I remember watching this countless times back in '92-'93. Awesome routines and music and I still consider this the best PC demo of all time as nothing since has produced such wow effect for me. And as a finn I was little proud of these guys, too: those VGA hacks they did displaying 256 colors with 640x480 were awesome. Those were good times... Thanks for posting this running on original hardware and not just on dosbox! My 386SX-20 was really struggling with Unreal and those parts that frames dropped significantly on 386-40 were a crawl with my 386-lite, though most of the demo was completely smooth. I upgraded to 486SX-20 sometime during '92 and it could handle whole Unreal really well.
*320 x _400_ 320x200 capacbility at 256 colors was called Mode 13 and had full BIOS access. The "VGA hacks" allowed to double the vertical resolution and to switch between frames seamlessly. 640x480 was another standard VGA resolution and provided only 16 colors. 256-color capability at that resolution was possible with SuperVGA only.
Yes, mostly. The _hardware_ resolution was 320x400 in both cases, but there's a repeat counter in the VGA hardware that's usually set to 2, so it will output each line of pixels twice. Due to that, we still got 320x200 pixels on the screen, but in a way that was easier on the eyes. (That applied to both mode 13 and the majority of mode X.) If you take it down to 1, that'll display twice the pixels, the whole 400 lines, but memory access is harder (because a DOS segment couldn't easily exceed 64k). That was done during the "And this is unreal" part of _Unreal_ and the awesome plasma effect of _Second Reality_ (right before the cube). Those effects were quite cheap per pixel and could go full 320x400 without stuttering, something that most effects could not. Some still images were 320x400, too. Those pixels are not even close to square, but for dithering, they are great.
Let it be know that once upon a time, probably back around 93. I spent an entire night+ downloading this to enjoy it. I showed it off for years to come.
the first demo for pc with 9-channel music in s3m format with texture effects in 256 colors, with a phenomenal wormhole and tricks in 32768 colors in 320x200 people then knew why the pc was buying
Playing this demo on my 386 with a cheap-but-crappy soundblaster-clone and i felt like a king... how long had i to wait to be able to play a game with grafics/music like this...
Before this demo, the Amiga had better demos than PC's could muster. But not after Unreal. This demo showed exactly what was impossible on the Amiga in 1992, and after it came lots of demos just underlining this point. Second Reality, Dope, Verses, Crystal Dream 2 and more just ended Amigas glory permanently. This was the year Amiga really lost at its own game.
to be fair, I felt the Amiga scene was still ahead in term of graphic artists... but we saw then some Amiga group moving to the PC Scene with their artists but a lot's of productions were still using coder-graphics!
@@fcycles I do not disagree with that. Amiga had the best graphics artists, and the platform was very well designed for creating beautiful content by skilled artists. But from 1992 the PC platform became powerful enough to muscle past Amigas cleverly built chips and helper processors. Before Unreal, PC demos tried to replicate what the Amiga scene made possible. After Unreal it was the other way around.
It is just cold and in winter time dark there for most of the day, thus you spend a lot of time on your computer. In the past, there were not many games available, thus you had to be creative and many learned programming. Today i would say, the young Fins do spend there time on gaming, instead of learning to code.
So, coding in "Assembly" (which isn't a real unified language by the way), isn't a free 10x code speed boost like people like to think. Your average assembly from a typical programmer would probably run about the same speed as something made in (say) C. It'd be faster sure, but typically not *too* much faster. The real speed tricks come from writing fast code in general, which also works in higher-level languages for the most part. Yeah you have lots of crazy ASM-only tricks that really are faster, but they tend to be pretty use-case-specific, not applicable everywhere, which reduces their usefulness.
my favorite music & part of that demo: world vector. Some simple patterns, but which work beautifully as I remember watching one of the first 3D scene which shown a more complex scene than what Amiga demos was showing back then.
