Second Reality
Encyclopedia
Unreal ][ - The 2nd Reality (later known as Second Reality), is a demo
created by Future Crew
for the Assembly '93 demoparty
. In the PC
demo competition
, Second Reality placed first with its demonstration of 2D and 3D rendering
. The demo was released to the public in October 1993. It is considered to be one of the best demos created during the early 1990s on the PC, e.g. Slashdot
voted it one of the "Top 10 Hacks of All Time".
and Purple Motion
using ScreamTracker 3. The degree of synchronization of the visuals with the music was highly impressive for its time.
For another part that its introductory text calls "just an experiment" start the demo with a command line argument of "u". The screen will start filling with ever more stars warping towards the screen.
sites, it is difficult or impossible to run Second Reality directly on a modern PC. The demo used its own memory manager
which accessed the MMU
directly in a way which is not compatible with modern operating system
s, accessed video
and sound
hardware directly (using its own built-in device driver
s), and many of the timings in the demo do not scale up to modern CPU
speeds.
To run this demo on a modern machine running Windows
or Linux
, one can use DOSBox
. DOSBox is even capable of emulating the exotic video modes and the Gravis Ultrasound preferred by Second Reality.
The demo runs best on an Intel 80486
PC with a Gravis Ultrasound
or a Sound Blaster Pro
(or register-compatible clone).
inspired a lot of people to do their own remix
es of the show. The most popular ones are the following:
Demo (computer programming)
A demo is a non-interactive multimedia presentation made within the computer subculture known as the demoscene. Demogroups create demos to demonstrate their abilities in programming, music, drawing, and 3D modeling...
created by Future Crew
Future Crew
Future Crew is a now-defunct Finnish demogroup who created PC demos and software, active mostly between 1992 and 1994.-History:The group was founded in 1986 by PSI as a Commodore 64 group, before moving to the PC demoscene in 1988; other members included, over time, Trug, Wildfire, Pixel, ICE,...
for the Assembly '93 demoparty
Demoparty
A demoparty is an event that gathers demosceners and other computer enthusiasts to compete in competitions. A typical demoparty is a non-stop event lasting over a weekend, providing the visitors a lot of time to socialize. The competing works, at least those in the most important competitions, are...
. In the PC
IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
demo competition
Compo
Compo may refer to:*A slang word in the demoscene for "competition".*A character from the British TV series Last of the Summer Wine named Compo Simmonite, played by Bill Owen.*British army field rations....
, Second Reality placed first with its demonstration of 2D and 3D rendering
Rendering (computer graphics)
Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model , by means of computer programs. A scene file contains objects in a strictly defined language or data structure; it would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information as a description of the virtual scene...
. The demo was released to the public in October 1993. It is considered to be one of the best demos created during the early 1990s on the PC, e.g. Slashdot
Slashdot
Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...
voted it one of the "Top 10 Hacks of All Time".
Demo description
Many techniques used by other demos, including Future Crew's own earlier work, were refined and reused in Second Reality. The demo had a soundtrack of Techno music composed by SkavenPeter Hajba
Peter Hajba also known by his demoscene nickname Skaven, is a Finnish musician and graphic artist.Despite having no formal training, he has won numerous awards for his music, including winning the Assembly music competition in 1993, 1995 and 2002. His most recent project is with Remedy...
and Purple Motion
Jonne Valtonen
Jonne Valtonen is an award-winning Finnish composer, arranger and orchestrator. He is renowned for his contributions in the field of demoscene and video game music.- Life and early career :...
using ScreamTracker 3. The degree of synchronization of the visuals with the music was highly impressive for its time.
