Classic (Legacy) Computers

The Demo Scene in the early 1990s was a dynamic, vibrant, amazing thing. Many of the special effects we now take for granted in movies & video games were pioneered at this time - in fact, some of the more advanced groups went on to found some of today's game developing companies.

This archive contains almost 4000 demos totalling almost 2GB of storage space. The hardware dependencies of these demos are sometimes extreme, requiring for example a specific make & model of video or sound card - many had to be run on a PC booted with a blank CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to ensure the demo had exclusive control over all the hardware. As such, unless you have a variety of vintage hardware to run these on, many might not work, even with the best PC emulators...

• PC Demo Web Repository
  Web access for the Hornet demo archive - these are the original distributions of the demo executables, most require a real PC running DOS (some of the later ones are Windows-based)
  
  
• Ready-to-View Video Captures
  Video captures of 20 of the most popular demos from this era, streaming from Google Video - it should be noted that computer generated imagery contains a lot of detail and doesn't survive compression all that well, but these are still fun to watch - Capturing these required some rather creative hardware hacking and software coding