Hello Scene — Conclusion
demo scene
I have been writing code since about 1978, when I first had access to a Commodore PET computer. For me, it’s always been about having fun, doing things with the machine that might not be obvious, and certainly not achievable on my own. Over the years, I’ve picked up some tips and tricks to help me get to the interesting parts sooner rather than later. During the 1980s-1990s, there was a ‘demo scene’ wherein coders such as myself, were engaged in trying to push our ‘personal computers’ to the limit in terms of what they could do visually, and with audio. This demo scene was often centered around computers such as the Commodore 64, or Apple II, or the venerable Commodore Amiga. The demo scene days are largely gone, and computers are a few orders of magnitude more powerful than those early personal computers.
And yet…
I still get excited to create quick and dirty programs that really push the limits of what you can do with the modern personal computer. Modern day programming is super heavy with frameworks, operating systems, SDKs and libraries. We are several levels removed from the core of the machine, which the demo scene of yore leveraged to great effect. But, the machine is still down there, waiting to be unlocked. With some esoteric knowledge, and some good habits and insights, we can begin to unlock all that the computer has to offer, and make creations quickly and easily, for fun and profit.
At the end of June of 2022, I decided I wanted to share some of this low level esoteric knowledge, because why should I have all the fun. So, I began on a series of tutorials to show how, the average programmer, can start to conquer some typically low level stuff. In brief, the series is about how to create quick and dirty programs using the C/C++ programming language on the Windows platform. Included in the series is everything from how to put a window up on the screen, to how to display text along an animated bezier curve. I avoid the typical frameworks and libraries, and use a fairly minimal amount of OS features. Without much work, the tutorials can apply to just about any platform where you have access to the graphics screen, mouse, and keyboard.
Along the way, I share various design decisions that I’ve made, as well as the reasoning behind doing things simple and cheap, rather than relying on giant frameworks. In the end, you could pick up where this series left off and create your own demos, or simply use it as inspiration for generating your own things that are small and fun to play with.
Here are the links to the various tutorials. They rely on my minwe github repository, so it’s pretty easy to follow along if you want to look at the code in full.
Hello Scene – What’s in a Window?
Hello Scene – Events, Organization, more drawing
Hello Scene – All the pretty little things
Hello Scene – Screen Captures for Fun and Profit
Hello Scene – It’s all about the text
I can only hope these tutorials give someone a fresh new perspective on one aspect or another of the coding process, and if they’re like my younger self, gives them some tools so they can create their own wild creation.