IntroductionFirst the introduction plays, demonstrating text rendering on a background. After that is done several ships appear and fly away from the camera, demonstrating 3D rendering. After some distance the ships explode, sending out a shockwave (reminiscent of the Praxis explosion effectPraxis effect The Praxis effect is a special effect commonly used in science-fiction movies and other visual media.... seen in the film "Star Trek VI"). The screen fades to display a rendition of Wendigo Wendigo (comics) Wendigo is a fictional monster in the Marvel Comics universe. He is based on the mythical creature of the same name... , at which point Purple Motion's main musical score for the demo begins. The image then flattens and falls horizontally to become a 3D, polygonal checkerboard. |
Bouncing sphereThe music has now finished its introductory notes at this point and the first melody starts. Next a glenz (additively blended) polyhedronPolyhedron In elementary geometry a polyhedron is a geometric solid in three dimensions with flat faces and straight edges... appears and bounces on the checkered surface, in perfect timing with the orchestra hit Orchestra hit An orchestra hit, also known as an orchestral hit, orchestra stab, or orchestral stab, is a sound created through the layering of the sounds of a number of different orchestral instruments playing a single staccato note or chord. The orchestra hit sound was propagated by the use of early samplers,... s in the score, demonstrating 3D rendering and realtime mesh deformation. After a while another larger polyhedron appears and the smaller polyhedron begins bouncing inside the larger. |
TunnelThe next scene is a winding, fluid tunnel built up by discrete points that move towards the camera. This creates a feeling of rushing through the tunnel for the viewer. |
Oscillating circlesThe tunnel fades out into some oscillating circles which soon fade into the next scene. |
Moiré patternsA scene that could be described as a light show. The scenes consist of multiple moiré patternMoiré pattern In physics, a moiré pattern is an interference pattern created, for example, when two grids are overlaid at an angle, or when they have slightly different mesh sizes.- Etymology :... s interacting. Moiré patterns were quite popular in demos of that time. |
CreatureNext an image of UlikUlik Ulik is a fictional character that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics. Ulik was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and first appears in Thor #137 .... rolls in from the right, and fades away. Some leaves and water are displayed, along with text characters floating downstream. The text says "Another way to scroll" and is an example of a scroller Scrolling In computer graphics, filmmaking, television production, and other kinetic displays, scrolling is sliding text, images or video across a monitor or display. "Scrolling", as such, does not change the layout of the text or pictures, or but incrementally moves the user's view across what is... , which was present in most demos of the time. |
Magnifying and rotating headAfter the text has floated by, again the scene changes to display something that resembles an evil looking human head with a pentagramPentagram A pentagram is the shape of a five-pointed star drawn with five straight strokes... engraved on his forehead. A sphere comes down from the top left corner simulating the below surface being refracted through a magnifying sphere. This is where the soundtrack utters the cult phrase "I am not an atomic playboy William H. P. Blandy William Henry Purnell Blandy , known to friends as "Spike", was an admiral in the United States Navy during World War II.-Biography:... ", quoting Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy's remarks before the Bikini nuclear test. The sphere vanishes down in the lower right corner and the camera begins to spin while zooming in and out to reveal a repeating pattern of heads, demonstrating a technique known as rotozooming. The camera then falls down and bounces back up on the surface twice, after which the scene again fades out. |
Plasma EffectWhen the image fades in, the camera is placed close to a surface changing texture every time. This is a continuation of their work in UnrealUnreal (demo) Unreal is a demo created by Future Crew in 1992.-System requirements:The demo states that "[it] requires a 386 computer [and] runs perfectly on a 486/33 MHz [PC] with Tseng Labs SuperVGA"... where they first introduced the 'unreal' plasma effect Plasma effect The plasma effect is a computer-based visual effect animated in real-time. It uses cycles of changing colours warped in various ways to give an illusion of liquid, organic movement.... . |
Colored spinning cubeAfter a few surfaces have been displayed, a cube comes up that has these animated surfaces attached and spins around while translating towards and from the camera. |
Vector BallsAfter a while this scene fades and many small vector balls fall onto the screen and begin bouncing off the ground and morphing into various spiral patterns. Because of a bug, this part will crash if the demo is installed in a directory with the complete path length exceeding 30 characters. |
RaytracingAgain there is a fadeout and a fade in, this time we are looking at a scene with two spheres, and a sword starts translating towards the camera. The spheres will display a reflection of the sword as well as a reflection of the aforementioned reflection in the other sphere. The scene was rendered using Future Crew's homemade raytracing software. |
WaterAs the scene changes again, this time the image rendered will be of a surface changing shape, similar to that of water. This scene is rendered using a VoxelVoxel A voxel is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space. This is analogous to a pixel, which represents 2D image data in a bitmap... landscape rendering technique. |
Bouncing bitmapAfter this, an image will fall in from above, depicting a rider on what appears to be yet another fantasy creature. Contrary to what the text says, this image was not drawn by the group members, it was available at the time in several image-art CDs. The image will hit the ground and bounce up while behaving like jellyGelatin dessert Gelatin desserts are desserts made with sweetened and flavored gelatin. They can be made by combining plain gelatin with other ingredients or by using a premixed blend of gelatin with additives... . |
3D spacecraft fly-throughIn the next scene, a craft reminiscent of the TIE/Advanced fighter from Star Wars: A New HopeStar Wars Episode IV: A New Hope Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, originally released as Star Wars, is a 1977 American epic space opera film, written and directed by George Lucas. It is the first of six films released in the Star Wars saga: two subsequent films complete the original trilogy, while a prequel trilogy completes the... flies around in a large 3D city, leaving it and heading up right over the text "Future Crew". This was later redone in the Final Reality demo by some of the previous members of Future Crew Future Crew Future Crew is a now-defunct Finnish demogroup who created PC demos and software, active mostly between 1992 and 1994.-History:The group was founded in 1986 by PSI as a Commodore 64 group, before moving to the PC demoscene in 1988; other members included, over time, Trug, Wildfire, Pixel, ICE,... working for Remedy Entertainment Remedy Entertainment Remedy Entertainment is a Finnish computer game developer founded in 1995 and based in Espoo, Finland. The company is best known for its Max Payne and Alan Wake series of video games.-History:... . Flat shading is used for the buildings and Gouraud shading Gouraud shading Gouraud shading, named after Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes... for the smooth trees and lettering at the end. |
Future Crew bitmapThe image fades out and the final scene fades in, an image of two nutNut (hardware) A nut is a type of hardware fastener with a threaded hole. Nuts are almost always used opposite a mating bolt to fasten a stack of parts together. The two partners are kept together by a combination of their threads' friction, a slight stretch of the bolt, and compression of the parts... s with the text "Future Crew" written on them. |
Hidden part
The demo can be started with a single character command line argument "2" through "5" to start from any of the later four parts.For another part that its introductory text calls "just an experiment" start the demo with a command line argument of "u". The screen will start filling with ever more stars warping towards the screen.
Running the demo
While the demo code remains freely available on numerous InternetInternet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
sites, it is difficult or impossible to run Second Reality directly on a modern PC. The demo used its own memory manager
Memory manager
In IBM PC compatible computing, DOS memory management refers to software and techniques employed to give applications access to more than 640K of "conventional memory". The 640kB limit was specific to the IBM PC and close compatibles; other machines running MS-DOS had different limits, for example...
which accessed the MMU
Memory management unit
A memory management unit , sometimes called paged memory management unit , is a computer hardware component responsible for handling accesses to memory requested by the CPU...
directly in a way which is not compatible with modern operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
s, accessed video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
and sound
Sound
Sound is a mechanical wave that is an oscillation of pressure transmitted through a solid, liquid, or gas, composed of frequencies within the range of hearing and of a level sufficiently strong to be heard, or the sensation stimulated in organs of hearing by such vibrations.-Propagation of...
hardware directly (using its own built-in device driver
Device driver
In computing, a device driver or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device....
s), and many of the timings in the demo do not scale up to modern CPU
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
speeds.
To run this demo on a modern machine running Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
or Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, one can use DOSBox
DOSBox
DOSBox is emulator software that emulates an IBM PC compatible computer running MS-DOS. It is intended especially for use with old PC games. DOSBox is free software....
