Demobit 2018

On February 2nd to 4th, 2018, this year's edition of Demobit was held in Bratislava, Slovakia. Demobit is a demoparty, where demosceners meet each other and present their latest works in competitions. It is the second time since its "resurrection" in 2017 that Demobit was held.

Written by Claus Volko
Vienna, Austria, Europe

Contact: cdvolko (at) gmail (dot) com
Homepage: www.cdvolko.net

Bratislava is only 70 km from my hometown Vienna, so it would be a shame if I did not attend the demoparty that has been held there on an annual basis since 2017 (and, previously, in the 1990s). Demobit is organized by Zden, a long-time scener and member of the group Satori who has made several outstanding demos of a peculiar style, such as Metamorf and Esocentrica. The party place is a startup hub called Binarium, located at Stary Grunty 18. Coming from Vienna with train, you can easily reach it by means of bus - no matter whether you are coming from the main train station (Hlavne stanica) or from Petrzalka, you just take one of the buses that stops at Zochova and then take bus 31 or 39 to Televizia. I had no problems travelling, except for a couple of loud and smelly co-passengers.

The party place is a bit elevated from the street level, so you must take a couple of steps upwards. When I arrived on Saturday there were already a few people chatting with each other outside the actual party place. The party had officially begun on Friday but most of the action was to be expected for Saturday and the night to Sunday. In contrast to the past year, I first did not meet any people I knew from the Internet, but that changed after some time. The first acquaintance I met was Zden,

the main organizer himself, who is a really friendly and nice guy. I sat down with some people from Poland previously unknown to me, and they were also friendly, and we mostly chatted about the Riverwash party which is going to be held in Kattowice this August/September for the last time. I drank a good Czech beer with the Polish people, and when I later met Nagz from Hungary, whom I had already met at the Hungarian demoparty Core in the year 2001, he was positively surprised that I was drinking beer, as I had previously had the image of being an anti-alcoholic.

At 12 o'clock Rrrola, a coder from the Czech Republic, delivered his presentation about 256 byte intro coding. This was especially interesting for me as I am also into coding heavily size-optimized stuff in x86 Assembler and had actually prepared a 256 byte intro for the competition at Demobit 2018 myself (called "Indian Winter"). Some of the tricks to save a few bytes which Rrrola revealed were really fascinating. Later there was a presentation about something related to computer graphics in the Czech language, and then Gargaj and Smash talked about virtual reality.

Between the presentations, there were demoshows, musical performances and, of course, the competitions. I was especially amazed at the quantity and quality of the releases in the animation compo. There were also a lot of intros and, to be honest, I was happy to see that both my intro and the photo which I had submitted to the photo compo matched the overall standards of the competitions quality-wise. Too bad my entries did not get many votes from the crowd, although they received good placements in the pre-selection done by the jury.

Apart from the names I've already mentioned, I met and talked to Natalia, Shakul, Aceman, Fei, Suhans, Blala, