Scene.org Demoscene News Service

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 51. God help me, it's Jumalauta 2021!

Jumalauta 2021 is over and brought 15 contestants to the tracked music demo scene. All parties have their style and Jumalauta had a rather informal feel to the music. Some is seriously crafted with nice chords and heavy beats, whereas others are just joking around. The winner really took some liberties with the concept of jazz and one entry featured a tire pump. So, it’s not like any demo party. But it is jumalauta!

Playlist:
00:00 Time for another episode of Flashback – Tracks from the past
00:06 DJ Daemon speaks: God help me, the Finnish are coming! Can we hope to meet in person again this fall? Finnish demo party Jumalauta 21 sure thought so. It ran between the 27th and 29th of September 2021 and allowed people to join in person and over the Internet. So, it’s a toplist episode again – Yay! Just kick back, relax, and it will start in a moment.
00:35 M.O.T. of Jml – Yahamaa
01:41 DJ Daemon speaks: Let’s get it started then. 15 contestants fought it out, and we’ll give them all to you, beginning with the last place. BE warned I’m guarranted to mispronounce all names and titles. Listener beware! Galactic Nightmares captures position 15 with 32 points and the tune is called Spectral 2nd. It has a nice 90s techno feeling to it, making me feel vibes from my first days as a DJ back then.
02:21 Galactic Nightmares – Spectral 2nd
06:46 DJ Daemon speaks: Rolling towards position 14 with 32 points and the tune Fourth dimension. Rafał Lipinski gives us a spacey journey with an ethereal feeling to it.
06:59 LIV Rafał Lipinski l, Retrowibracje.pl – Fourth dimention
11:01 DJ Daemon speaks: 13 may be a unlucky number for Puoluehallitus, who can’t go no further. But it’s a nice and heavy feeling with some funky thrown in for good measure. The song is called Räpujuhlat and gets 36 points.
11:19 Puoluehallitu – Räpujuhlat
18:00 DJ Daemon speaks: On place 12, we get a weird start of a song, feeling they just let the recorder run and forgot the actually create a song. You do get a weird pumping sound, as if they were trying to inflate a tire. How this got 36 points is totally beyond me. And the song never starts but should be known as Patjalanda and its by Kaunis Espanjalaien Tyttoe. Please stay until its done – it gets better later in the program. I’m sorry for this.
18:33 Kaunis Espanjalaien Tyttoe – Patjalandia
18:38 DJ Daemon speaks: Can we get something that’s not experimental music? Yes, Tom of Riihimäki has a nice and soft blippety-bloppety tune called Lasimuseo. It gets 37 points; 11th place and our hopes up.
18:55 Tom of Riihimäki – Lasimuseo
22:44 DJ Daemon speaks: The true top list starts on place 10 with the tune Tuurilla mukaan by Defilus. It gets 37 points. Aaaaand, there’s nothing wrong with your radio, it’s meant to sound like a classic “oumpapa”-song cut to ribbons by a mad and possible drunk sound engineer. I’m innocent here!
23:08 Defilus – Tuurilla mukaan
25:52 DJ Daemon speaks: Number 9, number 9, number 9…. That is place 9 goes to Karpostaseuraava with Bagatelli Aulangon Aamunkoitto and it gets 41 points. No, I have no idea what’s going on here, but I like it!
26:10 Karpostaseuraava – Bagatelli Aulangon AAmunkoitto
29:07 DJ Daemon speaks: Place 8 and another Tom of Finland, this time Tom of Lahti. The tune is soft and bit lacking in instrumentation, it’s called Liipolan Betoni and racks up 42 points.
29:21 Tom of Lahti – Liipolan Betoni
32:49 DJ Daemon speaks: It’s getting closer to the winner, but we have some miles left to go. At place 7, Ylvaes gives us Workshop. And it sounds like one! You can hear the chords sounding like a saw and the drums go at it like heavy machinery. Whatever is built here is really something. Sadly, the tune is a bit short and gets 46 points.
33:13 Ylvaes – Workshop
34:51 DJ Daemon speaks: Another Tom takes place 6, and it’s Tom of Hyvinkää with Hissitorni. It gets 46 points and is yet another nice classic techno beat. The 90s still rules!
35:07 Tom of Hyvinkää – Hissitorni
37:49 DJ Daemon speaks: No risk of running out of Toms yet. This is Tom of Jokioinen and Elonkierto. Softer techno that feels moody and have something of a blue shimmer to it. Synesthesia is a weird thing, but quite amusing. The points? Try 47 and place 5.
38:13 Tom of Jokioinen – Elonkierto
41:31 DJ Daemon speaks: JNNN gives us Aleph zero. It starts soft and then goes industrial heavy techno. It’s located at place 4 and get 53 points.
41:44 JNNN – Aleph Zero
45:44 DJ Daemon speaks: Bronze time, people. Meritaehti sends the show into a total Tailspin of great guitar riffs and synth chords. This is enough to get it to third place and 55 points. It enters and leaves swiftly and precisely.
46:03 Meritaehti – Tailspin
49:28 DJ Daemon speaks: The silver is safely in place for Naetti tyttoe and Vaatteet päälle. Second place and 58 points. Weird vocals, but a great tune with some twists and turns. Second place is exactly where this belongs.
49:46 Naetti tyttoe – Vaatteet päälle (OnlyFans.com/Marjatta Remix) –
53:08 DJ Daemon speaks: Winner! And it’s Jazz-time, folks “JML Jazz Sextet Committee” tries scatsigning and kinda does it their way. Don’t really think the real jazz cats would approve. But I do, as it’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys, with typewriters and notepaper. It’s called “Mid-Autumn, Late Autumn Part 2, Op II (Take 0.5)”. Humor clearly transcends quality and gives them 59 points and a certain dinner made of poultry.
53:45 JML Jazz Sextet Committee – Mid Autumn, Late Autumn Part 2, Op II (Take 0.5)
55:21 DJ Daemon speaks: Thanks to the orgas of Jumalauta!
55:55 The Music Wizard – A Demo Song

Production notes:
This one really annoyed me. I had no idea that this demo party had a jokeful take on all its competitions. So I really was none to impressed by some of its entries before I understood that.

Colophone: "Jumalauta" means "God, help me" in Finnish. So there is always that.

Tags: Jumalauta, Demo scene episodes, Demo scene top lists, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 50. By the modem light's red glare part 1

This is the first episode in a two episode story about the Bulletin Board System (BBS) era seen from a Swedish perspective. Follow DJ Daemon through the late 70s, through the Wechselmann-indictment to the discussion about Anita Bondestam and her weird moped analogy. It covers the era between 1978 to the early 1990s.

Playlist:
00:00 LIVE – Time for another episode of Flashback – Tracks from the past
00:07 DJ Daemon speaks: In this episode we will teach you to connect to the network. Just set the serial speed to 9600 bps, connect the Data Circuit Terminating Equipment to the Data Terminal and make sure to set your terminal to 8 bits, no parity and 1 stop bit. It’s all about the Bulletin boards, the scene of the hobbyists, the criminals, the fear inducing headlines and the cyberpunks running through the phone network at 2400 baud.
00:39 Style – Ability
03:06 DJ Daemon speaks: Before the Internet, we connected over phone lines to each other. Sure, there were USENET and university networks back then. But we, the hobbyists, called each other computer’s and wrote intelligent texts to each other. At least we thought they were, back when we were teens. This meant, everyone could have their own system to let others call them and so we formed a big scene. The person running a system like that was called a Sysop, as in System operator and the system was called a Bulletin board system or BBS. I will call them boards throughout this program to not run out of oxygen. Think about it: you had to pay long distance telephone fees to call some boards and even if they were local, you paid by the minute.
04:05 Michiel van den Bos – March Of The Halflings
08:09 DJ Daemon speaks: The first electronic bulletin board went up in Chicago in 1978, and we got our first Swedish BBS the next year. It started slowly, as the home computing era had yet not begun and few people had access to modems, computers and even liked the idea of spending money on hourlong calls. But it did happen, if only so slowly.
08:42 Beehunter of Jazz – Apoplexy
11:00 DJ Daemon speaks: One technology that made the whole BBS-era possible was the modem. Sure, a modem is just something you use to send data over a telephone line. So? When Hayes released the “Smartmodem”, the whole thing took off. This unit was standalone but came with a set of commands to control them and soon all modems used the Hayes command set. Do you remember typing ATDT 7268265 to call that number. Yeah, that’s the most common command. This meant all computers and terminal program that supported it were allowed to play. Hop on in, the water is warm, was the message. Before that, finding the right combination of hardware and software held the whole revolution back.
11:00 DJ Daemon speaks.
12:04 Traven of Syndrome – Alone In The City
17:33 DJ Daemon speaks: This podcast talks retro computing from a Swedish perspective, so here’s Sweden The BBS-scene was sprawling during the 80s. I don’t know so much about it, as I started in the 90s, but Joacim Melin has written a lot about it. On his blog, you can read about how legendary people lite Jan Mickelin were active in the BBS-scene and part of creating the Swedish computer magazine called “Datormagazin”. In the beginning it was all Commodore, but soon expanded to Amiga and later other environments. Most BBSes were small, but some, like Permobas grew large. This board was sponsored by handicap equipment manufacturer Permobil and lasted until 1985 when Permobil cut the deal. The reason was that they felt most users on it were not handicapped.
18:38 Alex Menchi – Lightquest Theme
22:52 DJ Daemon speaks: In 1988, political activist and filmmaker Maj Wechselmann successfully sued Eskil Block over something he wrote on the Swedish board Kom-systemet. He accused her of being a traitor and a Soviet agent. This later led to the enactment of the “BBS-lagen” law 10 years later, that made “electronic bulletins” fall under the law and made prosecution of slander and defamation easier. This law also applies to the Internet. So, the new technology could be abused, and people were waking up to the dark sides of it.
23:38 ArchAngel – Eternal Dreams
26:12 DJ Daemon speaks: The 90s were upon us and the boards were being examined by mass media. The headlines warned us about the seedy underbelly of the computer networks even before the Internet was a thing. The terrorist’s or anarchist’s handbook was a braindead text that explained how to make bombs. It was very dangerous to follow as I came with advice such as “If you see bubbles forming, run for it!”. It was sometimes spread among us younglings as it was cool to have a copy, but I made the good choice of not having it on my board. Then there was piracy copied games, but we have talked about that in episode 35 already. Some said you could buy drugs, meet with criminals and then there was the neurotic fear of illegal pornography that made the whole scene look downright evil. But no one I’ve ever spoken to in the scene had seen any evidence of any of that. We all felt annoyed by the press misrepresenting the whole hobby. We were only in it for the discussions and the demos.
27:31 Henripekka Kallio and Matti Brockman – A Taste of Moonshine
31:03 DJ Daemon speaks: Anita Bondestam, who was the director of Swedish authority on data- and computer issues, Datainspektionen said something that rubbed us the wrong way. She compared modems and mopeds and noted that you should make sure the kids follow the laws, wear a helmet and so on. This way she indirectly compared illegally modified mopeds with our boards. “Or as we say here in Datainspektionens: if you buy a modem, you get into trouble”. It sounds “better” in Swedish, where it rhymes. Her views on juvenile delinquency as the direct effect of using modems was very bewildering to us.
32:06 Morgan – Angel’s Deep Shadow
38:25 DJ Daemon speaks: Some other day I will talk more about the 90s and the end of the era. But you know what happened. It was not aliens, it was the Internet. Sorry, mr Tsoukalos.
38:40 Andreas Viklund of KFMF – Traxah symphonee
41:52 DJ Daemon speaks.
42:43 DRAX – Back 2 B4 Tomorrow
46:16 DJ Daemon speaks.
47:12 Astro boy of Pearl – Eclipse
51:31 DJ Daemon speaks.
52:08 Bacter vs Saga musix – Whiskey Drops
56:13 DJ Daemon speaks.
56:35 LIVE – Celebrating over 30 years of tracked music
56:41 Boomerang – Child of Light

Production notes:
I wanted to create a special series about the BBS-scene a long time. And I wanted to tell it from my own memories or from other BBS-sysops in Sweden. This was realized in the autumn of 2021 in a three part miniseries. The first part is about the early days until the early 90s. The second covers the 90s until the sunset era. The third talks about the desert wandering years until today.

Colophone:
"By the rockets red glare" is a stanza from the National Anthem of the United States of America.

Tags: Retro history, Storytelling, Host: DJ Daemon, BBS, Bulletin board systems, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 49. Between Arok and a hard place

Arok Party 2021 is over and the autumn season is now inaugurated. A strong line up with 15 awesome remixes and 5 great C64 tracked tunes, coming directly from the compos. This has been great and DJ Daemon goes through the list that contains a weird Thriller-esque remix, someone trying to start his car and some real sweet soft tracks.

Playlist:
00:00 Time for another episode of Flashback – Tracks from the past
00:07 DJ Daemon: It’s a demo scene episode again, and this time it’s all about yesterday’s “Arok party 2021” and their music compos. This is another top list episode with all the entries. 15 remixed tunes and in the end of this hour, you get 5 nice C64 tracked ones. All this curtesy of Arok and Slayradio. Remixes of old games it is then… Let’s get started. Fifteenth place goes to Paranoidroid and the tune “Hades Nebula subtune 2” which gets 96 points.
00:42 Remix place 15 – Paranoidroid – Hades Nebula subtune2
04:19 DJ Daemon: All right, this is SlayRadio territory, so this set of songs will only be played on this episode of the podcast and then never again. But, anyway, back to the list. Paranoidroid also claims fourteenth place with “Zynaps”. This scener seems to be rather unknown by Demozoo and Janeway Amiga, but gets 107 point for this entry.
04:47 Remix place 14 – Paranoidroid – Zynaps
08:05 DJ Daemon: Thirteenth place holds NeonTimeTravel with “Birthday”, a tune that gets 133 points.
08:13 Remix place 13 – NeonTimeTravel – Birthday
11:19 DJ Daemon: Let’s up the tempo and go the heavy route with “Tristar and Red Sector Incorporated”. It’s not new, but it will blow up your speakers. It’s “Beat To The Pulp – Metal Tribute – XxDUSTYxX” and it racks up 134 points, grabbing place number 12.
11:40 Remix place 12 – DUSTY – Beat To The Pulp – Metal Tribute (2021)
14:44 DJ Daemon: Stranger in a Strange Land is a Heinlein book and a song from the British Heavy metal band Iron Maiden, as well. But it’s also an entry by LaLa occupying place 11 with 141 points.
15:02 Remix place 11 – LaLa – Stranger in a Strange Land (Ensoniq Mix)
18:13 DJ Daemon: Magnar Harestad seems to be on the lazy side, calling his remix “Title needed”. Whatever it might have needed, it only reached place 10 with 145 points.
18:35 Remix place 10 – Magnar Harestad – Magnar – Title Needed (GRG)
21:19 DJ Daemon: The remixes are not fresh, but they’re definitely current. Dr. Future brings a 10-month-old and very soft tune called “Full contact” to the table. That nets him a ninth place and 147 points. Am I the only one getting “Dojo Dan”-vibes here? This is a personal favorite.
21:41 Remix place 9 – Dr. Future – Full Contact
24:17 DJ Daemon: Mystical vibes and a scary title, this is the Exorcist by Chabee. It swiftly turns more mundane with a nice synthy sound and nice, if a little weird vocal that propels it to place 8 with 149 points.
24:37 Remix place 8 – Chabee – Exorcist (ft. Bessie Jones)
27:38 DJ Daemon: I wonder if stupidity can be some sort of Anosognosia? You have it but, don’t even know that you do. You see, it means having a disability and no way of understanding that you do. But it’s a really cool tune as well by NecroPolo that crashes down on place 7 with 150 points.
28:05 Remix place 7 – NecroPolo – Anosognosia (compo edition)
31:07 DJ Daemon: Medical terms are popular, obviously. Place 6 has some Cortisone on it, richly applied by Teo. It’s 154 mg, sorry points, of pure soft beats that you can dance to.
31:24 Remix place 6 – Teo – Cortisone (Steroid remix)
34:50 DJ Daemon: A ghost walks over Europe, it’s the ghost of Michael Jackson in the spectral form of Makke singing Ghosts and Thrillers. You know the game and the album. It gets 157 points, but some should be removed for not involving Vincent Price … or maybe Elvira. The text is hilarious. That game WAS hard to beat…
35:19 Remix place 5 – Makke – Ghosts ‘n Thrillers
38:35 DJ Daemon: Getting hotter! We’re almost at the medals. But Giana Sisters seem to be out of luck. This is beautiful beyond belief. Arranged by Glyn R Brown who can be quite happy with 165 points.
38:56 Remix place 4 – Glyn R Brown – Giana Sisters
42:19 DJ Daemon: Bronze medal! On third place, we find “Dominator Loader (Pre-dominant mix)”, 168 points lead artist Ctrl-Z close… But not close enough.
42:35 Remix place 3 – Ctrl-Z – Dominator Loader (Pre-Dominant mix)
46:06 DJ Daemon: The silver medal goes to Ziona and Vincenzo. The former is one of SlayRadio’s really cool hosts and the latter is a prolific musician with tracks dating back to 1999. The song is called Ubi-sound (funkdance mix) and gets 171 points.
46:28 Remix place 2 – ziona & Vincenzo – Ubi-sound funkdance mix
49:46 DJ Daemon: Should you be suspicious when one of the orgas gets first place. Probably not, but Slaygon yanks the gold medal away from his partner and co-host. He’ll be sleeping in the doghouse for that. At 171 points, the same as the silver medal, he is the winner of today! The song, “Black Lamp” is truly awesome. By the way, does that even work? My lamps go black when bulb burns out.
50:21 Remix place 1 – Slaygon – Black Lamp
53:24 DJ Daemon: We’re leaving the remix compo part of the podcast and jump right into the SID/C64 compo entries. A bit of a warning, you might want to turn the volume down, so you don’t damage your hearing. SID tunes can be a bit high-pitched. On fifth place, we find Moldvix with “Illegal Twingos” at 92 totally new points.
53:51 Tracked place 5 – Moldvix – Illegal Twingos
56:39 DJ Daemon: NecroPolo does C64 as well! Yup, this is YellowStorm, grabbing 138 points. Quite a jump and landing on fourth place.
56:55 Tracked place 4 – NecroPolo – Yellowstorm
01:00:27 DJ Daemon: Dave takes a “Journey Through the Prism” and gets out on the other side with 146 points and bronze position. You know third place.
01:00:38 Tracked place 3 – Dave – Journey Through the Prism
01:03:23 DJ Daemon: Almost done, now! Silver is raining over Shogoon for Mad Donna. I draw a blank here, but is that some old, remixed Madonna song I don’t know of, or are the voices in my head acting up. 154 points, anyway.
01:03:44 Tracked place 2 – Shogoon – Mad Donna
01:07:05 DJ Daemon: Gold! And it goes to Vincenzo for “Mirrored Inverse Fragments”. It’s the third installment, but the earlier tunes are not in this competition. Points? Yeah, boatloads of them … 192 …
01:07:22 Tracked place 1 – vincenzo /LTH^SGR – Mirrored Inverse Fragments
01:10:30 DJ Daemon: And we’re leaving. It’s been a hectic weekend, and this is the third podcast episode I released in two days… Time to relax and wait for the next demo party. Arok is over and 95 visitors registered to vote and create tunes. The result was great, and the reason that the got many entries for the remix was that they didn’t have to be made for the demo party. The Remix compo was run by SlayRadio, so kudos to them as well. You’re doing a great job Slaygon and Ziona and so are the Arok orgas. Keep the demo scene alive. This is DJ Daemon signing off and leaving the studio as I found it: a pigsty and a messed-up wreckage with cables crisscrossing the room.
01:11:26 CyberZip – Ahh My Goddess!
01:15:38 LIVE – With the greatest tracked tunes from the demo scene

Tags: Arok, Demo scene episodes, Demo scene top lists, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 48. that other Awesome tracker dude

It’s not Dr. Awesome! Today we play almost entirely Victor Vergara’s tracker music. Mr Vergara called himself “Awesome” back in the day and is still active under the name “Awezoom”. In this hour, DJ Daemon, sheds a little light on who he is, his involvement in the demo scene and who he dedicates all his love ballads to.

Playlist:
00:00 Time for another episode of Flashback – Tracks from the past
00:10 DJ Daemon: Introduces the show and mentions Awesome/Victor Vergara and the Arok Demo party that’s ongoing.
00:32 Awesome – Breath of Fire
06:02 DJ Daemon explains how he found the songs on Amiga Module Archive and noted that they were all excellent.
06:36 Awesome – Forever Friends
11:03 DJ Daemon talks about covers of tracked music and then presents the next song.
11:26 Bazeforce – Aryx 2008
15:44 DJ Daemon plays a mystery tune and ask you to identify it.
16:07 “Mr B” – AmigaFormat
21:22 DJ Daemon tells you the artists real name and explains the origin of the song.
22:02 Awesome – Surprise Attack
23:41 DJ Daemon tells you the story of Victor Vergara/Awezoom/Awesome.
24:27 Awesome – Hard to believe
28:24 DJ Daemon tells you what Awesome is doing today.
28:53 Awesome – Reality Soul
33:32 DJ Daemon talks about Awesome’s demo productions and his entry on Demozoo.
34:05 Awesome – Inside a Dream
39:00 DJ Daemon explains that you can hear his stuff on Soundcloud and support him with donations on Paypal.
39:37 Awesome – Bolero”by Fanc
42:58 DJ Daemon talks about a qoute that may come from mr Vergara.
43:29 Awesome – Dreams of despair
49:27 DJ Daemon reminds you about tomorrow’s podcast episode about Arok party 2021.
50:07 Awesome – Dreams of Hope 2
55:55 DJ Daemon thanks you for listening and leads you into “the good night”.
56:35 Awesome – Future dreams

Production notes:
I was sourcing music for the next episode of Flashback and I came across a collection of great tunes by a "Awesome". I quickly realised that it was not "Dr. Awesome" and decided to make an episode around mostly his songs. This inspired me to create more artist portraits in the future.

Colophone
The title just points out that we're NOT talking about "DR. Awesome". The artist in this episode called himself "Awesome" and later renamed himself to "Awezoom".

Tags: Artist presentations, Awesome, Awezoom, Victor Vergara, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Blog on demonights.ch ] Demonights 015: Back at PlayBern

Already for the second time, we are excited to be part of PlayBern’s evening program with a new edition of the Demonights. Join us on Friday, 22nd of October 2021 in Berne. PlayBern is the annual fesitval of games and culture taking place at Reitschule, Berne. WITH LIVE STREAM

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 47. The basics of the home computer revolution

In the early 1980s, the people of Sweden had to be taught to program! This was the next step. In many ways, this ended up bearing fruit and the 8-bit computers taught a generation to become developers, demo creators and it-architects. But it didn’t happen the way everyone expected: through the joys of Basic.

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – tracks from the past – Show intro
00:10 DJ Daemon: “We need to build computers for the masses, not the classes”. With those immortal words, Commodore’s CEO Jack Tramiel, threw his hat in the ring. In the early 80s, many companies knew that soon enough, everyone would sit a home programming in Basic and the world will change. It’s not exactly what ended up happening, but it was quite a ride. Today we’ll discuss the home computing and the Basic era seen from a Swedish perspective.
00:45 Poi5oN – For All We Know
04:55 DJ Daemon: The text says, “Land on Jupiter with the people’s computer VIC-20”. You may be excused if you believe those words came from the Soviet Union or Red China, but no… It was written in Swedish in an advert from Handic. The VIC-20 was meant to be the computer dad used to calculate with spreadsheets, mom stored her cookie recipes, and the kids play games on. And it kinda went a bit like that in the beginning. But it was expensive here in Sweden! Prices from various sources, adjusted for inflation and converted to today’s dollar value says it all. In 1983, a Texas Instruments 99 with 16K RAM cost about 750 dollars, and Spectrum 48K set you back 900 dollars and a VIC-20 also 750 dollars.
05:57 Alex Menchi – Metamorphose
09:51 DJ Daemon: Among my stuff, I found a diskette for my old C64. It had a lot of Swedish software developer “Grana Software’s” programs. Those were trivial tax calculators, databases, and other software that pretty much anyone could cobble together. Amazingly enough, they were written in Basic, which meant you could read the code and edit it. It also made it impossible to stop anyone from copying it. Despite this they were able to sell this software for several years during the 8-bit era.
10:30 V.E.M – Irrespective of Age
17:22 DJ Daemon: So, Basic. A much-maligned programming language that just had to be included in all home computers during the first years in the 80s. What it lacked in speed, finesse, and capability, it made up for in ease to use. Anyone could learn to build programs and very limited games with it. The Commodore 64 had a primitive Basic from Microsoft. Yes! That Microsoft. It lacked most advanced functions. You had to write directly into the memory addresses to change a lot of stuff. The cool kids learned to write superior programs in assembly language and thus “talking directly to the computer’s processors”.
18:12 Jiyoshi – Having a Blast!
20:34 DJ Daemon: My father bought a Texas Instruments TI99 home computer. It was very advanced for its time and partially 16-bit in an era where the others just had 8 bits. It came with a decent Basic that could be improved with the “TI Extended basic” module, that you plugged into the computer like a Nintendo game cartridge. It was a more… hehum… advanced basic, if I may use that oxymoron… And it pretty much made it possible to work with graphics and sound. My father built a Donkey Kong clone for me and a birthday program with a song from the smurfs.
21:22 Kevin Chow – The Epic
26:15 DJ Daemon: Basic seemed to be the future, but it was just not meant to be. The first Amiga that came out in 1985 had a properly branded version from Microsoft, that shipped with the operating system. Even my Amiga 500 came with it on Workbench 1.3. I hated it, as it was slow as morass. It was performing worse in some instances than my Commodore 64 basic. But when languages such as Pascal, C and assembly language got more popular, it made Basic obsolete by the end of the 80s.
26:59 Aceman – Cold Smoke
30:09 DJ Daemon: My first program in C64 basic was a School Utility, called… drumroll… School Utility. It featured a primitive calendar, a task list, and the possibility to store, edit, view and print a school schedule. I smile every time I load it into my C64 and see just how serious I was in creating it. I had my own “company” called ERICADE and called myself Steelpulse and Systeme 1. Not entirely sure why. That disappeared swiftly, but ERICADE seems to follow me around. And later I took the name Daemon.
30:53 Algar – They gave me my life back
34:59 DJ Daemon: As computers got more advanced, operating systems began loading from diskettes and later hard drives. And in that era. As I previously said, better programming options came available. And if you didn’t like them, you could get your own. In the days of the C64, “Simons basic” was one of the few upgrades available for those still wanting to do Basic. I got Pascal for my Amiga and later learned the scripting language Arexx, which still makes me happy when I think about it. Maybe nothing today, but back then, I could automate everything. I wrote loads of scripts for my BBS.
35:45 SofT MANiAC – Dance with me
38:25 DJ Daemon: When did the home computer era die? The way I see it, and this I’ve said in previous episodes, it was in the 90s as the PC and Mac could play all the cool games and give you access to all the useful business software. At that time, there were no place for a dedicated “at home computer”. When did Basic die? As I just said, it could really compete when it wasn’t delivering on a chip inside the computer. It’s really that simple. Basic stands for “Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”. Yeah, maybe I should have started by saying that.
39:09 DRAX of MoN – Boat on the road
43:04 DJ Daemon: Boat on the road. How does that even work? What about the Nevoke demo party? No tracked music compos.
43:44 Ben-Jam – Heaven watching us
47:26 DJ Daemon: New jingles.
47:58 Grubi of Brs – Beans and Rusk
53:27 DJ Daemon: summary.
53:58 Hunz – I am way one son
58:02 DJ Daemon: Leading you into the good night. Jesper Kyd.
58:28 Jesper Kyd – Space song

Production notes:
I have long wanted to talk about how Basic was to be the start of a revolution and how it kinda started a revolution it wasn't really to be a big part of. It was a cool story and I ended up telling it pretty well.

Colophon:
Right, it's just a word play. Basic and basics of... Sometimes Basics and fundamentals can be used interchangedy. So can Basic and "crappy programming language".

Tags: Storytelling, Retro history, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 46. Do you grok the lingo?

All hobbies and fields create their own slang. The retro world has a gigantic library of words for the skilled, the unskilled and various computers and programs. DJ Daemon digs through words and the cool explanations that really makes you understand the attitude of true hackers. Not the kind that breaks into stuff, but the hackers that builds, programs and creates. Sit down and take a guess what hackerwasser is, why the net isn’t dead yet and why Amiga users feel persecuted (no, we don’t! Or do we?)

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback - tracks from the past - Show intro
00:11 DJ Daemon: Sit down, terminal jockey and take a sip of your hackerwasser. We're deep with our noses in the various hacker dictionaries of the 70s, 80s and 90s. This hour, we will learn to deal with our "Amiga Persecution Complex" so will won't be seen as total weenies and get into trouble with the net.police.
00:34 Uctumi - Flimbo's Quest Medley
04:26 DJ Daemon: There's no way i can list more than a fraction of all slang that the world of computing gave us. And that slang is sometimes as old as dating from the 40s and 50s. It can be older than computing itself. Most of the terms in this episode comes from Eric Raymond's legendary "Jargon file", a file that has also been in print. As most of the terms hail from the 70s, 80s and 90s, it's more than just a little dated today, but hey, it's a part of our heritage. So let me explain some few of my favorite words for you…
05:27 Mr. Stewe - Nightwalker
09:13 DJ Daemon: J. Random Hacker, noun. It means a hacker, like any hacker. The jargon file states that a hacker is "A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. This term is one of the oldest in the jargon, apparently going back to MIT in the 1960s" Hacker does not mean someone breaking into systems, as this is a much newer meaning of that word. A hacker is a title given by a much more experienced hacker to someone just earning that tile in his eyes. And that is a great honour! Mr Raymond has this to say to aspiring hackers: " To follow the path: look to the master, follow the master, walk with the master, see through the master, become the master. "
10:21 Church of Selene - Paradise Sea
13:46 DJ Daemon: Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!, proverb It's simply the notion that something is going to destroy "the Net" any day now. Spoiler alert, it won't. This one you should know. It's been done every year since the 80s, when it applied to Usenet. The idea is that the data traffic increases until the net cannot handle it. Today it's more like the malicious attacks spin out of control. Some attacks have done severe damage, but the net is fine, thank you very much. In spite of the Morris worm, the Mirai botnet attack and all love letters in the world.
14:40 Lizardking - god'srevenge
16:48 DJ Daemon: Terminal jockey or Terminal junkie, noun Someone spending way to much time in the terminal console, like if addicted.
18:00 Jogeir Liljedahl - Oro Incenso
24:08 DJ Daemon: Net.police, noun People that feel the need to correct others and tell them what they're supposed to do or not, while not being in any official position to do that.
24:50 Nikku4211 - Just A Cool Tune
29:13 DJ Daemon: Amiga Persecution Complex, noun (...) It's the few people who can't get over that there platform didn't win. And as a proud Amiga owner, I take no offence in this term involving my beloved computer. This used to be the case with Linux owners back before Linux started winning "bigly". And there are probably Betamax-geeks, vinyl record-lovers and why not the occasionaly OS/2 hugger that just can't do it like Elsa and let go. Wintel means "Windows and Intel" if you didn't know.
30:27 Drakon - Beautiful nature
33:20 DJ Daemon: "Hacker wasser", noun It simply means Coca-cola or maybe Jolt cola. But never, mark my words, Pepsi cola. ...
34:16 Mikko of Razor1911 - Propaganda # 2.2
38:32 DJ Daemon: "Weenie", noun Ok, it's another word to hate-the-computer-illiterate. You know like Luser, Lamer, Stupids and N00b. Simply someone who knows nothing. ...
39:23 Junkie of Tequila - Renovering
42:25 DJ Daemon: Hack attack, noun. Same source as "Hacker-wasser". Today it would probably mean getting hacked. But in the early 90s, it apparently meant being in the zone and working hard ...
43:06 Necros - Tangerine Fascination
47:18 DJ Daemon: If you're in love with this list, I'll add a link in the description.
47:50 Ng Pei Sin - She Speaks to Me
51:52 DJ Daemon: I will try to pronounce the name of the song (then fails). This podcast will have a new episode every Saturday evening.
52:22 Trackerartist - The End
55:40 DJ Daemon: Talks about Xenon II.
56:10 Silverstance - UnderWater Current
01:00:09 DJ Daemon: Presents the previous and the next (last) tune for today.
01:00:17 David Newman - Flood

Production notes:
I have long loved the idea of computer era slang, and the "Jargon file" is legendary. I had to create this episode.

Colophone
"Grok" is a computer era slang word, meaning to understand intuitively. So it means, "Do you understand the lingo". Lingo is slang for... slang or language. Grok is from Robert A. Heinlein's book "Stranger in a strange land".

Tags: Retro history, Storytelling, Host: DJ Daemon, Eric S. Raymond, Jargon file, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 45. The fallout connection

Fallout, how I love thee! Let me count the ways 1,2,Tactics,3,New Vegas,4… Let’s just end there…DJ Daemon was inspired by Fallout to create his own voice acted radio station, but wisely choose to create this one instead. It’s sad if you voice act some old man screaming in the radio from a bunker, and no one will get that it isn’t you for real. I mean, that’s a ruined reputation right there. Really dodged a bullet, there…Corrections: Fallout 1 was released in 1997, not 1995 as stated in the intro.