. DOSBox is even capable of emulating the exotic video modes and the Gravis Ultrasound preferred by Second Reality.
The demo runs best on an Intel 80486
Intel 80486
The Intel 80486 microprocessor was a higher performance follow up on the Intel 80386. Introduced in 1989, it was the first tightly pipelined x86 design as well as the first x86 chip to use more than a million transistors, due to a large on-chip cache and an integrated floating point unit...
PC with a Gravis Ultrasound
Gravis Ultrasound
Gravis UltraSound or GUS is a sound card for the IBM PC compatible system platform, made by Canada-based Advanced Gravis Computer Technology Ltd...
or a Sound Blaster Pro
Sound Blaster
The Sound Blaster family of sound cards was the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system platform, until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95, which standardized the programming interface at application level , and the evolution in PC design led to onboard...
(or register-compatible clone).
Remakes
The legendary state of this demoDemoscene
The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...
inspired a lot of people to do their own remix
Remix
A remix is an alternative version of a recorded song, made from an original version. This term is also used for any alterations of media other than song ....
es of the show. The most popular ones are the following:
- Second Reality C64 (pouët.net) by Smash Designs - Probably the most well-known and most impressive remix, being a faithful adaptation of the original demo for the Commodore 64Commodore 64The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...
platform. - Final Reality (pouët.net) by Remedy Entertainment - Although this is a commercial benchmarkBenchmark (computing)In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it...
ing software, one of the video scenes pays homage to the original demo's "3D spacecraft fly-through" part. - Real Reality (pouët.net) by N.E.V.E.R. - A remix, which shows all parts of the demo being played in real life.
- Zecond Re@lity (pouët.net) by Zon@ Neutr@ - Also a "real life" remix, however, this one also features the original soundtrack being performed a cappellaA cappellaA cappella music is specifically solo or group singing without instrumental sound, or a piece intended to be performed in this way. It is the opposite of cantata, which is accompanied singing. A cappella was originally intended to differentiate between Renaissance polyphony and Baroque concertato...
. - Flash Reality (pouët.net) by The Scampers - A Macromedia Flash remix, with many scenes recreated using the ActionscriptActionScriptActionScript is an object-oriented language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. . It is a dialect of ECMAScript , and is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash Player platform, used on Web pages in the form of...
programming language. - SHizZLE (Team Pokeme) - A demo on the Pokémon Mini, which contains some parts of Second Reality.
Trivia
- This demo can be seen (with optional commentary by Future Crew) on the MindCandy DVD. The Dolby SurroundDolby SurroundDolby Surround was the earliest consumer version of Dolby's multichannel analog film sound decoding format Dolby Stereo introduced to the public in 1982 during the time home video recording formats were introducing Stereo and HiFi capability...
information at the beginning was blacked out due to legal rights. - The "Ten seconds to transmission" sound effect is sampled from the movie BatmanBatman (1989 film)Batman is a 1989 superhero film based on the DC Comics character of the same name, directed by Tim Burton. The film stars Michael Keaton in the title role, as well as Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl and Jack Palance...
. - Children of BodomChildren of BodomChildren of Bodom is a Finnish heavy metal band from Espoo. Formed in 1993, the group currently consists of Alexi Laiho , Roope Latvala , Janne Wirman , Henkka Seppälä , and Jaska Raatikainen...
used the introduction music for the first track of Ubiquitos Absence Of Remission when they were known as Inearthed. - The demo briefly appears in an official promo-video for MaemoMaemoMaemo is a software platform developed by the Maemo community for smartphones and Internet tablets. It is based on the Debian Linux distribution, but has no relation to it...
. - The soundtrack of the demo was licensed for SHMUP an iOS game.
- This song is featured in the Album "Metropolis" (2011) in the tracks 2, 3 and 4.
External links
- Download location of the demo
- soundtrack in ScreamTracker 3 format (693K)