Cracktros

[dila]

Do groups still distribute cracktros anymore? It seems like people are reluctant to run additional binaries these days for fear of malware, and also that these extra programs are stripped from the releases when they inevitably make it to torrent sites and such.

From what I understand, the demoscene was actually born out of the 0day scene, so it makes sense that this tradition should stay alive. I've seen some releases have been distributed with video intros (I mean an actual MP4 video of some special effect - I've no idea how these are made), but I guess this isn't as neat as having the effects produced programatically.

I know it's possible to do demo effects in JavaScript, so perhaps distributing a intro.hml that runs and renders locally would be an interesting and safe way to keep writing cracktros, or are the days of cracktros over?

For reference, here's a CORE cracktro from 2001 (youtube) with code by neoman.

[dila]

I've been doing some demo programming over the last few days and thought I'd share the results with you here.

You'll need Windows XP to run them, otherwise you'll need an emulator such as DOSBox.

This is an example of "size coding", where there is a limit on the executable size, which in this case was 256 bytes.

Squibs 256b for MS-DOS
October 2014

So this is a little particle system with flares and trails. Not enough
space for a full greyscale palette in this one, so had to make do with
the default 16 grey colours.

Greets go out to: Harekiet, matja, bart^xt, comrade, and vprolix

Special thanks to HellMood for showing me some neat optimization tricks
for my last demo, some of which found their way into this new one.

dila / #asm / EFnet

• Watch it on YouTube
• Download from Pouet

Qube 256b for MS-DOS
October 2014

This is a classic wireframe cube in 256b. I didn't cut any corners here,
it's a complete and working vertex engine, just at a very small scale.

It was a complete pain to get this working on XP. Apparently the XP
DOS emulator starts to malfunction if you overflow the FPU stack, so
if you look at the code you will notice a bunch of FFREE instructions
that waste so much space. Please let me know if you have a workaround
for this.

Greets go out to: Harekiet, matja, bart^xt, comrade, vprolix, and HellMood

dila / #asm / EFnet

• Watch it on YouTube
• Download from Pouet