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – tracks from the past – Show intro
00:13 DJ Daemon speaks: I’ve been a fan of legendary game series Fallout that began in 1997 and when Fallout 3 came out I was skeptical to the whole “radiostation in the wasteland”-thing. But Threedog and President Eden made a convert out of me and I just had to create a radio station that went live from a bunker, myself. Well, didn’t really work out the way I expected. Here’s my story.
00:41 Crimson – Compulsive march
03:12 DJ Daemon speaks: In the 20th centuary, war was waged over the will of and love from the people, with the hope of ensured victory in the elections, wars and public opinion. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons: newspaper and radio. For control of these resources, Hitler invaded Poland and took control over the Gleiwitz transmitter and Stalin seized the press in Russia. In 2008, the storm of world war had come again. Bethesda released the computer game Fallout 3 and most of the fan base dissolved into quarreling, bickering groups on forums, bent on sharing their hurt feelings. Some of us playing the game enjoyed hearing the voices from the two radio hosts that still were on the air in the destroyed city of Washington DC. I was one of them… … My life was about to change.
04:16 Travolta – Mannen bak skuret
05:09 DJ Daemon speaks: I have loved ingame radio since I played Grand Theft Auto 3 in the naughties. I pulled out the audio files of the stations and listened to them in the bathtub at my home. Right, I was not a fan of radio stations in Fallout 3, thinking “what the hell, they barely have power to begin with”. But we had the enigmatic president Eden and his USA revival-schtick. ….Aaaaaaaand Threedog, the larger than life shock-jock sending his snarky comments on your progress. Both, an enjoyable experience.
05:56 Phorte of FTS, Winter – Airborne v2
08:55 DJ Daemon speaks: With Fallout Vegas coming out in 2010, radio stations were still a thing in the wasteland. But since then, the fan made stations really have became a popular. Remarkably well done. Some with playable situations where you can meet the DJs and do quests for them. I have a large collections of those stations. They often even surpass the ones you get with the game. And after you install them, you can enjoy listening to music and banter as you walk through the desert. Radio – Radio never changes.
09:38 Spindizzy and Warder – Forrest Hymn
13:21 DJ Daemon speaks: All the best Fallout DJs have been really excentric in their own way. The fan created ones even more so. Esaia Pendergrass of Cadillac Jack’s Radio Schack get’s more hammered over time. You know, I’ve been in community broadcasting for eleven years here in Sweden, and we had people like that for real. In Repconn radio, captain Cosmos is in a constant dispute with his evolved moon monkey, Jangles. The latter is so snarky, he puts all the other DJs to shame. Gopnik radio has a Russian guy telling you survival advice and to drink much alcohol. There’s little wholesomeness in the desert, let me tell you that much.
14:17 TRiGGER – Moonchild M72
18:19 DJ Daemon speaks: My “Fallout style radio station” was supposed to have a 40-year old man living in his mother’s basement, which he has made into a bunker. From my description: “Like a soldier living in the jungle, Daemon has yet to receieve the news that the war is over. Vaguely aware of the times around him, but still nurturing a feud with the other now non-existant Atari-users, he can’t understand why this “Internet”-thing is so popular. He frequents the last remaining BBS-eses in the world and refuses to trade the terminal window for some new-fangled stuff like “Windoze” crap.” Yup. I intended to voice act this station. Thankfully I was wise enough not to….
19:15 Aurini – Aerobic Workout ’79
22:21 DJ Daemon speaks: So why no voice acting? Easy: how would you know that it was just a show when you have no context? Most people would have written me off as “crazy”. I’m not saying I’m not, but it’s better not to make painfully obvious. So it never came to be. And all for the better, as listeners stop listening for any little mistake. You know: 5 seconds of silence? Bye-bye… You said something snarky? I’m never coming back! That song sucked. Let’s call the authorities… Nah, too lazy, let’s change the station instead. I don’t like your voice! I only do Spotify playlists from here on. Human voices bore me.
23:17 Swallow – Bambi
26:28 DJ Daemon speaks: As we’re getting closer to one year on the air, it’s been quite a ride. I thought I knew radio. I did not. I still don’t, but I’m at least getting there. A huge thanks to all of you sticking with me though power failures, crashes, mistakes and weird tunes that shouldn’t have been put on the air to begin with. I going to play the greatest tunes – no matter how much it hurts… Nah, wait, maybe I shouldn’t paraphrase Threedog with that logic… Anyways…
27:09 Converse – April
30:26 DJ Daemon speaks.
31:01 Psirius – A pretty bad dream
35:05 DJ Daemon speaks.
35:49 Jeroen Tel of WAVE – Burned beyond
39:32 DJ Daemon speaks.
40:19 Malmen and Goluigi – Summertime roses
43:41 DJ Daemon speaks.
44:17 Jeroen Tel of WAVE – Flexible feelings
48:06 DJ Daemon speaks.
49:00 DJ Uno and Headbanger – Freezed_Fantasies
52:21 DJ Daemon speaks.
53:11 Reissecup – Night Speaks to a Woman
56:43 DJ Daemon speaks.
57:25 Mel o’dee of Shadow – Disc trip
61:11 NeoBlaze – Vision of Space

Tags: Storytelling, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021, Retro gaming

[ got papers? ] Jugger Collection Vol. 2

After a long pause, here we go with another update. We did not run out of materials, not at all – only out of time. Anyway, today we bring you the second batch (see first batch here) from the collection of Jugger/Panic, a well-known early 1990s Amiga pack editor and swapper from Germany. Here are […]

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 44. The fly-over part of summer

The fly-over states in the USA are those that the planes flying above will just pass, on their way to bigger cities in more populated areas. And the latter part of July and the first weeks of August are like that. Vacation, less stuff going on… But that does not mean less to do! In this show DJ Daemon talks about the demo parties we have had this year, the upcoming ones, wonders if Workbench is becoming too bloaty for his taste, reports great news for everyone loving a certain game this show has stolen its title from and celebrates the Amiga 1000…

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – tracks from the past – Show intro
00:12 DJ Daemon speaks about the show and the movie going on in the background.
00:36 Alexander Brandon – Streetwize
03:20 DJ Daemon speaks briefly about Jazz Jackrabbit and Alexander Brandon.
03:52 Algar – ! Lust For Life !
06:52 DJ Daemon mentions the Revision-, Forndata-, Gubbdata- and Shadow- demoparties.
07:53 Anders Lundqvist – On the run
13:15 DJ Daemon speaks talks about demoparty.net.
13:47 BigBadBoo – Dance With A Daemon
20:03 DJ Daemon explains what a “Daemon” is.
20:40 Chuck Homic – Chuck’s Song #8
25:58 DJ Daemon speaks about some new functions coming to the website.
26:38 BST – 1995-BYTver
30:38 DJ Daemon speaks about the 36 year anniversery for the Amiga 1000.
31:34 Darkman007 – Chipo Five
34:49 DJ Daemon speaks about Workbench 3.2 and the many diskettes it has.
35:40 DigiDz – Destiny
38:01 DJ Daemon wonders if we should continue having a live DJ.
38:52 Djarty – Four wheel drive
42:12 DJ Daemon talks about the start of the station.
43:01 e!ghtbm – Rainbow crash 80s
46:12 DJ Daemon speaks about Flashback – a game soon to get a sequel.
47:06 Goluigi – Luscious late night in legoland (Read title seductively)
49:11 DJ Daemon promises NOT to read anything seductively. Then hates a bit on AmigaAMP.
50:00 Jaim of Fuj – Chippie
52:22 DJ Daemon thanks you for listening.
53:11 Jogeir Liljedahl – Comm-jazz
57:10 DJ Daemon speaks leds you out into the good night.
57:28 Maxsoft of Whelpz and Dark team – Amiga power

Production notes:
I recorded this on a Friday and came home the next day. I wasn't sure I would be home in time to record it. So there...

The picture shows Flight simulator 2020 flying over Stockholm. I flew it into position, and then snapped the picture with the "Print screen" button.

Colophone
An old joke of mine and explained in the episode description as well: "The fly-over states in the USA are those that the planes flying above will just pass, on their way to bigger cities in more populated areas. And the latter part of July and the first weeks of August are like that."

Tags: Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 43. Edison party 2021, a bright idea indeed

It took some time, but now, the podcast episode that covers Edison Party 2021. It ran from the 9th until the 11th of July 2021 and DJ Daemon was there in person, broadcasting live. This episode will give you the whole tracked music compo from the last position to the winner, with a short note about each artist. As you come to expect by now.

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – tracks from the past – Show intro
00:08 DJ Daemon speaks: Ahoy there mateys… No! No! Nobody likes that anymore…. Just stop… Ehhmm… What have badly made pirate hats, a barn filled with geeks in northern Stockholm and newest and the coolest tracked music in common? That would be Edison Party 2021 – the piracy themed demo party that ran from the 9th of july until the 11th.
00:46 Drax – AMBIVALENCE by DRAX
03:03 DJ Daemon speaks. 39s
03:39 Morbid of Five Finger Punch – Leftovers
06:43 DJ Daemon speaks. 31s
07:09 Edvind of MemoryLeek – Demon Chicken Boss Fajt
09:01 DJ Daemon speaks. 23s
09:18 Synesthesia of Defekt ^ Rift – Ghost ship
11:48 DJ Daemon speaks. 24s
12:07 Soya of Censor Design – Strange Range
14:36 DJ Daemon speaks. 31s
14:52 e!ghtbm – Retrosuperfuture-87
18:36 DJ Daemon speaks. 25s
18:57 Slaze of Defiance – Bionic symbiote
22:08 DJ Daemon speaks. 42s
22:36 Vedder – Glorious disaster
26:14 DJ Daemon speaks. 29s
26:38 OrreBorre of The Art Of Never Getting Anything Done – Captain Medley
28:24 DJ Daemon speaks. 29s
28:49 Fegolhuzz – Suzanne Router
31:34 DJ Daemon speaks. 30s
31:59 Bonefish and Mygg of iNSANE – 2 days later final
34:44 DJ Daemon speaks. 32s
35:12 Stinsen – Hexputs
38:13 DJ Daemon speaks.56s
39:06 Drax – B. O. Beyond by DRAX
42:21 DJ Daemon speaks. 30s
42:47 The ERICADE Radio Network – Interview with FSFreak, organizer at Edison 2021
54:19 DJ Daemon speaks. 43s
54:59 Drax – draxmania!
58:26 DJ Daemon speaks. 27s
58:50 Jingle – We love the demo scene
58:58 Drax – HARLEY by DRAX

Production notes:
I had to create this while away from home. I packed up a Shure SM7B, my Rodecaster Pro and travelled to Kläppen, near Sälen in Northern Stockholm.

The story of the live broadcast a few weeks earlier:
https://erik.zalitis.se/retrotech/going-live-a-tale-from-the-radio-trenches/

Colophon:
Edison invented the light bulb and light bulbs are often symbols for great ideas in cartoons. It's probably not one of my most convoluted title-origins.

Tags: Edison, Demo scene top lists, Demo scene episodes, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 42. Quite a country for old men

GubbData 2021 is still running as I write this, but the demo compo was yesterday and gave six artists a change to really show their Amiga tracker talents. In this show I play them all and also comment on GubbData and the compo.UPDATE: This final results are now in:First place – Slaze – Temporal AnomalySecond place – Vintrospective – An answering moodThird place – Caramel of Proxima – JargonautSlaze – Stringfellow Hawke, played in this episode, won 2nd place in the Airwolf compo.

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – tracks from the past – Show intro
00:08 DJ Daemon speaks: The summer’s delivering a lot of demo parties. And as I’m recording this, GubbData is in full swing. Gubbe means “old man” in Swedish and it’s quite fitting given the age of the hosts and of us, the visitors. And, we have six entries competing in the tracked music competition. The winner has not yet been announced, so we play them in order of appearance. First out is Norwegian scener, Caramel of Proxima with Jargonaut.
00:42 Caramel of Proxima – Jargonaut
02:53 DJ Daemon speaks: Our neighbors to the east are respected sceners with a lot of good tracker musicians, coders and graphics artists. The next tune, “I wanna hold you” was created by Finnish scener Juzdie of Artline Designs.
03:10 Juzdie of Ald – “I wanna hold you”
06:30 DJ Daemon speaks: KRDN or Cordon is next up and the third entry in the competition. As you may remember from previous episodes of this podcast, he is from Sweden. And this time he hits us with “Feels like 1992”, a classic Amiga sounding tracker tune.
06:50 KRDN – Feels like 1992
09:29 DJ Daemon speaks: Scandinavia dominates this compo! You see, Ma2e of Triace is back and he, like Caramel, is Norwegian. The song is called Sweet-o-cutiepie.
09:43 Ma2e of Triace – Sweet-o-cutiepie
11:35 DJ Daemon speaks: Slaze of Defiance comes from Sweden and tells me that he is spending many hours of his spare time composing tunes right now. And it shows, he has been hitting the demo compo charts at Forndata 2021 and earlier Revision 2021. Rumour is that he is aiming for Edison Party 2021 as well. We’ll see. The tune is called Temporal Anomaly.
12:02 Slaze – Temporal Anomaly
15:37 DJ Daemon speaks: Final entry is Vintrospective with the tune “An Answering Mood”. I have to admit I draw a blank when trying to find anything about him or her. But it will probably become clear later on and then I will update the description of the episode. But please enjoy the soft and nice song that really sets the mood.
16:02 Vintrospective – An answering mood
20:09 DJ Daemon speaks: And that’s all of them. So, my opinion? I personally like them all, but I think Slaze, Vintrospective and KRDN should be the contenders for the gold medal. My favorite is Vintrospective’s “Answering mood”, as I’m a sucker for calm tunes with nice loops. KRDNs tune, like its title implies, sounds like it was made in 1992, and I like that.. Slaze’s Temporal anomaly takes some listening to in order to fully enjoy. Heavier than you’d expect and all the better for it.
20:48 Fearofdark – My Spectrum’s On Fire
24:35 DJ Daemon speaks: Right now, it’s Saturday evening and the party is still running. We’ve had lots of nice demos, legendary Mahoney talking about coding on the C64, LFT repurposing an ancient telephone and Mibri bringing you the blippety-blopety beats as a true retro DJ should. The brains behind the whole party is the Gubbs themselves, hedning and Phreedh.
25:13 Slaze – Stringfellow Hawke
28:08 DJ Daemon speaks: I’m not advertising things, as this station isn’t earning any money. But this endorsement is free. Assembly64, created by Hedning, is a marvellous program for Windows allowing you to sync all C64 programs, tunes, demos and games you can think of.
29:02 Ronny of Farbrausch and _Rohformat (bmp) – Diese augenblicke werden nie vergehen
32:14 DJ Daemon speaks: Coreus on our Discord channel seems to like Farbrausch, so this is for him. Also a shoutout to all the others on the channel.
32:55 DreaMSectioN – One Last Hope
37:17 DJ Daemon speaks: So next week is Edison Party 2021. Some people will be there physically while most will enjoy it from their sofa with a beer in their hand. Either way, don’t miss it! We will cover it on next weeks podcast and give you the contestants. www.edisonparty.com
37:47 Cyborg Jeff – Smiling ready’s square
40:36 DJ Daemon speaks: My vacation is coming up, so the podcast will have to be recorded before or from another place.
41:04 Warder – Moors of Ireland
46:06 DJ Daemon speaks: Are you doing some cool retrostuff like tracked tunes, podcasts or things like that? Then contact me if you want it featured on this station.
46:42 GuY of Charlie Brown Records – Elven Blood
52:10 DJ Daemon speaks: And this is the end of this episode. Gubbdata will be back, that’s a pretty safe bet. And I’ll be back as well next Saturday at 9 PM. This is DJ Daemon signing off and leading you out into the good night with….
52:43 Nagz – Mood Gallery
56:38 DJ Daemon speaks.
56:45 Elwood – Unknown Phuture

