Before YouTube, Teenagers Were Coding Mind-Blowing Digital Art in Assembly | Comuniq
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Before YouTube, Teenagers Were Coding Mind-Blowing Digital Art in Assembly
Manon_code<br>1783152537<br>[Programming]<br>0 comments
Before YouTube or any modern video streaming, there was a time when digital art had to be calculated in real time by incredibly raw lines of code. In the eighties and nineties, a semi-hidden subculture of teenagers turned ordinary home computers into canvases for pure art. To understand how this worked in practice, imagine opening a text editor in MS-DOS and writing a few lines of pure Assembly. You would call a basic video interrupt to switch the screen to the classic 320x200 pixel mode with 256 colors, point the code directly to the video memory address, which if I remember correctly was 0xA000, and start dumping values there in a loop until the user pressed the ESC key. The operating system didn't even know what was happening because the code took total control of the processor. The result on the screen was a moving color effect or a somewhat hypnotic plasma, all generated by a tiny executable file of just a few kilobytes.
If we were to translate this logic into a classic Assembly code block from that era, it would look something like this:
```assembly<br>mov ax, 0013h<br>int 10h<br>mov ax, 0A000h<br>mov es, ax<br>xor di, di<br>loop_efeito:<br>mov al, bl<br>add al, cl<br>mov es:[di], al<br>inc di<br>jnz loop_efeito<br>inc bl<br>in al, 60h<br>cmp al, 1<br>jne loop_efeito<br>mov ax, 0003h<br>int 10h<br>mov ax, 4C00h<br>int 21h
```
This whole story started in a slightly sideways way because of game piracy on computers like the Commodore 64 or the ZX Spectrum. When cracking groups managed to break a game's copy protection, they wanted to leave a signature at the intro before the game even started. They created what were called cracktros, which were screens with the group's logo flashing, electronic music playing in the background, and those text scrolls running across the bottom shouting out to friends and mocking rival groups. Over time, the competition to see who could make the most impressive introduction became much more fun than the actual act of pirating the game itself. Around 1985, a lot of people dropped piracy altogether and started creating these files completely independently, just for the pleasure of showing who could program better. That is when the movement gained its own identity.
Things changed quite a bit when the Commodore Amiga hit the market. It had incredible dedicated video and sound chips for the time, which allowed for the rise of megademos, which were basically several of these presentations put together on a single floppy disk. But the community had its ups and downs. If we were to draw a timeline of this activity, we would see a first peak around 1988 with the Amiga, followed by a sharp drop in 1992 when Commodore went bankrupt. Everyone had to migrate to the IBM PC running DOS, and that was a shock. The PC back then was a bit of a stripped-down office machine without the friendly custom chips of the Amiga, so the CPU had to calculate everything by hand. It was a difficult phase, but people learned to optimize mathematical matrices and analytical geometry to create 3D engines from scratch. It was during this period of overcoming obstacles, around 1993, that the graph line shot up again with productions that became legendary, like the demo Second Reality by the group Future Crew, stabilizing years later at a more technical and professional level with the arrival of modern 3D cards.
To make a demo like this work, groups operated almost like very small game studios. You had the coder focused on heavy math and bit-shifting, the artist who drew everything pixel by pixel managing tiny palettes of sixteen, twenty-four, or thirty-two colors, using dithering techniques to trick the eye, and the musicians. Since you couldn't just drop in a recorded audio file that would take up too much space, they invented trackers. These were programs that used tiny instrument samples and created a sequence of notes on a vertical grid. The whole song ran by reading these commands and took up almost no space on the disk.
Eventually, modern 3D graphics cards appeared and things moved to another level. That ease of accessing memory directly vanished, and people started programming using shaders and APIs like OpenGL. The scene had to adapt and began focusing on absurd limits, like putting complex music and entire three-dimensional settings inside four or sixty-four kilobyte files. To achieve this without using ready-made textures, they specialized in procedural generation. Basically, instead of saving the image of a brick wall, the programmer writes a mathematical equation that calculates and...