This version: "WELCOME TO THE ULTIMATE DEMO ON THE PC FROM THE WORLD FAMOUS FUTURE CREW! SO DO YOU LIKE THIS... I THINK IT STINKS! AND WORLD FAMOUS MY ASS!! WHAT!!!! YOU HEARD ME. THIS SHIT STINKS!! OKAY THAT'S ALL I CAN TAKE SO SHUT UP AND LET ME CONTINUE! CONTINUE LIKE HELL! THAT'S ENOUGH. I'M GONNA DO SOMETHING YOU DON'T ENJOY!!!! LIKE WHAT? EAHM.. SOMETHING PAINFUL IF YOU DON'T SHUT UP! REALLY SORRY! BUT... YEAH SURE. BUT NOWW LET'S CONTINUE!" Version 1.1: "WELCOME TO UNREAL THE FIRST BIG PRODUCTION FROM THE PC! HOPE YOU FIND THIS DEMO INTERESTING LET'S GO ON!"
This is how it was supposed to be played. I watched another one and the video was out of synch with the music and the spot in the front where the pillars lit up did not happen. I remember that starting to happen as I played it on different operating systems. Thank you for putting this one out.
@Infinitie unfortunately, the most popular game engines these days have very limited support for tracker music, if at all. they don't really allow for stuff such as pattern switching, which is essential if you want to fit huge amounts of music into one file.
@@Zerbey and yet most unanimously agreed that they were glad when PCs got to the point that storage and memory allowed for a better way to mix music than in a tracker lol
According to Wikipedia, this demo was released to the public in August 1992 at the Assembly party which was held in July. It says at the end of this video that it was "released October 5th 1992". Why did they wait 2 months to release it to the public? I'm thinking that this might not have been the very first public release. Where did you get the version number 1.0 from? I'm just curious where you got the version number from. Does it say so in any of the files? As for version 1.1, the version number is printed out at the bottom of the screen where you select the sound setting. So in that case, it's clearly indicated. However, in version 1.1, it says "originally released in September 1992". These are two (or three, if Wikipedia is accounted for) contradictory statements. First released in August, September, October... whatever! It was released sometime in 1992, give or take three months. I guess it was considered unimportant to record the date correctly.
This demo was made under time pressure and was thrown together to run on the computer used in the competition. Then they started making the public version that could be run on different computers, and that took 2 months to complete.
Actually I downloaded some years ago an archive with all Future Crew productions. The 1.0 version of Unreal was included. As for the flashing pillars effect, I think that it is not as easy to do with a Gravis Ultrasound since the GUS does hardware mixing whereas a SB Pro f.e. requires software mixing. For the software mixing case you have the resulting channel waveform available. If you use a GUS you do not have direct access to it. Except you do it in software additionally, but its inefficient.
Flashing pillars don't actually go with the music waveform but with note commands as they're executed by the player routine. Every time a note is triggered, there's essentially a fade animation being retriggered or rather the fade sign is set. Even if you did have to make it sound based, synthesizing 70 samples per second really isn't that big a deal compared to synthesizing a few tens of thousands per second.
I do remember the pulsating blue bars with the wonderful music and the scrollers wrapping around at 0:44 Now I find out that this version 1.0 has difference from version 1.1. This scroller is much shorter in 1.1 and doesn't have the text of two scrollers fighting with each other from 1.0. Also at 5:22 it says "Let's Kick some Balls!" while at 1.1 they changed it (see similar parts in th-cam.com/video/W8An2ayqA14/w-d-xo.html) And it's quite possible those blue bars were disabled or forgotten for some weird reason in the process, version 1.0 is the one I remember but then I checked today 1.1 and wonder why the bars are not pulsating, but missed there are changes like this (to not deem offensive?)
92-й. Мы теоретезировали с друзьями насчет реализации "в гору дольше, а с горы легче, чем по полю , алгоритм лучшего шага"... Почему человек понимает, что дверная ручка это ручка - ее надо тянуть, толкать, нажимать, крутить.. Нам было 15. Теперь мы кодеры или близко к тому.
