Episode: 389
Title: HPR0389: Demo or Bust 2010
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0389/hpr0389.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 19:34:36

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I've never really liked it with Artistic Legends.
I loved it!
Sex is a part of Banjoahr.
It'sgiug행.
Oh, hi, welcome to a hacker public radio.
My name is Sig Flub and this is episode 1 of Demo or Bust 2010.
Now what is Demo or Bust 2010?
It's a series of HPR episodes which I thought would be a lot of fun to do.
They're rating the construction of a demo which will be shown at Block Party 2010, which
is in Cleveland.
Jason Scott will be there, he's pretty cool, red man, a whole bunch of other people,
trickster, a lot of hornet people, phoenix, northern dragons will be there.
Barzul, Guybrush, Aztec, Polaris, a lot of demo people, it's a lot of fun you should
go because it's a lot of fun and what this is, again, is a narration of the construction
of a demo because you work on the reason why I'm doing this is complex, one of the major
reasons why is you work on a project right in the dark as it seems to other people and
you type away, you need type away and say you have this operating system that you write
and it's a pretty simple operating system as far as operating systems go.
It's something that boots off a floppy disk and has two processes and it's switching between
these processes and you have the outputs maps to two keys that you can push and you're
like, dude, look at this, you put it in a floppy disk, you turn on the power, you wait a
little bit and it says A and you're like, dude, that's, look, that's the process one and
then you press the button two and that's just to get put a process two, right, and it
shows B's and you're like, dude, that's process two, it has B's coming out of it and they're
like, great, A's and B's, that's wonderful, good, you've done some good work there and
they don't really, they don't really get it because it's not shiny enough and maybe
if they knew what was going on, it would be more impressive to them and so you're just trying
to describe demos to people in sort of a similar way.
You're like, you have this disk of demos that you bring over to someone and you tell them
a little about it and you're like, demos are so cool, let's watch a demo and you show
them this demo and five minutes later they're like, I've seen better videos than that,
I guess that was kind of cool but they're like, no, this is a program, it's doing it real
time and think of it like a player or something and they're like, yeah, I guess and then
their mind they're thinking, well, I saw this car commercial the other day and it had
the almond break in it and these cars flew around and it was nice and shiny and it wasn't
these ribbons and this cube and crap that was much better and it's totally different
but people don't really really understand programming art unless you're a programmer and
I think that's similar for a lot of other arts, a lot of my friends who aren't a guitarist
for instance, tell me that techno music is wallpaper music and I'm like, no, I'm trying to
describe, well, no, this song you're listening to is the TR303, the TB303 and it doesn't translate,
you know what I mean? So this is an attempt to translate the effort that goes into something
that is a little opaque at the end because demos are kind of opaque, you don't really get a feel
for if you have no flavor for what a demo is, you have no feeling for what it is by watching it
and so step one, each episode is going to be a different step that I've taken in making this demo
and I've written a couple demos and they've been from scratch and this one's going to be from
scratch too, pretty much, I'm going to eventually, I think the North American demo scene will,
because it seems like there's the European demo scene, you can google demo scene if you want
to know about it, the European demo scene to me, at least seems like they've had a lot more time
with this and with time comes techniques and sometimes with techniques comes tools and comes
groups and comes things like this and it takes time to have good demos and starting from scratch
every time necessarily isn't the best idea if you want a good demo, so I'm starting from scratch
this time too, but I'm going to attempt to make a system for me in my demo group, which is just
me, but if anyone wants to do art or music, they certainly can, is make an environment in
engine if you will, that is useful for making other demos, it makes it easier to make other demos,
thereby taking a lot of the workload off of the programming aspect of it, which will always be
there because it's a demo, it's kind of programmer art, but if it's a little less abstract,
it becomes easier to implement ideas about art that maybe abstract, if that makes sense,
one abstraction makes room for the other, or the lack of one abstraction makes room for the other,
so the first thing that I did was generate a file system for it, a think of like an ISO file system,
maybe that's maybe not the best example, but something where you have
something that you read once, or you generate once, you write once and you can read a lot of other
times, like an ISO, maybe a wad would be a little bit more appropriate, I think if you've ever played
Dumbo, Dumbo, right, you had wad files, and this wad file is a representation of other files,
they had a namespace in there, more or less, the namespace is just root directory, but
you had this file system in there, and the reason for that for games could be for a number of
reasons, for off-wiscation, maybe, mostly I think it's for, if you have a distribution where you
just have one file, it's a lot nicer than having, we have Doom.exe and Doom.wad, it's a lot nicer
than having Doom.exe and Doom slash, and in that Doom slash, you have 80 files, or something like
that, and for demos it's really nice because you want one thing, you want Dumbo.exe, or failing that
Dumbo.exe and Dumbo.that, or something like that, so the name I'm going with is Pug, because
because the the generator is called Pugler, and that's a cool name, and Pugler and Pugly and all
these things. Why is a tree at the beginning? Data at the beginning, metadata at the beginning,
and then real data at the end is in files. So it's the root of the tree is slash, because that's
root, right? But there's no real directory structure inherent within the tree, although the tree
itself can represent directories pretty easily, but slash is root, right? In saying slash,
you had q.c. So you have these leafs of this root node, 96 possible of which, because they're
96 characters that are in the file names. You have a leaf at q, and then at the q you have a leaf,
at dot, and then at dot you have a leaf at c, and at that node you have data is here,
enough leg, and then they have a structure that points to where this data is within the file,
and it's this long, and that's how files are represented. And so as long as you know the
delimiter for directories, which is a slash, you can walk this alphabet tree, if you will,
to the delimiter of your where you want your directory, and then subsequent walks
while becoming from that directory, and so that if you stop at that delimiter at the
directory that becomes your root directory, it's kind of a trick, but it works pretty well, and so
that's that's the file system. If the header is a little big, but the size of it remains pretty
static, you can have like if you have if you have 12 files, the header is 12k, but you can have
300 files in the header is like 15k, so it doesn't expand too much, and it kind of tops out at the
size of the longest file. So that is episode one, episode two, I'll be talking about something
completely different, but related of course to building this demo image. Shouts to click to,
click to, click to, I hope I'm pronouncing a name right, and all the other HPR people in
Hacker Media, and everything else, because it's fucking late. So take care, and again youtube.com,
username, assembly, assembly, you can watch these if you feel like it, so take care, and bye-bye.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio, HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over
to C-A-R-O dot-A-T for all of us here.