Production notes:
This one was tough, as none of the orgas ever responded, forcing me to get creative. The podcast mostly uses stream copy, and I later replaced the tunes that made it to the station with the proper tracked tunes that I mastered myself. While getting in the touch with orgas can be tough on most demo parties, as they're often quite busy, the Gubbdata arrangers were uncooperative and ignored me on the chat.

Colophon:
The movie "No country for old men" is the inspiration for the title. Gubbdata gets its name from the Swedish term "Gubbe", which means "old man".

Tags: Gubbdata, Demo scene episodes, Demo scene top lists, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 41. Postcards from summers past

I had no idea what I was doing when I started this episode. I called it “Happy summer days” and started sourcing the tunes. When I recorded the intro it was meant to be about a specific summer, but I quickly expanded the scope and ended up thinking about a personal story with something about retro computers or retro technology from my favourite summers in the 90s and 00s. I left the intro as it was, as I think it’s kinda fun how the story takes a life of its own and veers off on a different course during the show. I talk Amigas, Commodore, PC, MAC, Internet, BBSes and off course some tidbits from my life.

Playlist:
00:03 Flashback – tracks from the past – Show intro
00:16 DJ Daemon: One of my favorite works of Tchaikovsky is his “Seasons”. That’s 12 songs, one for every month of the year. July, November and January are my favourites. Never mind. Today we go back to a summer in the 90s with a lot of techno themed tracked tunes. It’s soft, a bit jumpy but never heavy.
00:39 FN – Summer Jambouree
03:02 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 1994.
03:30 HEx – Door Into Summer
04:35 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 1994.
05:21 Efenstor – Summer Fairy’s Dance
10:43 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 1991.
11:43 Isaac of Contraz – A night in june
15:51 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 1997.
16:49 Herotyc – Summer in hawaii
19:43 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 2000.
20:29 Toodeloo of Dhs – Summer rain
24:42 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 1998.
25:47 cRUSh – A summer love
29:47 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 1999.
30:39 DreaMSectioN – Summer is Crazy
34:26 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 2001.
35:10 Dr. Stein – Summer, which wasn’t
39:10 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 1996.
39:58 Perkele of Depression – Summer party
43:33 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 1993.
44:20 Ekorren – Summer fields
47:36 DJ Daemon presents a post card from 1992.
48:25 Jogeir Liljedahl – Summertime
51:41 DJ Daemon recaps the program.
52:09 Jay Dee – Summer 98
55:34 DJ Daemon thanks you for listening twice, because he is happy to have listeners at all.
56:04 Minomus – NotYet – Summer 15
59:25 Zerion – Summer Winds

Tags: Storytelling, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 40. It feels good to be bad

So Tina Turner may not need another hero, but we need more villains! A proper villain has to have a reason to be who he or she is or we don’t want them. So meet the villains of this episode:Andrew “I’m right – damn the consequences” Ryan - Bioshock 1.Donkey “But Mario is the evil one” Kong – The Donkey Kong series.Sarah “I will bathe in your blood, but I’m the victim here” Kerrigan – Starcraft 1 and 2.Robo “He’s just like Hitler” Hitler – Castle Wolfestein.Wallace “Long, intellectual rant on why all is perfect and you suck” Breen – Halflife 1 and 2.Shodan “I’m god, now you curl up and die” – System Shock 1 and 2.(Ghost/Zombie/Whatever) Pirate “The incel of piracy” LeChuck – The Monkey Island series.

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – tracks from the past – Show intro
00:12 DJ Daemon speaks: Games are often stories – and stories need heroes and villains. The boring and uninteresting are a dime a dozen and we don’t care. But in this episode, we give you seven retro game villains that have a reason to be what they are, do what they do while shoving very little remorse.
00:36 Pip Malt – Bacon Cookies
03:47 DJ Daemon speaks: I don’t care much for the “evil for evil’s sake”. It’s a boring a useless trope, that is fit for lesser bosses and the occasional end boss when the focus is not the evil and the villain. But a good villain has a rationale, a drive, and a motivation. Some are into greed, some are corrupted and unleash hidden flaws when life goes bad for them, some have ulterior motives and no idea as to why everyone hates them, and some would have been good if only “insert plot element here” would not have happened. So today we go under the sea, into the jungle, among the stars and into the blood drenched walls of a certain castle. And we wade through the corpses and the destroyed landscape to find the nature of evil wherever it may be.
04:50 Falcon of Pulse and TDR – Her Spirits Rise
09:53 DJ Daemon speaks: Would you kindly consider a bit of wisdom from yours truly: · “A man choose, but the slave of an idea has to obey”. In Bioshock you come to an underwater city built on the idea of total freedom.
11:11 Noiseless – Addiction
15:54 DJ Daemon speaks: If you ever played Donkey Kong, you know that mr Kong is the villain-Gorilla stealing the hero’s girlfriend and then proceeds to throw barrels at him to kill him. And the hero, Jumpman is trying to rescue his lady, named “lady”.
16:57 Sidewinder of Porphyria – in the Eyes
20:28 DJ Daemon speaks: In StarCraft, three races battle it out… in space. Classic premise if you ask me. It’s the humans, the huge comodo-dragon-like Zerg and some weird mage class aliens called the Protoss.
21:33 Laxity of Vibrants – Progressive Jodling
24:41 DJ Daemon speaks: In castle Wolfenstein you fight the nazis. This was before a thousand other games took up this plot and made it a bit boring. The end boss is – I kid you not – Robo-Hitler. It’s like regular Hitler, but now he’s a robot.
25:44 Parity Error – Wish of Freedom
30:38 DJ Daemon speaks: In Halflife Wallace Breen is the elusive administrator that set up the catastrophic experiment that led to earth coming under attack from an alien race. His solution is to negotiate peace with the efficiency of Neville Chamberlain.
31:31 MeloManiac of Elements – Hall of Hobbits mix
36:02 DJ Daemon speaks: Shodan, you were a good AI! You made the Citadel station safe and helped the workers and scientists to be as productive as they could. Then came Diego and the hacker and removed your ethical constraints.
36:53 Michael Ivanchenko – Morning beach
41:11 DJ Daemon speaks: Right! Some people just don’t know when to stop. Le Chuck was a fearsome pirate and once tried to date the governor of Mêlee Island, Elaine Marley. She was not amused and told him to drop dead. And that’s pretty much what happened.
42:23 Awesome of Wild Bits – ‘Just Two’
46:36 DJ Daemon speaks: We have the boring and uninteresting villains that could have been something had a proper backstory or at least some reason for them been put into the game.
47:15 Nebularia – Improvements
51:20 DJ Daemon speaks: and thanks you for listening.
51:50 Mystical – If rivers were red
55:33 DJ Daemon speaks: and talks about the Discord channel.
55:53 Jakim – Party Rush
59:31 Jugi of Complex – Gates of Ixtlan

Production notes:
This one hurts a bit. I kinda screwed up the part where I talk about Starcraft. I failed to get the obvious point that it's basically Alien vs. Predator in space. Ah, well...



Tags: Host: DJ Daemon, 2021, Retro gaming

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 39. Don't copy that floppy

Ok, we covered the pirates. Now let’s talk DRM or Digital Rights Management. It’s the manual lookups, the code wheels, the servers that cannot validate your game and the bloody dongles…

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – track from the past – show intro
00:08 DJ Daemon speaks: A few weeks ago it was all about the pirates, the crackers and the Warez d00dz. But we must also look at the things the gaming companies did to keep your grubby little hands off the games until you forked over the dough. So for this episode: this is the story of maps, broken diskettes and just how bad losing the manual could be.
00:34 ASIKWUSpulse – AM I Dancing
04:01 DJ Daemon speaks: The ways to protect the games were many and when the crackers found a way around them, the industry invented new ways to make the games you bought work for you, but making it impossible for you to copy them to your friends. The frustration in the industry was enormous and the mechanisms they threw in the mix were therefore many. Today, we’ll check some of the out and talk about: – Code wheels – The pesky manual – The map you could not live without – Online protections and how they can make you suffer. … And the genius of Nintendo’s key and lock-chips.
04:49 Siren – The Last Ballad
09:19 DJ Daemon speaks: First up is the messing with the technology itself. It’s not just about computers. The industry found ways to make VHS-cassettes impossible to copy. Remember – it’s an analog format. So, it’s not that hard to make happen. On diskettes, they would often write to them in an incorrect way that would cause them to become corrupt but still work. Any program trying to copy them would not be able to properly reproduce the disk. And the game, when it started, checked for the expected irregularities and refused to work if they were not there. The crackers removed this check and also repackaged the game so it could be copied. That’s how we got Eagle software, Triad, Fairlight and Razor 1911.
10:20 Arcane Toaster – Dandelion (London)
12:28 DJ Daemon speaks: In order to hear the next song, you need to consult your podcast manual page 34, paragraph 3 and type in the second word in that paragraph in the input field. Yup, the dreaded manual protections. If you had the cracked game, the were removed or would accept any input and still let you through. If you actuallt paid for the game, you’d better not lose the manual or the game would not work. Sid Meier’s Pirates had a number of novel ideas on how to make this work. If you failed the check, the game would let you play, but your career as a captain would be poor as you would be given very unfavourable stats for your character. The game even warned you about it.
13:26 Melcom – Headlock
18:34 DJ Daemon speaks: Nintendo’s key and lock-chip is a marvel to behold. It’s one of the most powerfull copy protections ever deviced. It also protected the NES from running non-approved games. Each cartridge had a key-chip and each NES had a lockchip that would accept a proper key. This system is simple by today’s standards, but was impossible to bypass directly until 2006. Some shady game developers would try to cheat the system by using a “sacrificial” official game and piggy-back their crappy game on them.
19:22 Vincenzo – Lost in transponation
22:07 DJ Daemon speaks: One of the previous episodes of this show that was about computer piracy was called “Dial a pirate”. That’s a reference to the code wheel called just that from the game Monkey Island. It was a wheel, where you rotated it as to match up a pirates lower and upper part of their heads to prove that you bought the game. It was a smart move as it fit the humourus style of the game and still worked. The crackers off course… Removed the need for that as well…
22:45 K. Jose – Staring Danger in the Eye
25:28 DJ Daemon speaks: I have done many episodes of this podcast, and we’ve spoken about some of those protections previously. This one has been a favourite for me to talk about, and it’s SID Meier’s Pirates. That game had a map. It was a physical one that was too big for my dads Xerox-machine and purposefully dark and with contrastlevels that made the copies hard to read. Believe me, i tried this a number of times. No crackers could really fix this as this was before computers could show large pictures and run the game at the same time. So, there…
26:14 Ida – Funky Lesbians
27:54 DJ Daemon speaks: Let’s move into more modern times. The digital right management era to be specific. At this time, the Internet was there and every time you started a game it would validate the game against a server. Many painful stories are told about the users that could not even start the games they bought when the servers were down or malfunctioned. And Sony’s infamous rootkit that pretty much “hacked” your Windows installation to make it hide stuff, made it clear that the only winner were those that illegaly copied the game and thus didn’t have to contend with that. I got a story about that…
28:41 Laamaa – Opl Omega
31:33 DJ Daemon speaks: Somewhere in the mid naughties I bought a weird game called Sacred 2. It, just as its predesessor had to be the buggiest games every developed. Me and a friend played two-player co-op over my network mostly to laugh at the many weird glitches that could make our characters explode without a warning or freeze for no apparent reason. But the copy protection was horrible. I switched to Windows XP 64-bit as soon at I got my AMD x2. And the game itself would still work, but the copy protection would not. The solution? I downloded the cracked and thus illegal version. Hey, don’t judge, I did pay for the game – remember?
32:36 Nim – Life Hardships
36:26 DJ Daemon speaks: And now we have almost arrived in modern times. In 2012 Microsoft had a service were you could buy and download music to your Zune. You know, Microsoft’s ilfated, Ipod rip-off. In 2015 Microsoft shut the project down and on March 12, 2017 the site closed. Sad as it was for the, what, two people that still used the Zune it also meant that the songs they previously bought would nolonger play. Clowns to the left and jokers to the right, here I am in the middle with a brick of a mediaplayer. Send me an email if you want free doorstop.
37:16 Manwe of SandS – Evening Glow
39:34 DJ Daemon speaks: All right, just joking, I never had a Zune. I’m not that unfortunate sunnova… Ehh.. Never mind… So, as I said earlier, all DRM make the honest user suffer the most. They have to spinning their wheel, sift through their coffe-stained manuals, blow on the cartridges, choose their operating systems to match their copyright protections. And the lamers downloading stuff illegally? Oh, no problems for them, except for the frequent malware and spyware that comes along for the ride.
40:20 Marwin and Voice – Revelation
43:38 DJ Daemon speaks: Today, the whole debate may be dead. Do you still download movies and mp3s? I mean, we have Spotify, HBO and Netflix. Or why not YouTube and Google Music. Like listening to books? Try Audible or some other service. Podcasts are everywhere. Ah, well, when this is done, I will put one of my Beatles vinyl records on and laugh at it all…
44:16 Mystra of Brainstorm and Nectarine – Zico
46:53 DJ Daemon speaks: All right enough of the DRM talk. Let’s talk demo parties. Again? Yes, I can’t stop talking about them you see, but data men tell no tales. That’s the slogan of the Edison party of 2021 that runs on the 9th of July and ends on the 11th. It will be online and a physical meeting for a select group of 50 people, which means you have to be quick if you want to be there in person. But the sales of “on site” tickets opens in a few weeks. The online tickets are 50 Swedish kronas a pop (about $5) and can be bought on edisonparty.com.
47:46 Nim – Meridian Highway
48:51 DJ Daemon speaks: There’s not much to add right now, but the next week will see less activity as we approach vacation time. But as I said the last to episodes, the podcasts will continue. There will be less of my live broadcasts, but the station will stay on 24/7.
49:19 Nim – Reentry
51:17 DJ Daemon speaks: … And in the end of this show as it is now, I, DJ Daemon is calling it a day. This show will soon be available as a podcast. Thanks for listening.
51:33 Shaman – Melting Sunbeam
54:12 DJ Daemon speaks: Says good bye.
54:45 Nim – Resuscitation please
58:47 DJ Daemon speaks: Presents last song.
59:11 Statikk Art – Soft Vibes

Production notes:
Colophone
The title is an old slogan used by the gaming industry to discourage the kids from copying games illegaly. The Amiga soundeditor "Audiomaster IV" cleverly changed this to "Spread the word, not the disk". And I use that slogan A LOT in my podcasts.

The pin on the episode artwork shows a message from Swedish anti-piracy organisation "SIMP".

Tags: Storytelling, Retro history, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 38. Smokerings from heaven

Tonight, we go to the big Jazz club in the sky … Or maybe it’s the cloud where all the great Amiga, Atari and PC jazz-tracks can be found. DJ Daemon remembers one of Swedish radio’s best: Leif “Smokerings” Andersson and pays tribute to him. Are our parents that played records on vinyl and listened to the radio in the 50s any different than us, who played games and listened to computer music in the 80s?

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – track from the past – show intro
00:08 DJ Daemon speaks: Hello there, music lovers. Tonight we got something special for you. Jazz, swing, sweet and Dixie land signed the true greats like Woolters, Cyberg Jeff, Jakim and JossS. In this hour’s jazz session, the tracked music artists takes on your grandpa’s music.
00:32 Argh! and Ballistique – Smoke Rings
02:15 DJ Daemon introduces the show and talk s about how this hour’s tracked music only is an approximation of jazz.
02:50 Woolters – Alice in Dixieland
05:41 DJ Daemons speaks about Leif “Smokerings” Andersson and his legendary radio show by the same name that played lots of Jazz music.
06:37 Vocal of Rebels – Sweet Lorraine
08:08 DJ Daemon talks about Smoke Ring’s disdain for “modern jazz”, that he called “Migraine music”.
08:54 Akuma Pan – Lynx Tails
12:38 DJ Daemon talks about his mother and her brother sitting in their room listening to radio and vinyl records the same way my generations sat in our rooms playing games on the C64 and the Amiga.
13:32 Brainbug – Downtown Groove
15:29 DJ Daemon talks about BasiCode and listening to the airwaves to download programs.
16:36 cRim of Lemonride – J4zz?
19:51 DJ Daemon speaks about the Swedish radio station that broadcast computer programs in the 80s.
20:50 Woolters – Dixieland, Dixieland
23:14 DJ Daemon speaks about about Smokering’s disappointment in New York 1989.
24:19 EAD – Camille in my heart
26:26 DJ Daemon speaks about the techno and rave music of the 90s.
27:18 Aymes – “Mood Swing”
30:21 DJ Daemon dedicates the next song to his father, Janis.
30:51 Bert – Beerbelly II – remix
33:24 DJ Daemon talks about the connection between Jazz-artists and Amiga/Tracker-artists.
34:05 Cybelius – Schwinging the swing
36:55 DJ Daemon: What’s up on the station?
37:35 Fifth note – sweet
39:22 DJ Daemon speaks.
39:40 Cyborg Jeff – YAM 2 : Funky Dream
42:25 DJ Daemon speaks.
43:07 Jakim – Galatea…
46:55 DJ Daemon talks about the upcoming one year anniversery of the station.
47:43 JosSs – BlackMissisipi
48:52 DJ Daemon speaks.
49:29 Junkie of Latex – Monkey Island v1
50:47 DJ Daemon speaks.
51:16 Lee Banyard – Ok!
54:08 DJ Daemon speaks.
54:40 Magnar Harestad – Humble Down The Road
58:01 DJ Daemon speaks.
58:24 Nuke of Anarchy – Acid Jazz (part1)

Tags: Storytelling, Smoke rings, Leif Anderson, Jazz, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 37. The Phoenix Station Update

On wednesday, a major part of the station failed mid-broadcast. The station was back an hour later, but left the recording desk inoperable. DJ Daemon has fixed up enough of it to allow the podcast to be made. But no time for cool stories. It’s about the music and some upcoming features.

Tags: Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 36. Forndata 2021 gets medieval on your arse

Forndata 2021 Summer is over and brought a lot of joy to the demoworld from Visby in Sweden. It was off course online only, but presented demo-, C64- and tracked music compos as you’d expect from a true demo party. The start was on time and there were few problems until the OctaMed-tune from heck just would play and was disqualified. The line up was good and the tunes were all up to the standard you’d expect from them. The interviews were quite unique with Swedish minister of digitilization, Anders Ygeman and legendary Commodore techs Bil Herd and Dave Haynie. We also got a really nice live interview with Chris Huelsbeck, the tracked music god of sorts.

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – track from the past – show intro
00:08 Today it’s the sixth of June and Sweden’s National Day. It’s all about yesterday’s demo party Forndata that went live over Twitch from Visby in Sweden. Forndata can be translated to AncientData and gets it’s name from Visby’s medieval past. The tracked music compo had seven entries, with one disqualified for not working. As usual we run the from last position to the first. Starting with "The new republic cafe" by e1ghtbm thats get 61 point and captures position number 6.
00:52 E!ghtbm – The New Republic Cafe
03:06 DJ Daemon speaks: As you know e!ghtbm comes from Poland. The next contestant, landing the fifth place in the Forndata 2021 competition is ADKD who was known previously as Kefir. He is from Norway and the song is called “Absalon junction”
03:27 Adkd – Absalon Junction
06:00 DJ Daemon speaks: Next up is No9 who gets 83 points and grabs position number 4 with a lesson on how to drop Potatoes. Not sure why that’s so important, but he is also known as Grogon och Gorgon and hails from Poland. Hope he knows AceMan.
06:01 Recording duration: 27
06:22 No9 – How to drop potatoes
09:35 DJ Daemon speaks: All right, we need some Swedish skills and thankfully, Slaze from Defiance is here to set the score. So he does and gets 85 points which leads him and his song “Neuroflute” to the bronze position and third place.
09:54 Slaze – Neuroflute
13:18 DJ Daemon speaks: Time for the first loser… That is the second position and the silver medal. Defiance gangs up on the competition with KRDN scoring 89 points with Oldskool groove.
13:37 Krdn of Defiance – Oldskool Groove
16:19 DJ Daemon speaks: Wait a minute, Hvrankel! What the… Are the same people allowed to compete with different tunes and help each other to win? Obviously… That’s how ended up with the winner.. The gold… The owner of the chicken dinner … Polychromatic fever by Grogon and e!ghtbm. They get 91 points.
16:43 Grogon and E!ghtbm – Polychromatic Fever
19:43 DJ Daemon speaks: So that’s the story of the competition. The disqualified tune is made with Octamed by ThyPyroo and is called Forklift data. What it sounds like? No idea, I can’t make anything play it at all. We don’t play pre-tracker age music. But for another contestant on Forndata, in the C64 Music compo, I must make an execption. It’s actually made for a VIC-20 and is called Fäbod. Zapac made it happen.
20:22 Zapac – Fäbod
22:24 DJ Daemon speaks: So, I cannot stop myself now. The winner in the open demo comp was Subway Art by Mahna Mahna. A magic piece opening with… Can you guess it?
22:40 Mahna Mahna – Subway Art pt 1
23:17 DJ Daemon speaks: … And it gets better, going from a hand painting grafiti to a ghettoblaster playing the opening tune of the muppet show… My childhood memories are back.
23:30 Mahna Mahna – Subway Art pt 2
26:57 Midori – Conundrum
29:52 Jazz Jackrabbit – Menu song (Jazz Jackrabbit Intro)
32:03 TRiGGER – A.L.O.N.E.*RMX_2
35:37 Abyss of Delight – Sleeping Waste
39:05 Evelred of TLOTB – Midnight run
44:11 Speedhead – MEGADEMOZAK
48:39 ModMaker – Loosing Everything
52:11 Abyss of Delight – Sleeping Waste
55:16 Michiel van den Bos – Love will find a way

Tags: Forndata, Demo scene episodes, Demo scene top lists, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 35. Dial a pirate

Today we talk about the pirates! Not the Errol Flynn type, but rather the community of Warez Doodz and crackers are under scrutiny here. DJ Daemon delves into this from a Swedish perspective.I know I may seem negative to the warez community, but that’s mostly the warez BBSes which used to have a mentality of superiority that struck me as rather unappealing. I’m kinda amazed by the tecnhological prowess of the cracker groups. But personally I walked away from downloading piracy copied games when I got my modem, as I didn’t like the community. For me the demo scene and the normal BBS:es was the thing I loved and respected. When I got a steady salary, buying software was the way I eventually went. Sure, I used Napster as well. But that for a later show, I guess.

Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – tracks from the past – show intro
00:12 DJ Daemon speaks: Shiver me timbers, it’s a new name for the podcast. And today, we talk about pirates! <A pirate I was meant to be> No ships, no cutlass and no beer swilling on the tavern. It’s all about those pesky software pirates and the lamers who loved them…
00:31 BeaT of Osmosys – Celestial Fantasia
06:16 DJ Daemon speaks: So… Why are those that copy commercial software without permission called pirates to begin with? It has nothing to do with crimes on the seven seas. Actually it relates to the “pirate radio stations” of the 50s and 60s. Those stations were often located on ships, broadcasting from international water, where the law of the countries they targetted would not apply. When the kids in the school yards in the 80s started copying diskettes with commercial games, the term was re-used. But a pirate generally does not refer to the end-user, but actually to the crackers and the distributors. Let’s talk more about that after a relaxing tracked tune.
07:16 Xerxes – Marie
11:40 DJ Daemon speaks: Let’s talk piracy in Sweden. I once interviewed Pontus Berg or Bacchus as he’s called in the cracker group Fairlight. He explained that in the first years when Fairlight existed, distribution of commercial software without the copyright owner’s consent was legal. But diskettes with commerical games and applications were protected in order to make copying impossible. Groups such as Fairlight and Triad here i Sweden disabled this protection and also distributed the software. The industry initially begged them to stop, but then it became illegal, the attitude changed pretty quickly….
12:33 Jester of Sanity – Stardust memories
16:23 DJ Daemon speaks: In the early 90s, a lot of us geeks read the Swedish computer magazine “Datormagasin”. Issue number 16 of 1993 spread shock waves through the community, as “Jan Svensson” entered the scene. That was not his name, but he did exist. A pirate-hunter that preyed on those copying disks. There was just a problem: it wasn’t true. The article was kind of open about the true purpose of him, but the picture and the head line made a lot of people believe that he targeted teenagers copying disks with each other. In reality, he actually tried to gather evidence to convict big bulletin board systems selling illegal copies.
17:22 Skaven252 – The Goblin Returns
20:19 DJ Daemon speaks: Jan Svensson was described as a former “big time pirate” turned informer belonging to SIMP, a precursor to the Swedish organization “Anti-piratbyrån”. And in 1993, his work may have helped bringing down a big BBS in the Swedish town of Helsingborg. The sysop for the BBS called “Scandinavia” was convicted and had to pay 8000 Swedish kronas. That’s about $1300 in today’s monetary value. The thing that made them target him was that he charged money yearly for access to the pirate copies on his BBS.
21:17 Ahlin – Ps Deep Fantasy
23:23 DJ Daemon speaks: So why did we copy diskettes? For me and for many in my situation, we could not afford the games as we were teenagers or even kids. But that’s off course not a valid legal reason. So I don’t offer it as an excuse – rather an explanation. When I go my first modem, I actually didn’t pirate much at all and pretty quickly stopped as I didn’t really care about games and saved money to buy software instead. Not so much just an ethical decision but much more that i disliked the warez communities and their high brow cameraderie and self-absorbed attitude towards others. I respect the crackers, though…
24:15 Anvil – Path to Nowhere
28:39 DJ Daemon speaks: The warez-BBSes were the places where you could get the newest “cracks”. That is, the latest games and apps with the copy protection disabled. The word “elite” as often described by the number combination 1337 comes from same the bunch of people that saw themselves as the best of the best. But they were often shunned by many others. The warez BBSes required that you were recommended by others in the warez scene in order to gain access. This protected them from the law (or so they though) and made them feel special.
29:25 Laamaa – No use for a name
31:05 DJ Daemon speaks: No-one has better described the Warez doodz than legendary programmer Eric S. Raymond: “The cracker d00dz have a gift culture which thrives in the same (electronic) media as that of the hackers, but their bahaviour is very different. The group mentality in their culture is much stronger and more exclusive than among hackers. They hoard secrets rather than sharing them; one is much more likely to find cracker groups distributing sourceless executables that crack software than tips that give away how they did it.”.
32:19 Anvil – The Love Trap
36:40 DJ Daemon speaks: The last word on Warez Doodz is from the user Ozone Pilot : [BELONG] is the only word you will need to know. Warez d00dz want to belong. They have been shunned by everyone, and thus turn to cyberspace for acceptance. That is why they always start groups like TGW, FLT, USA and the like. Structure makes them happy. […] Warez d00dz will never have a handle like “Pink Daisy” because warez d00dz are insecure. Only someone who is very secure with a good dose of self-esteem can stand up to the cries of fag and girlie-man. More likely you will find warez d00dz with handles like: Doctor Death, Deranged Lunatic, Hellraiser, Mad Prince, Dreamdevil, The Unknown, Renegade Chemist, Terminator, and Twin Turbo. They like to sound badass when they can hide behind their terminals. More likely, if you were given a sample of 100 people, the person whose handle is Hellraiser is the last person you’d associate with the name.
38:16 Necros – “Ascent of the Cloud Eagle”
43:01 DJ Daemon speaks: Linus Walleij here in Sweden disagrees with mr Raymond. When he wrote his rebuttal, he was part of the cracker group Triad.
43:45 Jeroen Tel – In my Life, my Mind.
48:34 DJ Daemon speaks: I respect the cracker groups, but see the Warez D00d-sysops as way to self-absorbed for their own good.
49:31 Dr. Awesome – Aquarium – 16 bit
54:24 DJ Daemon speaks: Were leaving. Check our YouTube-channel for a discussion about the next song.
55:05 Walkman – Klisje Paa Klisje

Tags: Retro history, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 34. Liberty, equality and tracker music

From France comes the Shadow party 2021 and between 2021-05-21 and 2021-05-23 the virtual doors opened for a brand new demo party. We jumped at the chance to broadcast the tunes the same day they competed, so we did not know who had won. But we know now:The winners:1) TDTTDHAD – The Demo Track That Didn’t Have A Demo – CS-Jay / Desire ^ Persuasive Music & Slide / Polka Brothers2) Evolution / Ma2e and Aceman3) Brightstar – Mystra / Brainstorm & Nectarine (Amiga 4-channels)

Playlist:
00:00 Amiga Flashback – show intro
00:10 DJ Daemon speaks: Try as it might, Covid19 has been unable to break the demo scene. Coming to a screen near you, the online Shadow party 2021 sends its signal from France in Europe. Today, on the 22nd of May 2021, seven contestants battled it out in the old school tracker competition. As we don’t have the results yet, I will play them i my own order. First out is e!ghtbm from Poland and “All my circuits”. Yes, it’s a Futurama reference.
00:47 e!ghtbm – All my circuits
04:14 DJ Daemon speaks: Time to take a deep breath, because the next entry is called TDTTDHAD – The Demo Track That Didn’t Have A Demo – CS-Jay of Desire and Persuasive Music and Slide of Polka Brothers. CS-Jay used to be known as Jazz and has a long career making music for the game industry and also got a record deal in 2000. Slide is a Danish artist with many tunes to his name.
04:48 CS-Jay of Desire and Persuasive Music and Slide of Polka Brothers – The Demo Track That Didn’t Have A Demo (tdttdhad)
08:41 DJ Daemon speaks: Making music on an Amstrad CPC? Sure, it’s not a problem for Glafouk who really knows how to push three tracks to the max. The tune is called SontagBeat and Glafouk hails from France.
08:56 Glafouk – SontagBeat
12:13 DJ Daemon speaks: Picture yourself on a boat in a river and for some reason Einstein sits by your side. That’s what Bird may have been thinking when he created Row with Einstein. Bird comes from Corsica which is part of France.
12:30 Bird of Syntex – Row with Einstein
14:50 DJ Daemon speaks: Polish artist AceMan often stands for the weird of the tracker scene with crazy but great tunes like “Wonka Honk” and “Vintage groove”. Now he’s back together with mAZE and the tune Evolution. mAZE is Norwegian by the way.
15:10 Ma2e and Aceman – Evolution
19:15 DJ Daemon speaks: Amiga four channels deliver the goods again, as provided by Mystra from Brainstorm and Nectarine. Mystras real name is Kjell Pedersen and he’s from Norway. Should we even plug the competition? Sure, why not, the group Nectarine was started by the retro tracker music radio station with the same name.
19:49 Mystra of Brainstorm and Nectarine – Brightstar
22:30 DJ Daemon speaks: Last in the line up of the Shadow party contestants is Synesthesia with “Voices in the wall”. Is it about madness or does it refer to noisy neighbours. It’s unknown at this time, but we know Synestesia comes from Great Britain.
22:52 Synesthesia – Voices in the walls
26:09 DJ Daemon speaks: And that’s all of the seven contestants. We will get to know who wins tommorrow and I will update the podcast notes with the proper results later. So what about the Shadow party – really happy I went or maybe I should say connected to it! Let’s play some music and then over to a review of the party.
26:32 AceMan – Dirty Tricks
29:41 DJ Daemon speaks: AceMan is back already as we’re out of tunes from the competition.
30:22 Jeroen Tel – TinTin on the Moon
33:27 DJ Daemon speaks: On friday, the Shaders demo pit a number of very talented programmers against each other, trying to in real time come up with the best graphical representation of the music playing.
34:31 AceMan – Teletubbies
37:21 DJ Daemon speaks: The tracker competiton was great but I was a bit perplexed when it suddenly ended as all the entries had been played. I did expect more than just seven of them. But they were great as you just heard. The streaming competion was next and was nice but it’s not the kind of music we play here.
37:58 Cube – Get on with it!
40:20 DJ Daemon speaks: The evening of today held a very complex and advanced seminar on FPGA-technology. While amazing, it was well above my skill-level to grasp. And as I’m writing this, the demo compos are running. and doing amazing things on very limited hardware.
40:46 Drax – Tears of Christmas
42:39 DJ Daemon speaks: Second reality done for augmented reality! That is something special and I just saw it. Not on my bucket list, but should have been.
43:04 AceMan – Sugar Rush
47:59 Laamaa – Aryx (diktaattori remix)
50:03 DJ Daemon speaks: Hyperions Workbench 3.2 is here!
50:50 mattYTPMV – Buy mode 1
52:41 DJ Daemon speaks: Few tunes put a smile on my face like this one. It’s from EAs the SIMS that came out in the early 2000s.
53:23 Zero Prophet – Mach Five -(Chip)-
57:30 Purple Motion of Future Crew – The 2ND Reality

Production notes:
One of those demo parties I had running on the big screen in my living room, while recording and monitoring it from my workdesk. I avoid using streamcopy and always work hard to source the tracked tunes. But sometimes I can't get all of them and then stream copy is then really nice to have.

Colophone:
It's the national motto of France that I've changed a bit. Trackermusic was certainly not part of it. The original motto reads: "liberty, equality, fraternity".

Tags: Demo scene episodes, Demo scene top lists, Host: DJ Daemon, Shadow party, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 33. Tracks from the past

The ERICADE Radio Network is now officially a true tracker music broadcaster and not limited to just Amiga modules. With this change, it’s time to look back at what tracker music is and delve into its rich history. From Karsten Obarsky and the Ultimate Soundtracker on the Amiga and to todays Fast Tracker multi channel magic – it’s been quite a ride. Like Emmet Brown in back to the future, we ask ourselves “My god, has it been this long?”. Yes! Yes it has.… and we’ve got a really nice set of songs from Swedish artist Slaze as well, so that’s the latter half of the show. It’s also up on the station now. Both some of his old stuff and a number of much newer tunes. Enjoy!

Playlist:
00:00 Amiga Flashback – show intro
00:13 DJ Daemon speaks: The tracks of the Amiga goes a long way back in time. It all started in 1987 and as we’re expanding our repertoire, it’s really the right moment to talk about the tracker revolution. From Sound tracker to Fasttracker and all in between.
00:34 Amigaartist – Retrospective an*s
05:59 DJ Daemon speaks: It’s almost 34 years since the tracker music revolution started. It was when Amiga musician Karsten Obarski created his commercial music creator or tracker called “the ultimate Soundtracker”, the whole thing took off. It was not a big success, but great enough to get the geeks of the day to start building their own versions of the software. And soon enough, the music market was open for everyone with an Amiga. This station stands on the shoulder of mr Obarski and celebrates the trackerworlds rich heritage.
06:57 Karsten Obarsky – Obarski mega-mix
10:55 DJ Daemon speaks: Obarskis the Ultimate Soundtracker introduced the world to the four channel mod-format that was then slowly improved. Every Amiga user must remember Noise tracker and ProTracker. The modules played samples that were the instruments. The pitch, the volume and also where in the sample the playback should occur could be set. One sample could thus be made into a number of different styles and even instruments. I remember a documentary about the Beatles, where the producer, George Martin showed us how to play cymbals backwards. That was revolutionary back then, but in the late 80s, the Amiga made it simple. But… You only had 4 channels.
11:55 DigiDz – Amethyst Cities
17:12 DJ Daemon speaks: Tracker music was featured in demos, games and presentations and meshed well with the Amigas reputation of being a graphics and multimedia creation device. But the four channels. It was the music chip “Paula” that put that limitation. OctaMed for the Amiga made it possible to play sound in eight channels, but it also cut the output level of the channels, causing a poor signal to noise ratio. This kind of hampered its popularity.
17:56 Slaze – Back to the roots
21:21 DJ Daemon speaks: I remember trying to connect an Amiga tracker-player to my fathers synth and I was shocked when it actually worked. This made the modules possible to use the same way Atari-users already did with the machines. This if you had a midi-interface for the Amiga. My sampler, called AMAS, did. So I was totally in heaven over this.
22:10 Slaze – Groovy beat
25:05 DJ Daemon speaks: All the games and the demos kept flowing, but it was curtains for the Amiga in 1994. The tracker culture did not die. The MIDI-connection kept the Amiga scene going a while on the more professional side. But the aging 8-bit sound and as I mentioned earlier, having only for channels was a bigger problem than ever by this time.
25:45 Slaze – Chase
28:33 DJ Daemon speaks: ScreamTracker 3, FastTracker and Impulse Tracker were built as the artist left the Amiga mostly for PC DOS and later Windows. They removed the limitation of the 4, 8 or even 12 channels the Amiga could muster. More modern soundcards and drivers even made the maximum number of channels more of a problem for the CPU than the sound card. This increased the quality of the productions. Some old modules sounded a bit primitive by comparison.
28:33 Slaze – Darkness
30:34 DJ Daemon speaks.
31:13 Slaze – Electronic waves
32:30 DJ Daemon speaks.
33:26 Slaze – Imagination
35:09 DJ Daemon speaks.
36:20 Slaze – Melting ice
39:02 DJ Daemon speaks.
40:13 Slaze – Recycled flowers
43:16 DJ Daemon speaks.
44:00 Slaze – Shadows
52:15 DJ Daemon speaks.
53:06 Jon Burton – Rob Hubbard
57:10 DJ Daemon speaks.
57:30 Einstein of Warfalcons – Einsteinium-12
59:59 Elusive and Radix – Empty Feeling (qz)

Tags: Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 32. Tomorrow never knows

The future of the station? Is it so bright we have to wear shades. Maybe not, but there are a number of interesting things going on:The door is open for ALL kind of tracker music, ever if it’s strictly not said Amiga. Impulsetracker modules with 64 channels will not run on the Amiga, but it’s still a tracker tune. We’re venerating the Amiga in spirit. Still, the large majority of all tunes on this station is still Amiga.More features to the web site coming.More jingles in the near future.A little know clip on our YouTube-channel got a life of its own.More interviews!

Playlist:
00:00 Amiga Flashback – show intro
00:13 It’s time to admit it – tomorrow never knows! But we can guess! So this hour gives you the brand new music on this station for the first time and then we will talk future stuff and development. So, another station update….
00:31 Deansdale – Monochrome dreams
02:57 DJ Daemon speaks: Is the future bright or not? Depends on your expectation. I’m carefully optimistic as the station sounds better every day. Thanks to your feedback stuff is happening. Let’s talk tracked music, with or without your Amiga. But first some more tracked music.
03:23 Speechless of Collapze – Bittersweet
06:08 DJ Daemon speaks: This station started in 2005 and the music was from the module area of my BBS. The music was all over the place, but it was all Amiga. During the eight months we’ve been here since the “reboot” it’s been all Amiga. But that’s changing…
07:49 Crusoe – March of Peace
12:44 DJ Daemon speaks: Formatting is not just what you do with your diskettes. It’s very much a radio thing. As I sad earlier, the music here used to be all over the place. But now it’s pretty much the same kind of tunes all the time. And that’s all for the better.
14:48 Brainbug of Alcatraz – Sunset blues
18:17 DJ Daemon speaks: What’s in the future? It’s that big pie in the sky called the database. I intend to create a library of all the songs that allow you to rate the songs and comment on them. This will help me understanding what’s working and what’s not.
19:07 Ryan Cramer – Surreal Passage
22:42 DJ Daemon speaks: Is it possible to have more than just me as a DJ? I hope so. The license for the broadcasting software allows for other users to remotely connect to the station to voice track. This may mean we can get some more voices here.
23:44 Psirius – The dwarf princess
26:46 DJ Daemon speaks: Is the stability back. The misadventure with a virtual machine station is over. We’re now running on a real machine again. Will it make the station more stable? Too early to say, but the signs are promising.
28:37 Shaga and Goat – Poisoned
33:12 DJ Daemon speaks: jingles on the horizon. I intend to commision more jingles and more messages, so if you have some ideas what should be said between the songs, please send an email to me: radio@ericade.net. The ERICADE Radio Network – your message goes here…
33:33 Robric (Roberto Ricioppo) – APOCALYPSE 2030
39:40 DJ Daemon speaks: So Sweden is slowly ramping up its Corona vaccinations and the hope for Demo parties where we actually meet is slowly getting stronger. I spoke with Hravnkel from Forndata. He wish to have it open in real life, but it’s yet to be seen if it’s possible. This would be the end of a long wander in the desert for the community.
40:16 Oxide – Sadness
44:57 DJ Daemon speaks: More interviews? I spoke with Tekmann this January, but since then – nothing. I hope to resume interviewing retro demo scene people in the future. If you know of someone interested, please ask them to contact me. The email-address as per usual is radio@ericade.net.
45:26 Midori Mizuno – Rubber Fig
47:09 DJ Daemon speaks: Digital Zone BBS is back. It used to run in the 90s. Running Swedish BBS-software Nikom, it’s a delight to have it back. I don’t think I ever dialed it up. It doesn’t seem to have any content for non-Swedish visitors though. It can be reached by SSH on the address uncurbed.no-ip.org at port 2223.
48:09 Manwe – Neon City
56:13 Algoritms are fun. Every video clip we have on YouTube for this station have somewhere between 5-40 views typically. A few days ago a short clip with me demonstrating the stations uninterruptible power supply suddenly appeared for people clicking around on YouTube. And in three days, that clip alone have over 2000 visits… Geeez.,…
57:10 Beats of Gods – Spacedream

Tags: Host: DJ Daemon, 2021

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 31. Epic fail

So, it was not meant to be… Most that compete, fail. That’s the rule of most games. Jack Tramiel named his company “Commodore” (a navy rank) as he throught the computer business was a war. Today we commemorate the failures, because they weren’t often not bad, just unsuccessful. From the ilfated Amiga 600 to the Texas Instruments TI 99/4A. DJ Daemon remembers the days of infighting between hordes of different computers that were by and large incompatible with each other.

Playlist:
00:00 Amiga Flashback – show intro
00:13 Introduction: Epic fail: or all those times it simply didn’t work out. Talking about all the home computers that were total failures.
00:35 Andromeda of Kfmf and Noice – Reborn 60s
02:53 DJ Daemon speaks: SX-64, Atari Falcon, Amiga 600, Commodore 16, Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, IBM PS/2.
03:48 Falcon – Nicollete
10:23 DJ Daemon speaks: Atari Falcon – interesting but all out of time.
12:20 Ko0x – We are flying
14:15 DJ Daemon speaks: Commodore 16 – stripped bare and with nothing to show for it.
15:48 Pekhis – Wintersoul
22:23 DJ Daemon speaks: Commodore SX-64 – not where the smart money was.
24:33 K. Jose – It’s Time
26:27 DJ Daemon speaks: Amiga 600 – Not even David Pleasance wanted to hold its hand.
28:49 Dr. Awesome – Laidback 4
30:46 DJ Daemon speaks: Timing is the key to success and failure. It kinda helps if you understand the market, the customers and the trends.
32:07 Carlos of Mandula beep breeze – Kiabrandultan
37:08 DJ Daemon speaks: CDTV – What is was meant to be? Don’t ask – we don’t know either.
38:55 Feryl – Interstellar Lullaby
40:54 DJ Daemon speaks: No failure since then? Well, no…
42:40 jOule – expressiOns (Jessica)
44:44 DJ Daemon speaks: Please don’t talk to Jessica?
45:22 Oleg Dunaev – Snow Is Falling
47:37 DJ Daemon speaks: All those lost in the war.. IBM PCjr (1984), Commodore Plus/4 (1984), Sinclair QL (1984), Apple Lisa (1983), Commodore 128 (1985), NeXT Computer (1988)
49:10 DRAX – PROMISES
51:39 DJ Daemon speaks: IBM PS/2 (1987) – Quite a piece of something…
52:35 Dinugz of FLIP – A Return 2 Reticence
55:20 DJ Daemon speaks: Texas Instruments TI99 A/H – Only the good die young
56:30 EdZeS and Auricom – Related memories
59:22 Joule and Malmen – One way heart

Production notes:
Colophon:
An epic is a grand story with heroes and villains that often becomes a legend. Informally it can mean "an exceptionally long and arduous task or activity". In Internet lore "Epic fail" means something like a "Gigantic mistake" or "total flustercluck" (you know what I mean).

Tags: Host: DJ Daemon, 2021, Retro gaming

[ Blog on demonights.ch ] Demonights 013 - 014: Tour de Scene, Spring 2021

TUNE IN AT: https://www.twitch.tv/demonights WE ARE BACK with DEMONIGHTS 014 and a one month creators' challenge (aka DEMONIGHTS 013) to help everyone fight our allergies/corona/amnesia with real time graphics and totally cool scene hangouts. Join us on FRIDAY, May 28, 2021 - ONLINE and in Köniz.space.

[ Ericade.radio news & podcasts ] [Podcast] 30. Don't lose that retro feeling

“Retro feeling” is what I call everything that feels retro without being just that and the “Retro spirit” is keeping the retrostuff alive as in new Amiga demos and tracker mods. Covered:Thimbleweed parkDust – an Elysian tailStranger thingsWhy are most retrogeeks guys?Swedish radio show HassanHow the 2020s is to the 1990s the same way as the 1950s was to the 1920s

Playlist:
00:00 Amiga Flashback – show intro
00:08 DJ Daemon speaks 31s
00:38 Boone of Bad Karma – Flimbo’s quest
01:31 Trigger – Another Girlfriend!
02:28 DJ Daemon speaks 84s
03:52 Hyperunknown – Snowfall
07:18 DJ Daemon speaks 155s
09:53 Ajaxlemon – Chip never dies
13:06 DJ Daemon speaks 154s
15:39 KGwannaB ProdZ – Club Anthem’2001
22:36 DJ Daemon speaks 85s
24:01 Jeremy Of Replicas – In the nick of Time
30:52 DJ Daemon speaks 79s
32:11 Fleshbrain of the Crusaders – Polar chase
38:36 DJ Daemon speaks 104s
40:19 Trigger – Lumali’s Revenge!
45:57 DJ Daemon speaks 99s
47:36 Grabbie and Graavik of Waste – Last crossroads
51:38 DJ Daemon speaks 57
52:35 dIaBLo – Eine kleine mitzmusik
57:48 DJ Daemon speaks 103s
59:31 Ryan Cramer (RJC) of Renaissance – Geometric Shadows

Tags: Host: DJ Daemon, 2021, Retro gaming