Demoscream
Posted to the PARANORMALPRICKHEADS Forums by user "n1bbl3r0p."
A very in-depth look at a technological terror... The same applies to this as it did with Roland's Basilisk- it's heavily implied to cover an already existing topic. But it's a pretty good one, so we can let it slide.
im n1bbl3r0p, if ur familiar with the demoscene u might know me for fucking around with c64 demos in the early 2002-2005 scene. if ur not familiar with demoscene, its basically a bunch of geeks/chiptune greybeards squeezing every bit of flash/ram out of defunct computer hardware in a dickmeasuring contest to see who can make the craziest demos. its fun cuz u got to work in the constraints of the hardware. like early game programmers doing batshit insane stuff in assembly to get dynamic lighting. but it's also a pain in the ass to work with sometimes, so some contests will allow u to do light modding to the hardware to quickly alternate the SIDs and shit like that.
so me and some other demoscene buddies who were obsessed with the c64 decided to do a tiny competition over like 100 bucks in prize money. we didnt publicize it or anything, was kind of a 'tell a friend if u want' deal. we allowed some light mods, but that's where we get into shit. there's this guy i was kinda familiar with, kxxwk, who was known for doing sick sprite scroller demos, and had a rep as a decent artist. he mentioned he found some new manufacturer for a JiffyDOS ROM chip he wanted to try out, and whatever, thats pretty standard. a few months later, we show off the demos, i was under some crunch at work at the time so mine was kinda shit. but kxxwk must have really been milking the JiffyDOS upgrade, cuz he had full like, sprite-created 3d renders and shit. music was decent, but near the end of showing off the real-time shading and shit hed created out of the sprites, the hw froze up and began to draw a new sprite on the screen. vivid, trippy colors of something like a garden. genuinely impressive art, i swore it was a jpeg converted to memory, but it seemed too abstract to be an image.
so he obviously won, and after we wrapped things up, i asked him how he rendered it.but problem is, he said he didnt. i didnt know kxxwk too well, but from what id heard, he usually put on this kinda 'too smart for u' hardass persona. i had thought he was a bit of a dick. so i think hes fucking with me, but kxxwk seems genuinely kinda pissed too. like he thinks we're the ones fucking with him.
so i ask him more what he means, and he says he tested it out earlier and the end scene was just supposed to be the render and his tag at the end. i tell him were not fucking with him, we hadnt even seen the demos beforehand, and ask him to play it again. so he does, it gets to the scene at the end, and it renders the garden again, except its a little bit more zoomed in. so we're all like 'what the fuck' looking at this, and kxxwk gets butthurt, starts packing his shit, and tells us to fuck off.
so.. ok, whatever. few days later, kxxwk gets into our irc and starts demanding answers. says hes poked around with it, dumped the rom, looked over it, and cant figure out how were putting in the fucking sprites. i tell him we havent fucked around with his chip, maybe its the guy u got it from in the first place. he says he tried emailing the manufacturer back and got fuck-all. so i tell him 'ok, its probably some script someones using to screw with u. or its a bootleg chip that had some other memory preloaded on it'. but he keeps yelling (well, abusing his shift key in the irc) that he DUMPED all the memory off the hardware, and theres literally nothing that could have rendered those images.
one guy in our group, J, is some ex-stanford wizard who fucks around in hacker spaces and has a lot more hardware RE experience, so he offers to take a look. says he can even decap the chips and check later if they dont find anything. kxxwk is hestiant to do the decapping cuz that destroys the chip and he wants to keep it functional for now. so they work out something, and i dont hear anything from them for another two weeks.
but then i get word from J that he can't figure it out either. that theres nothing in the assembly or memory that loads in the images. theyre not encrypted either, they just straight up never read from memory that would have loaded in anything except what kxxwk tried to in the demo. and theres no viruses or anything in the firmware either, or at least nothing they can find. its somehow, passively replacing the final tag sprite at the end with these new images. and the images have kept changing. they moved from the weird trippy garden, zooming in on a house by the horizon. and kxxwk has only gotten worse. freaking out about it, saying he recognizes the house. that its really fucked up that they would put it in there. J just thinks hes getting too heated over it. that it doesnt look like anything real. but theyre stuck. only suggestion left is to try decapping the chip.
kxxwk really doesnt want to, but finally agrees to let J hand it off to a lab to do some proper imaging and acid treatment shit. that ends up taking another month (that shit is expensive to do quickly) and kxxwk continues to get more weird in the meantime. he tended to show up for a lot of hackerscene parties and shit, but even people who know him are having a hard time getting in touch. computer geeks dont tend to get out often, or keep normal sleeping hours, but this is abnormal even for him. hasnt been showing up to work and shit abnormal. i shouldnt really give a shit, the guys a dickhead, but something about it was morbidly fascinating to me.
and finally I hear back from J about the decapped chip results. kxxwk demanded the chip back for some reason (even though its guaranteed destroyed), took the image mapping results, and sent them to J. from what J told me, most of the chip seemed like a normal eeprom memory chip.. but there was a bizarre section on the lowest substrate that had a mess of unconnected wires. no mosfets, just random wires. it shouldnt do anything. nothing there that stored secret memory to load in those images, and nothing that would make them change between runs. thats where shit started to make me feel a little uneasy. kxxwk didnt take the news well. told him it over video and everything, and J says kxxwk looked like shit. hadnt slept and shaved, pale as fuck. kxxwk told J that he tried running it again, which doesnt make sense cuz the chip's utterly fucked by this point. says he got a new image from it, and forwards it to J. thats how i ended up seeing it too.
it looks fucked, clearly the chip has been damaged. its hard to make anything out of it to be honest. kinda like looking at shit in the dark and letting ur imagination go wild. but maybe there was a face, or like a skull or some shit if u squinted hard. idk, its pretty dumb, but even if i couldnt really see shit, it still kinda made me feel unwell to look at it. maybe more to do with how fucked up kxxwk had gotten over it. cuz after he showed J, he just kept repeating shit like 'i knew it' over and over again, and ended the call. and then fucked off somewhere, idk. J went to check up on him irl, knocked at his door, and got no answer. called his family and shit and they hadnt heard from him either. he just vanished.
i guess he wasnt doing the best mentally, idk his family medical history. ive seen shit like this happen before where someone just breaks and falls into psychosis and its really sad to see. but it still bugs me that we never figured out how the images got on the chip in the first place. and its freaky the chip still worked after it was practically destroyed. so idk. our demoscene group fell apart after that. kinda hard to keep doing that shit when it just reminds u of real life tragedy. the chip's gone, btw, if anyone wanted to try fucking with it themselves. J still has the documents though, if anyone know shit about hardware layout. and i guess if u have any ideas on what happened, or know anything else like this, let me know.
(C) 2002-2008