Where did you get the 1.0 version? O_o I can't find it anywhere .. It's a shame how they removed the blinking pillars from the text scroller in the beginning and shortened it ..
Back in the day, I downloaded this from a BBS…Bulletin Board Service. Dialed in on a 2400 baud, looked in the files section once in the BBS, download, Play. It went like that. And then the demo magic happened on my 386.
The first music pieces are from Purple Motion, grab them here artscene.textfiles.com/music/mods/S3M/MODLAND/Purple%20Motion/ The second music is Unreal Symphony by Skaven, grab it here www.futurecrew.org/skaven/music_tracker.html
Maaannn, Purple Motion made an INSANE leap in musical mastery between this and Second Reality!! I first heard heard/watched Second Reality and was absolutely blown away by the music!! I don't even usually like that kind of music (as a metal fan), but the themes and melodies he used were so catchy and gripping that I could not help but love it! Then I watched this... Daymn. Where's the wizardry?! The music on Unreal is "okay", but rather generic. There's not really any good themes or cool melodies that drill ur mind or any of that master level prowess that I would have expected from Purple Motion. Sure, these are probably his early works, BUT there's only 1 year difference between this and Second Reality! But musically it's like comparing Drake to Tchaikovsky!! :D :O Also, no offense to Skaven, but on Second Reality u could always hear the difference whether the track playing was by Skaven or Purple Motion. Skaven himself does some good tunes too, but Purple Motion was on a whole other level. Here there is no difference. I was watching this and constantly waiting when those superful Purple Motion tracks were gonna kick in instead of all this Skaven thing... Then when the credits rolled in I was surprised this even had Purple Motion songs! :O I could not tell the difference. But I must say the whole group improved (Skaven included!) on Second Reality, but my man Purple Motion must have taken some additional purpleroids! It's a shame he hasn't become big after Future Crew :( Sure, he's done loads of stuff (according to wikipedia)! But it's mostly minor titles and things not known to the wider audience. I would have expected that he'd be writing music for Pitbull or had become another JS16 or is working for some big Hollywood company doing music for films...
Back when the future of computers was bright, clear, and optimistic.
I remember watching this countless times back in '92-'93. Awesome routines and music and I still consider this the best PC demo of all time as nothing since has produced such wow effect for me. And as a finn I was little proud of these guys, too: those VGA hacks they did displaying 256 colors with 640x480 were awesome. Those were good times...
Thanks for posting this running on original hardware and not just on dosbox! My 386SX-20 was really struggling with Unreal and those parts that frames dropped significantly on 386-40 were a crawl with my 386-lite, though most of the demo was completely smooth. I upgraded to 486SX-20 sometime during '92 and it could handle whole Unreal really well.
*320x200
*320 x _400_
320x200 capacbility at 256 colors was called Mode 13 and had full BIOS access. The "VGA hacks" allowed to double the vertical resolution and to switch between frames seamlessly.
640x480 was another standard VGA resolution and provided only 16 colors. 256-color capability at that resolution was possible with SuperVGA only.
No... was 320x200 with 4 planes, called it Mode X. This is not was simply mov ax,13h int 10h but mode X
Yes, mostly.
The _hardware_ resolution was 320x400 in both cases, but there's a repeat counter in the VGA hardware that's usually set to 2, so it will output each line of pixels twice. Due to that, we still got 320x200 pixels on the screen, but in a way that was easier on the eyes. (That applied to both mode 13 and the majority of mode X.)
If you take it down to 1, that'll display twice the pixels, the whole 400 lines, but memory access is harder (because a DOS segment couldn't easily exceed 64k). That was done during the "And this is unreal" part of _Unreal_ and the awesome plasma effect of _Second Reality_ (right before the cube). Those effects were quite cheap per pixel and could go full 320x400 without stuttering, something that most effects could not.
Some still images were 320x400, too. Those pixels are not even close to square, but for dithering, they are great.
