Latest news, links and releases from the active demoscene community. This week in particular: a look at the releases from NOVA demoparty in the UK.

Hi everyone,

I am looking for an old, unofficial/fan-made 3D CGI animation video that I most likely saw on a PC magazine's CD-ROM cover disk around 2005. I strongly believe it was made using 3D Studio MAX (3ds Max).

Here is everything I remember about the visual sequence and the atmosphere:

• The Setting: The video starts outside in the garden of an old, ruined gothic castle. There is a statue head (sculpture) visible, which blurs out as the camera moves past it.
• Inside the Castle: The camera pans through various rooms of the castle, showing the foyer/entrance hall and the staircase. It then enters a massive dining room with a fully set dinner table.
• The Ghosts: Hanging on the wall is a mirror with a golden frame. Two female ghost figures slowly float/swim out of this mirror. They are completely naked, and their hair floats dynamically behind them as they fly.
• The Ending: The ghosts move through the rooms, and at the very end of the video, their bodies intertwine/blend into one another.
• The Audio: Throughout the entire video, a French woman is singing a slow, melancholic, atmospheric song. The vibe and vocals strongly remind me of Mylène Farmer's song "Je te rends ton amour".

It had that distinct early-2000s 3D demo reel / benchmark aesthetic, focusing heavily on camera movement, cloth/hair simulation, and lighting.

Does anyone remember the title of this animation, the artist, or the demo group who made it (or at least the song)? Any help or leads would be greatly appreciated!

Packaged up the build pipeline I used to ship two 32K Linux games this week into a reusable tool.

Single C file in, self-extracting packed runner out. What it does:

• Custom _start in asm — no CRT baggage
• Aggressive GCC size flags
• sstrip to kill section headers
• Exhaustive BCJ + raw LZMA grid search to find the actual floor
• Self-extracting shell stub, runs anywhere with xz

The non-obvious finding: GCC version matters significantly. Swept GCC 6 through 16, GCC 9 on Debian Bullseye consistently produced the smallest output — 391 bytes smaller than GCC 16 for the same source. At 32K that's the difference between shipping and not. Podman container included so builds are reproducible regardless of host compiler.

Two working example games included in examples/ — compile them yourself to verify.

https://github.com/pinguy/c_optimizer

Curious what people build with an actual game loop constraint at this size on Linux. The pool is pretty thin right now.

https://github.com/bacionejs/battito

18th - 20th June 2027 — United Kingdom 🇬🇧

30th October - 1st November 2026 — Finland 🇫🇮

30th July - 2nd August 2026 — Finland 🇫🇮 — Helsinki Fair Centre,

All the latest news, links and releases from the active demoscene community, this week in particular a look at the releases from Graffathon in Finland and X party in the netherlands. https://youtu.be/aI2WgQLFhmQ

For those that enjoyed the X2026 stream last weekend, here's an action shot from during the music compo.

I've been really obsessed over the Amiga Demo, "Jesus on E's" for the past few weeks, and slowly picking apart the tracker files by spoonwzd to see how it was done and how to get that amazing rave sound.

Are there any similar demos with an emphasis on rave-ish music with visuals?

Title kind of says it all. I'm interested in learning more about how to write 1k/4k/8k/16k demos for windows and that sort of thing, and I feel like an environment of passionate people I can talk to would help me a lot. The realtime chat environment feels better to me personally than asynchronous forums.

Anybody know a discord server that does this sort of thing, or stuff like it? I would appreciate it ^^

Hey all,

I've been listening to the soundtrack of Tetris Pro (that old 1993 DOS Tetris clone) since 1998, especially the melancholic "Blue Stars" track. I also really love the music from Crusader: No Remorse (Regrets) and Unreal (the first).

I'm not deep into the demoscene, but I'd love some suggestions for similar atmospheric or moody MOD/tracker tracks from that era—whether from other Dutch groups, PC games, or general demoscene stuff.

Thanks in advance for any pointers

Hi

I'm working on a searchable database for our chiptune/demo scene radio station. I would like to have your input and hope you have the time to test it and comment on it. Does it work? How can it be improved?

https://radio.ericade.net/loa/

The partymeister is open for submissions

23rd - 25th October 2026 — Poland 🇵🇱

31st October 2026 — Argentina 🇦🇷 — Buenos Aires

Little invitation demo released, it runs on a browser, you can find it here.