I think one of the things that set Demozoo apart from other sites that we can compare ourselves to is the hard work the staff actually put into researching past releases, as well as keeping you up to speed on recent events. There's currently no way to actually see what the has been worked on except perusing the edit logs, and that's hardly something everyone will be doing regularly. So I thought it might be beneficial with a place where I (and any of the others, if they choose to) can sort-of let people know what new stuff they may want to check out.

I have a stupid huge archive of stuff I've downloaded over the years - many, many gigabytes - and one of my current things these days now that I am a scene.org file archive maintainer, is making sure that the information is made available to everyone on scene.org. This involves a lot of organization of files, and a lot of the times I find stuff that isn't already in the archive - so I upload it. This often crosses over into the work I do for Demozoo, so it's often mutually useful - Demozoo gets the downloads, the results files, and lots of useful metadata, and the files are available to all.

Recently, I've been getting back into my /demoscene/events/ folder that contains a lot of results and files for various parties over the years. Most of the newer stuff was already on scene.org (and in demozoo), but I'm currently working around 1998 and backwards, and things are getting interesting. I'll leave this first post now, and get into the case study for our first party in just a sec.

Zoo 1998 was the 2nd Zoo party, and the last one until it was revived in 2013.

http://demozoo.org/parties/728/

When I found the results file for this party in my archive, I first quickly checked scene.org and discovered there had actually never even been a directory for this party. This is not uncommen for platform-specific parties, so I grabbed some of the files off other sites, recompressed a few of them with kzip and made the appropriate directories on scene.org. I added the results to Demozoo, and checked other sites to see what might be missing. Funnily, it turned out the party had originally been added to Pouet in 2001 by Tomaes - who is now on our staff - so it's a small world. Pouet results are a bit messy, with some of the basic demos added as outside compos and such.

So, anyway - Demozoo now has results, and scene.org now has most of the files.

It would appear no-one has the complete archive of the disk covers (which I've tagged 'paper', by the way), so those files may be lost unless someone can point me in the right direction (or simply upload the files). Feel free to pitch in with your screenshots and credits and whatnot if you want. :)

Cool initiative! Basically I'm doing the same from time to time, so next time I'll post here, too. :)

Yodel Conference 10 was to be held in Varberg, Sweden in july of 1998.

http://demozoo.org/parties/2295/

However, as you can no doubt tell from the text in the entry, we have no further information on whether it was ever held. In fact, there is no information about this party on either Pouet, Janeway or CSDB. I just had the invitation text file in my archive, so I made a directory for the party on scene.org where I stored the file, and documented what I could find out. So, any information about this one is most welcome :)

Today: Trip 1998 in Italy.

http://demozoo.org/parties/998/

I discovered I had the results for this party in my archive, but they weren't on scene.org, and not on Demozoo (though a few singular results had been added previously) - so I uploaded it, and added all the results to Demozoo. Unfortunately, the results were somewhat rough, with no authors specified whatsoever. I managed to discover a few with the help of the most excellent Modland search engine Buzz of http://exotica.org.uk provides, but most remain a mystery. I then added all the downloads from scene.org to their respective files through a little magic we have on the backend :) Still, lots of information (mostly authors and other metadata) and files are missing - we currently have absolutely no files from the graphics and music competitions. So as usual, if anyone thinks they have any of this stuff, please please let us know - or just upload it directly to scene.org and I'll take it from there :)

if you have stuff sitting around on floppies or other obsolete media, also get in touch - a number of staff have equipment to dump floppies in a variety of formats, so we can definitely help with that.

Preserveration of demoscene history is key, people :)

Anyway, rant aside - I finished up by making new screenshots for the winning Amiga demo Side FX, since it had just a single screenshot (added by its author Unreal, mind you) and I found the list of graphical contributors intriguing :)

South Sealand 1994 did not have a scene.org directory, nor an entry on Demozoo. I fixed both of those issues, and uploaded the results and the invitation text. I will backfill some files when I am back home.

Greetings from cabin-in-the-woods-wifi! :)

http://demozoo.org/parties/2296/

This is probably the equivalent of asking a music fan "have you heard of the Beatles", but is the AstroideA Results Pack on your radar? https://www.scene.org/file.php?file=%2Fparties%2Fai_res94.zip&fileinfo

(I knew I'd downloaded something like this years ago, but couldn't find it again. Finally rediscovered it on my computer a week or two ago...)

Had a quick scoot through the first couple of years, and found plenty with a well-populated entry on Demozoo but no scene.org folder (and thus no results.txt linked); a good few files that can fill in gaps in our data (just found the title of Analog's winning demo at Submission 1993, for example); and one or two complete goldmines (like the full results of Primavera 1994).

As always, let me know if there's anything I can do on the coding side to speed things along - queries, automation, spidering, whatever. (I guess the ability to upload your own results.txt files would be a start...)

Summer Encounter 1998 did not have a results file on scene.org. Now it does. :)

http://demozoo.org/parties/675/

Gasman: Well aware of the results pack. Just haven't gotten to those years yet; working my way backwards in time, so currently at 1998 in my archive.

Summer Libation (not LIBERATION as some seem to assume) Camp was a series of social parties in Poland in the late 90's and early 00's.

Demozoo had entries for 1999, 2000 and 2001, which are now followed by our entry for 1998 - complete with new directory on scene.org and the invitation text file - unfortunately in Polish, so it doesn't really mean much to us at this point. If anyone can read Polish and can help out with things like the date of the event, then we'd be most grateful :)

http://demozoo.org/parties/2297/

As an added bonus, fixed some issue on the other editions as well.

I can read Polish (I thought you know that) - will take care of this in the next days.

dipswitch: Excellent - thought you only did German, Russian and English. :D

The No Limits and IMP-666 Amiga Conference 1990 did not have a scene.org directory, so it now does. :) I also added the graphics results, and am working on the rest. Keep watching this space.

http://demozoo.org/parties/1421/

We had seemingly forgotten to add the results from Belgian Scene Event 1998 earlier, as well as match the downloads from scene.org. All fixed up now. :)

http://demozoo.org/parties/891/

Bush Party 1998 had a results file, but it was cleverly hidden inside /misc on the scene.org server. Thankfully, a top demoscene detective discovered the grievous error and made sure to correct it.

Results are now correctly linked up, and have been added to Demozoo too!

yay!

http://demozoo.org/parties/439/

ok, SLC98 fixed!

here's an awesome Polish party report resource btw: http://ksiegaparties.ppa.pl/
will work my way through it.

Many Compusphere folders on scene.org (e.g. 2005/2010), and even the results are incomplete (e.g. 2009). Is anyone in conctact with the CS staff so that we could check if it's possible to get all results and files from them before they are lost in time and space?

I've been in contact with Orbiter (long time no listening to ska and drinking, mate!) who was involved in organizing Compusphere in the past, and according to him organizers have lost pretty much everything to harddisk crashes. So, our only bet in this particular case is if there are any sceners out there with stuff in their archives.

Bünzli 1996 (6) - the first of two editions in 1996 - did not have its results file on scene.org. Thankfully, friend of the site and Bünzli organizer Unlock had already entered the results on demozoo, so we've had them for a while :) Now, everyone else has access to the original results file as well. Sharing is caring <3

http://demozoo.org/parties/778/

Incidentally, quite a few of the files are still missing from scene.org. Should you be sitting on any of the files, you know what to do.

Err, 1998. That should be 1998, not 1996. :)

It would appear everything I said about the previous Bünzli also applies to the second edition this year. Every last thing.

http://demozoo.org/parties/777/

Inspired by Saga's mention of the missing files from many editions of Compusphere, I went and researched Compusphere 1998 (aka Compusphere X or CSX) a great deal. This one had several results files available, but they had just the entry names. I downloaded and checked every archive, added the appropriate credits, cleaned up the scene.org directories a bit, and even uploaded a few entries that were missing.

We're still missing things like the entire Raytrace and HTML competitions.

http://demozoo.org/parties/471/

:( It's a shame that so much stuff from that party series is missing. One could think that people would care about making the results public or learning from previous disk crashes... ;)

I dug into the hornet archive and did some work to recover some of Singapore's relatively lively demoscene of 1994-1996, including two demoparties. Just search for "singapore" to see the results.
http://demozoo.org/search/?q=singapore

Saga_Musix: Could not agree more. Let's hope the current price war on cloud storage leads to more things staying found :) I, for one, was not saddened when DropBox recently increased my storage 10-fold for no extra charge.

Intel Outside 1998 had terrible results files made available, but I've tried to make the best of it.

http://demozoo.org/parties/517/

A lot of holes filled in, including cataloging as best we could all the contributions to the music competitions and matching them up with their respective files on scene.org. Too many other fixes to mention, except for hooking up two alternative results files, each yielding small pieces of the puzzle.

As usual, some files and details are still missing if. Please help out if you can :)

Hype 1998 in Sweden has one single demo available on scene.org - all the rest appear lost.

http://demozoo.org/parties/893/

I spent large parts of the weekend hooking up graphics and music from Abduction 1998 - including all those tunes that were preselected away. Oh, and how great is the Amiga demo winner, <a href="http://demozoo.org/productions/37213/">Phase One<7a> by Capsule? :)

http://demozoo.org/parties/410/

The most complete results from this party ever, anywhere. You're welcome.

Spent a fair bit of time cleaning up Absolute 1998 - fixing results, adding in non-placed entries, and fixing things on scene.org.

http://demozoo.org/parties/954/

In the process I deleted mmul/ourtime.zip off scene.org - the archive was corrupt (also on every mirror, so the problem was at the source) and the music within was also duplicated in another archive, so no information was lost. scene.org also had a bit of a mess concerning the results; it had several files in the /misc subfolder, and no results in /info or a symlink to results.txt in the root. I cleaned up all that, making sure nothing was lost in the process.

Result: Much improved organizing of the files, and more entries detailed. Yay! :)

<3

i love it how the only surviving copy of hype'98 results passed through two of my favourite boards - los endos and black arts. =)

Resuls and releases from VIP 2009,2010 and 2011 totally missing... any clues?

The VIP website has them.
http://www.popsyteam.org/vip2011/prods.php (with points)
http://www.popsyteam.org/vip2010/prods.php (only entries)
http://www.popsyteam.org/vip2009/prods.php (ditto)

2011 imported to demozoo.

Working on VIP 2009 for both here and scene.org.

<a href="http://demozoo.org/productions/121816/">Unofishall by Razor 1911</a> does not have a working download either on the vip site or on its pouet entry, and <a href="http://demozoo.org/productions/121826/">Skating Marseille by French Demoscene Activist</a> does not have a download link at all. Both are marked lost in our database, now.

...and VIP 2010 wrapped up. Unfortunately, the downloads situation is not nearly as good as with 2009, so lots of files are missing. I've added (and mirrored) what I could. Please help if you're sitting on files we are missing.

So, a big one. Assembly 1998 was a bit of a mess on scene.org specifically, so this post will focus on that a bit.

http://demozoo.org/parties/105/

Deleted pc64kint/375-lock.zip since the archive contained only the description and a 0 byte file. The full intro is present on the server (with the same description files in the archive), hence no information was lost by removing it. This whole behaviour with files containing only the description from the party system and an empty file is prevalent throughout the scene.org history of this particular party - especially in the raytrace competition. In cases where a full alternative does not exist, I opted to keep the "damaged" archives as placeholders (since they do contain metadata, and as such are not entirely useless) and tag all the entries "lost" with a descriptive text to explain the situation.

I removed the text file graphics/bazar.txt, which was in fact the .nfo for Bazar by Impact DK - http://demozoo.org/productions/73027/ - released at an entirely different time this summer. :) I checked, and the file was byte-for-byte identical to the edition stored on scene.org for that demo, so no information was lost in its removal either.

The entire party directory was littered with index.htm files for the different competitions, likely download from the official website or the party intranet at the time of the party. They do contain some valuable metadata, such as the order of the showing of things, that is not stored in the results file. Rather than keep these in their separate competition subdirectories, I opted to rename them (so graphics/index.htm became graphics.htm) and move them all to /misc, so they are out of the way, but preserved.

the /animatio subfolder had all the file description files stored as .txt instead of .diz. I renamed them all, so they now show up correctly in the scene.org web interface.

Made sure there were .diz'es for many, many more files that had not been processed as such yet.

And finally, the c64 directories had nothing but the html files in them. They now have the productions from the party, instead. :)

I did a small tune-up of the Dutch party Bizarre 1998;

http://demozoo.org/parties/447/

The very first thing I discovered was sort-of amusing to me - the results file on scene.org was just some text cut from my old textfile project Scenery! So.. the results were written by me! Luckily I had my source file from when I compiled that, and replaced it with the real thing. I did leave the one that was originally there, just to be complete.

I did not have the location of the party on demozoo, so I found that information and hooked it in there.

Also, quite a few of the archives for the graphics were double-archived (a zip within a zip, if you will), which had prevented our automatic image-extraction-from-archives-of-graphics-entries magic from working. I fixed all those and made sure they had screenshots on demozoo.

Any sign of Ukonx 1998 and 1999 results?

http://demozoo.org/parties/1041/
http://demozoo.org/parties/1042/

menace, thanks for doing these detailed descriptions on your work on scene.org/demozoo! next time i'll do some substantial party uploading at scene.org again, i'll follow your example.

(perhaps we should post such updates on the scene.org staff mailinglist too, so that the others see what's being done?)

dipswitch: Good idea - I'd rather just post the link to here, though, and the interested parties can follow along if they so wish, rather than spam the mailing list :)

So, Amiganica Hungarica 1998.

http://demozoo.org/parties/2032/

This one was a bit of a weird duck. Usually, the case is we have the results, but are missing a lot of the files. This was the other way around - we have very little in the way of results (apart from for the c64 competitions), but seemingly most of the files. So, I pieced together what I could, and cleaned up a few things in the scene.org folders. For one thing, the wild demo Dreams by Breeze was huddled in the c64 directory, along with a c64 results file. I made a folder for the wild compo and moved Dreams there, and moved the results file (since it did not terribly official) to /misc. The C64 compo entries were all in the archaic zipcode format, so I took steps to convert it to the more universally used .d64 and replaced the file. I tested every single product in the resulting .d64, and they were all fine. Shoutouts to the rather excellent http://style64.org/release/dirmaster-v3.0.0-style for help with the conversion (there are seemingly hundreds of dos-based converters out there, none of which run natively under Windows 8.1).

And apart from that, I made entries for all the files and their contents, though of course we do not know the order they placed in.

So, Romantica 1998, held in Porsgrunn, Norway. One of the more obscure parties with regards to historical documentation. Pouet had documented the invite, that was pretty much it. I had the results in my archive, so I started by uploading that to scene.org, and adding the information to Demozoo. After those basics were covered, I started digging a bit deeper, and found the address to the original homepage from back then which I naturally fed into the WayBack Machine. All too often, these searches lead to - at best - a static edition of the original homepage, with none of the subpages present. This time, however, I struck something close to gold. An edition of the page archived in 1999 was not only the complete page, but even featured a "downloads" section - where I could download most of the long-lost entries. Now, not every single production is here, but a good chunk is, including artwork from Optic and music from Xhale. Unfortunately, none of the 4 channel music competition was preserved. Anyway, all of what I could recover is now safely in the hands of the scene.org servers.

Have fun :)

http://demozoo.org/parties/2385/
https://www.scene.org/dir.php?dir=/parties/1998/romantica98/

awesome!

Our user Asle brought to my attention that somewhere along the way, some of the Romantica archives had gotten corrupt. Don't know what happened with that, but replaced the ones he pointed out, and everything should be working just fine now.

If you don't know, Asle is one of the people behind the Amniga Music Preservation project (http://amp.dascene.net/) and one of the top contributors to Bitworld or Kestra or Janeway or whatever it's called this week ;) (http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/) - and just a general top bloke. Go support his things :)

If anyone finds any more, be sure to let me know by whatever means and I will fix.

This week I've been getting busy adding C64 results from the premier c64 demoscene ftp site ftp.scs-trc.net, to beef up our coverage of that scene a bit. Just so you know what's going on :)

So, I'm going to Compusphere this coming weekend, which made it pertinent to have a look at Compusphere parties from the past. I started at the earliest incarnation in our database, Compusphere 1993, and found a single file on scene.org - which unfortunately did not belong in that directory at all. It was, in fact, a demo from the following year, so after verifying that the binearies were bit-identical, it was deleted.

I don't want to leave the directory empty, so people - help me fill that bad boy up :)

...and it turns out Compusphere has a really, really terrible track record with making their releases and results available over the years.

My Swedish friends, please do look in the deepeste recesses of your archives, and let me know what you find, and I'll do the same :) Currently scouring the seedy outskirts of the web for information. :D

Christmas! Investigated Scene Meeting 1998 this morning, and found a results file and not a lot of graphics and music available. Matched up everything possible from scene.org, and marked everything else lost. Should you happen to find any files that are not available yet, please talk to us or simply upload to scene.org.

http://demozoo.org/parties/1348/
https://www.scene.org/dir.php?dir=%2Fparties%2F1998%2Fscenemeeting98%2F

For the french Lucky & Tigrou Party 1998 I once again found some (but not all) coded prods, and very little in the way of graphics and music. I went ahead and tagged everything that was not readily available as lost. If you have stuff, bla bla bla, follow the usual routine.

http://demozoo.org/parties/912/
https://www.scene.org/dir.php?dir=/parties/1998/ltp98/