"Demoscene Collection 4"
Various DOS/Windows conversions by Jonathan Campbell in his spare time.
NTSC region-free DVD ISO image.



Production notes:

Demos were captured using the DOSBox emulator. In some cases, I
had to modify the source code to DOSBox to make the demo work.
One hack added an option to DOSBox's VGA emulation that forced
the fake "refresh rate" to 59.94Hz no matter what the DOS program
did, which was hit-or-miss depending on whether the programmer
assumed the standard refresh rate. When it works it avoids the
need for framerate conversion. In other cases, I had to resort
to using the Bochs emulator and some backend video capture code
I hacked into it. Actual emulation was done on 1) Windows XP
and 2) a Linux KDE desktop.

In some cases, the DOS demo switched VGA modes or had emulation/timing
problems that required additional editing in Final Cut Pro. Interim
titlecards were made in Final Cut Pro.

Some demos included were written for Windows. These demos were
captured on a WinXP SP2 machine with Kkapture v0.6 and a ATI Radeon
R330 PCI-e graphics card.

In cases where I lacked the hardware or platform to run the demo,
I used the available DivX, WMV, or MP4 files already available on
scene.org.

Video was encoded to DVD format using MPlayer 1.0rc2 + some source
code modifications of mine to add high quality framerate conversion.

The DVD is authored with two titles.
First title has demos captured in 16:9 anamorphic format.
Second title has demos in 4:3 format.
The DVD format does not permit one title to have different aspect ratios.

DVD was authored using DVDAuthor (http://www.sf.net/projects/dvdauthor)



DVD contents:

CoC - Halo [16:9 DOS]
   * This is one of those demos that both uses fake highcolor
     and funny VGA resolutions, fortunately it sticks with one
     mode the entire presentation. The actual output is something
     like VGA 320x480 256-color mode, but all of the action is
     drawn in the center leaving the top and bottom blank.
     So it made sense to me to just crop the top and bottom off
     and encode it as 16:9 footage. A box blur filter was applied
     to avoid artifacts when converted to NTSC. This is so far
     the one and only DOS program I've converted to 16:9 anamorphic.

Complex - XTAL [4:3 DOS]
   * Nice! Runs your VGA output fixed at 50Hz and something like
     320x160. Uses some of the same VGA palette blending techniques
     seen in the fire clouds in Dope. I assumed the demo actually
     ran like this on real hardware, until I found several YouTube videos
     that showed the demo and effects running at about twice the
     speed shown here, but I kind of like it this slow anyway so
     I didn't bother reconverting.

Doomsday - Complex [4:3 XBox]
   * Nice! Unfortunately I don't have an XBox to run this on, so
     I used the DivX available on scene.org.

EMF - Verses [4:3 DOS]

Impact Studios - Legend [4:3 DOS]
   * Somehow I can't imagine any other reason than this demo for
     putting a Gravis Ultrasound into a 286 :) It runs fine in
     DOSBox, but some builds of DOSBox cause the "Legend" lens
     part to run at half-speed (and then loop forever in that
     part). The rotating 3D dots render but do not clear in
     DOSBox (you incorrectly get a flickering "ball"
     of vertical lines). This is the first demo I know of that has
     random VGA palette glitches in DOSBox. At most, the demo
     manages to make it 80% of the way through before it corrupts
     the VGA palette (if you're lucky). Parts that could not be
     captured in DOSBox were captured by pulling out an old
     486/33MHz and capturing the VGA output through a scan converter
     and the S-Video input of my capture card.

Limp Ninja - Farbrausch [4:3 XBox]
   * I don't have an XBox, so I used the capture from scene.org.

PWP - Robotic Liberation [4:3 VIC 20]
   * I don't have a VIC 20, but a high quality DivX was found on PwP's
     website, which was used here (by converting PwP's 720x576 PAL 25fps
     DivX to 720x480 NTSC 29.97fps).

COMA - Washing machine [4:3 DOS]

COMA - Washing machine encore [4:3 DOS]
   * Some parts are CPU speed sensitive.

CoC - Egg'O Trip [4:3 DOS]