@@achtsekundenfurz7876 yes.. the famous "aspect ratio" 🙂
Let it be know that once upon a time, probably back around 93. I spent an entire night+ downloading this to enjoy it. I showed it off for years to come.
I still show this off. Lol .
Ahhhh nothing like the smell of non-interpolated aliased sound by mornings! So many memories.. Cheers!
Wow this brings back memories of my teen years! Thank you for this trip down memory lane!
the first demo for pc with 9-channel music in s3m format with texture effects in 256 colors, with a phenomenal wormhole and tricks in 32768 colors in 320x200 people then knew why the pc was buying
Playing this demo on my 386 with a cheap-but-crappy soundblaster-clone and i felt like a king... how long had i to wait to be able to play a game with grafics/music like this...
Before this demo, the Amiga had better demos than PC's could muster. But not after Unreal. This demo showed exactly what was impossible on the Amiga in 1992, and after it came lots of demos just underlining this point. Second Reality, Dope, Verses, Crystal Dream 2 and more just ended Amigas glory permanently. This was the year Amiga really lost at its own game.
to be fair, I felt the Amiga scene was still ahead in term of graphic artists... but we saw then some Amiga group moving to the PC Scene with their artists but a lot's of productions were still using coder-graphics!
@@fcycles I do not disagree with that. Amiga had the best graphics artists, and the platform was very well designed for creating beautiful content by skilled artists. But from 1992 the PC platform became powerful enough to muscle past Amigas cleverly built chips and helper processors. Before Unreal, PC demos tried to replicate what the Amiga scene made possible. After Unreal it was the other way around.
It's my impression that all Fins are born with the ability to code in Assembly.
It is just cold and in winter time dark there for most of the day, thus you spend a lot of time on your computer. In the past, there were not many games available, thus you had to be creative and many learned programming.
Today i would say, the young Fins do spend there time on gaming, instead of learning to code.
@@OpenGL4ever yeah that's my understanding as well. In winter you either code or drink beer, and there's only so much beer you can drink
So, coding in "Assembly" (which isn't a real unified language by the way), isn't a free 10x code speed boost like people like to think. Your average assembly from a typical programmer would probably run about the same speed as something made in (say) C. It'd be faster sure, but typically not *too* much faster.
The real speed tricks come from writing fast code in general, which also works in higher-level languages for the most part. Yeah you have lots of crazy ASM-only tricks that really are faster, but they tend to be pretty use-case-specific, not applicable everywhere, which reduces their usefulness.
I've honestly never seen a single fish that could code.
@@kargaroc386 coding old skool demos is all about those use-case specific tricks, going into the extreme edge of what is possible
Probably have the floppy disk somewhere in my PC box of days gone by..
This was an eye-opener in early 90’s.
Truly great stuff.
The demo can be found in the internet. Just search for "unreal.zip DOS" and "second.zip DOS" for second reality.
09:53 most expressive facial animation in CGI to this day
Bass @ 6:19 when wormhole starts is still one of the baddest drops in a demo!
I personally love this part th-cam.com/video/VjYQeMExIwk/w-d-xo.html
1992 - mind blown!
The end titles track 'Realm of Chaos' is one of my favourites!
A remastered version without the tail end cut off is here: th-cam.com/video/MLE9yNGlTZ8/w-d-xo.html
Thanks! Of course I have the S3M so can play it anytime.
Watching this gives me chills. Good memories.
my favorite music & part of that demo: world vector. Some simple patterns, but which work beautifully as I remember watching one of the first 3D scene which shown a more complex scene than what Amiga demos was showing back then.
This version:
"WELCOME TO THE ULTIMATE DEMO ON THE PC FROM THE WORLD FAMOUS FUTURE CREW!
SO DO YOU LIKE THIS...
I THINK IT STINKS!
AND WORLD FAMOUS MY ASS!!
WHAT!!!!
YOU HEARD ME. THIS SHIT STINKS!!
OKAY THAT'S ALL I CAN TAKE SO SHUT UP AND LET ME CONTINUE!
CONTINUE LIKE HELL!
THAT'S ENOUGH.
I'M GONNA DO SOMETHING YOU DON'T ENJOY!!!!
LIKE WHAT?
EAHM..
SOMETHING PAINFUL IF YOU DON'T SHUT UP!
REALLY SORRY! BUT...
YEAH SURE. BUT NOWW LET'S CONTINUE!"
Version 1.1:
"WELCOME TO UNREAL
THE FIRST BIG PRODUCTION FROM THE PC!
HOPE YOU FIND THIS DEMO INTERESTING
LET'S GO ON!"
Sweeet! I had the same SoundCard - Loved it, miss it
This is how it was supposed to be played. I watched another one and the video was out of synch with the music and the spot in the front where the pillars lit up did not happen. I remember that starting to happen as I played it on different operating systems. Thank you for putting this one out.
Dang, I actually remember this!
Count me in. I remember this! Late nights ... a beer and heck yeah! \o/
Love end credits font!
Good old Norton Utilities System Information at the start :)
Try to imagine world where every piece of software will be optimized just like this kind of demos.
I remember I bought co-processor to my 386SX and next step I started Unreal... What's next??... Woooow ;)
Skaven music is fantastic.
thank you. thank you
Back when the music made computers sound more powerful than they actually were. Today computers are powerful but the music sucks.
Yes! I wonder why most game music of the past is so memorable, while very few soundtracks in the present are.
@@Optimus6128 Back in the 8 bit days the musicians had to code their music players, in assembler. A different breed back then.
@Infinitie unfortunately, the most popular game engines these days have very limited support for tracker music, if at all. they don't really allow for stuff such as pattern switching, which is essential if you want to fit huge amounts of music into one file.
Now imagine putting this music into 4 channels with a limited sample set and primitive music trackers. These guys were artists.
@@Zerbey and yet most unanimously agreed that they were glad when PCs got to the point that storage and memory allowed for a better way to mix music than in a tracker lol
I see they already had twitch chat in '92, only it was hidden in a demo
monkaS
According to Wikipedia, this demo was released to the public in August 1992 at the Assembly party which was held in July. It says at the end of this video that it was "released October 5th 1992". Why did they wait 2 months to release it to the public? I'm thinking that this might not have been the very first public release. Where did you get the version number 1.0 from? I'm just curious where you got the version number from. Does it say so in any of the files? As for version 1.1, the version number is printed out at the bottom of the screen where you select the sound setting. So in that case, it's clearly indicated. However, in version 1.1, it says "originally released in September 1992". These are two (or three, if Wikipedia is accounted for) contradictory statements. First released in August, September, October... whatever! It was released sometime in 1992, give or take three months. I guess it was considered unimportant to record the date correctly.
This demo was made under time pressure and was thrown together to run on the computer used in the competition. Then they started making the public version that could be run on different computers, and that took 2 months to complete.
And the official release date of the public release can be read at the end of the Demo.
❤Still here.
Actually I downloaded some years ago an archive with all Future Crew productions. The 1.0 version of Unreal was included.
As for the flashing pillars effect, I think that it is not as easy to do with a Gravis Ultrasound since the GUS does hardware mixing whereas a SB Pro f.e. requires software mixing. For the software mixing case you have the resulting channel waveform available. If you use a GUS you do not have direct access to it. Except you do it in software additionally, but its inefficient.
Flashing pillars don't actually go with the music waveform but with note commands as they're executed by the player routine. Every time a note is triggered, there's essentially a fade animation being retriggered or rather the fade sign is set.
Even if you did have to make it sound based, synthesizing 70 samples per second really isn't that big a deal compared to synthesizing a few tens of thousands per second.
I do remember the pulsating blue bars with the wonderful music and the scrollers wrapping around at 0:44
Now I find out that this version 1.0 has difference from version 1.1.
This scroller is much shorter in 1.1 and doesn't have the text of two scrollers fighting with each other from 1.0. Also at 5:22 it says "Let's Kick some Balls!" while at 1.1 they changed it (see similar parts in th-cam.com/video/W8An2ayqA14/w-d-xo.html)
And it's quite possible those blue bars were disabled or forgotten for some weird reason in the process, version 1.0 is the one I remember but then I checked today 1.1 and wonder why the bars are not pulsating, but missed there are changes like this (to not deem offensive?)
I think the scroll text dragged on a bit too long, maybe that's why they shortened it?
8:06 Ottomagic Critic!
92-й. Мы теоретезировали с друзьями насчет реализации "в гору дольше, а с горы легче, чем по полю , алгоритм лучшего шага"... Почему человек понимает, что дверная ручка это ручка - ее надо тянуть, толкать, нажимать, крутить.. Нам было 15. Теперь мы кодеры или близко к тому.
Something that i've noticed over dosbox is that it's desynced...
Where did you get the 1.0 version? O_o I can't find it anywhere ..
It's a shame how they removed the blinking pillars from the text scroller in the beginning and shortened it ..
I have a copy somewhere if you want it
Why is World Vector running so fast here?
Back in the day, I downloaded this from a BBS…Bulletin Board Service. Dialed in on a 2400 baud, looked in the files section once in the BBS, download, Play. It went like that. And then the demo magic happened on my 386.
At the end, in the contact info it says: "Send Netmail to". Wow. No email at that time.
i wish someome would do a remake of that world vector music
Omg, 5:16 hits hard af OOOOOOOOO
I'll put this simply, how!? Also, torille nyt ja heti, tuon makkarat ja viinat, kuka tuo grillin?
This music is delicious who made it?
The first music pieces are from Purple Motion, grab them here artscene.textfiles.com/music/mods/S3M/MODLAND/Purple%20Motion/
The second music is Unreal Symphony by Skaven, grab it here www.futurecrew.org/skaven/music_tracker.html
Thanks
Is it just me who recognises part of the music as used in a iBook guy video?
No ;) Instanly thought of "Old computers did it better!"
I was there Gandalf! Was thousend years ago! eheheeh
Maaannn, Purple Motion made an INSANE leap in musical mastery between this and Second Reality!! I first heard heard/watched Second Reality and was absolutely blown away by the music!! I don't even usually like that kind of music (as a metal fan), but the themes and melodies he used were so catchy and gripping that I could not help but love it! Then I watched this... Daymn. Where's the wizardry?! The music on Unreal is "okay", but rather generic. There's not really any good themes or cool melodies that drill ur mind or any of that master level prowess that I would have expected from Purple Motion. Sure, these are probably his early works, BUT there's only 1 year difference between this and Second Reality! But musically it's like comparing Drake to Tchaikovsky!! :D :O
Also, no offense to Skaven, but on Second Reality u could always hear the difference whether the track playing was by Skaven or Purple Motion. Skaven himself does some good tunes too, but Purple Motion was on a whole other level. Here there is no difference. I was watching this and constantly waiting when those superful Purple Motion tracks were gonna kick in instead of all this Skaven thing... Then when the credits rolled in I was surprised this even had Purple Motion songs! :O I could not tell the difference. But I must say the whole group improved (Skaven included!) on Second Reality, but my man Purple Motion must have taken some additional purpleroids! It's a shame he hasn't become big after Future Crew :( Sure, he's done loads of stuff (according to wikipedia)! But it's mostly minor titles and things not known to the wider audience. I would have expected that he'd be writing music for Pitbull or had become another JS16 or is working for some big Hollywood company doing music for films...
Why is it that metal fans often have the idea they can't like other styles?
What's music that starts at 0:44?
"The White Tiger" by Skaven
I feel like the original version on my et4000 had a higher frame rate
I just blocked by a friend on discord for sending the demo file lmao dude thought I was gonna hack him