New book: Freax, about the history of the demo-/underground scene.

[DaWiper]

I'm like reading about the good ol' days. Do you?
http://www.freax.hu/
If I only buy one book this year this will be it.

There is a sample chapter on the site.

Edit: Sorry about that. Seems they will initially only ship in Europe.

[Malpine Walis]

Well, I checked amazon and they don't even admit that the book exists. However, if you like that you may also like GoTo by Steve Lohr (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465042260/qid=1121810869/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-5505618-3715109). It is probably the last history of the computer revolution that will ever be based on interviews with some of the people who did the work as he went into nursing homes to grab several people.

[DaWiper]

There is another book on my list. Thanks!
The difference is that Freax is written about the demo scene from the early 80's and upwards.
Ever wondered what the demo scene is all about? Take a look at www.scene.org
A demo is a gfx-showoff presentation of what a person/group is able to do with their hardware. This started in the early 80's and exploded from there. It's amazing to see what people can do with few resources.
Anyone remember the kkrieger game? The 3d fps-demo with dynamic light that only needed 96KB of hd space(but a lot of mem)? That evolved from the demo scene.
Alot of todays game makers started out making demos on the c64/amiga/atari/etc.

These people are in my book the true coders out there. For those of you that know what a c64 is. What if I told you that I've seen true texture mapped 3d gfx on that machine. Sure, it looks like crap, but its a 1mhz cpu with 64KB ram.

Anyway, Freax tells the story of how it all begun. From the very first simple text-based crack-intros until todays extremly advanced dx9 demos with studio quality sound. The first book that I linked to tells the story about the c64 and the amiga(so they say). It will be released 1. august.