these demos are surprisingly substance-free, just pure shiny surface. Somehow, making this kind of demo twenty years later, and still keeping it incoherent and substance-free feels a bit underwhelming.

Looks neat, going for 1997 style gfx but more colorful. Effect parade without transitions. Basically all of the things oldskool demos that actually run effects the platform couldn't before, sometimes get as a negative or a don't-care. This is not an oldskool platform, and most oldskool prods have worse design than this.

needs more design arrows!

Major, major Zilog vibes, to the point it almost feels like it's sharing Zilog's audio code. They're even comparable in size. Haha. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Paying homage to the late '90s scene aesthetic sure is welcome in 2021.

I guess the info file explains it all. I'm just glad this demo happened in the end. Also, I love the geometry after the flower scenes. One ♥ Love

great DOS demo! enjoyed the chill music and classic design elements

The best thing on this year's Function.

that was great

omg

Although I agree with Kusma, I still give it a thumb :)

looking forward to seeing what comes next from gargaj in the y2k!

Definitely!

Fat-Kusma agrees with Kusma

OK, so the polyfillers. Yes, the polyfillers. They're low-precision and they z-fight and they leave seams somehow, and the prod seems just not to care. (The z-fighting and seams may also be non-polyfiller issues.) The best oldschool prods are those that accept the technical limitations and work around them (to the degree they almost seem invited in), but this one somehow thinks they don't exist, and run very slow movement that puts the weaknesses front and center.

But thumbing a prod on its polyfillers alone is probably the most coder-y thing you can do. :-) And there are other things here. The music, obviously, has been mentioned, and it fits the mood nicely. The effects themselves are pretty much what other prods of the era have been doing (OK metaballs, some of the envmapping is reasonable). I'm not a fan of putting objects dead in the middle like this, but OK, it works reasonably well.

So overall, a weak thumb?

🌸

Just watched it on my Pentium with GUS. Some part are slower but watchable, some are smooth. There are plenty of nice scenes there. The z-fight or gaps weren't as jarring for me, I rarely noticed it. Overall good big production for DOS.

The visual design is just gorgeous. The music directly hits the minimalistic chill IDM spot.
And the vibe is a great throwback to the golden early 2000s demoscene.
The last scene also was such a flex.
Good shit.

wild honey

Cool design! Unfortunately, I can not run it on my 486 PC. So, I'm Youtube watcher today :)

i love it ❤️

A nice trip down memory lane

Very good demo. I can feel the atmosphere.

You made this oldskool DOS demoscener very proud.

You made a Y2K aesthetic enthusiast proud.

Jesus Christ! The design is so modern and packed with MS-DOS themed technology, but it looks and sounds out of this world. Somehow, I missed it.

A design demo. Very nice.

Nice, love the soundtrack!