SecondReality

As for cracktros, probably not. I should spelunk through backups. However, the most technical and competitive people generally transitioned to the demoscene in the early 2000s and that scene is far more open. You can find a lot of groups/individuals publish a lot of esp. their older stuff now. Two off the top of my head: - https://github.com/ConspiracyHu (and they made a W32 port of Future Crew's Second Reality, which is public domain: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality) - Farbrausch published their original demo tool source ages ago: https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public

Classic masterpiece, for those who experienced it in 1990s and wanted to know how it was done: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

Second Reality was truly a technical marvel and arguably represented the pinnacle of the PC demo scene. It’s amazing how much influential it has been and how it continues to endure some 30 years later. Not too shabby for a group of teenagers from Finland. (And now I feel extra old realizing the original Second Reality was released 30 years ago.) Aside: I first watched Second Reality on my PC at the time which was a 386/40DX. I must have watched it 100 times at least. When I upgraded to a 486/66DX2 the first thing I did upon booting it up was to watch Second Reality. I was amazed at how much I had been missing before; everything ran smoother and elements that had been truncated before were now visible. Yet even when it was on my old hardware it was still completely presentable. It’s a credit to the Future Crew coders that it could run so w

Incidentally, source code is available for both Elevated and Second Reality: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality https://github.com/in4k/rgba_tbc_elevated_source

I had a 386/40DX that could run Second Reality, and I was blown away. When I upgraded to a 486/66DX2 the first thing I did was run Second Reality, and I was shocked at how much of the demo content I had missed before from parts being truncated. Also it’s worth noting that a lot of Second Reality’s source code got released to GitHub several years back: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality and here’s an incredibly deep dive into the code: https://fabiensanglard.net/second_reality/ Finally, here’s some rare footage of the creation of the legendary demo: https://youtu.be/LIIBRr31DIU (English subtitles available)

The source code (+data) of Second Reality by Future Crew from 1993 is available under an open source license: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality It consists of 32K lines of assembler, 24K lines of C and 2K lines of Pascal. Here is a video of the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw17c70uJes

The Second Reality source code is on Github -- it is fun to poke around through the code and code comments with what seems like little in-jokes between themselves. Also interesting to note the contrast of when English and Finnish is used...you can run into gems like "pikkukuva" and "pakkaamaton formaatti" https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/

I was never really into demos, so thank you, it looks very interesting, and the source code is released too [1]. Will try to fill the gaps, even if just a little bit. My high water mark was '96 when Aleph One released his stack smashing article in Phrack. So yeah, more than two decades, not 15 years. [1] https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

Bytes are often added by the high level frameworks (see the megabytes of unused C library). Putting a pixel in a framebuffer requires a single instruction. You can do quite a lot of T&L in short bits of code. Have a look at the source code for Second Reality, one of the more popular demos of 20 years ago. https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality particularly the draw code https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality/blob/master/VISU/ADR... ; admittedly it does one light and no texttures, but it does it in a few kb of assembly.

One of the most legendary pieces of early PC demoscene. Released in 1993, Second Reality by Future Crew is a very influential production. http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=63 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA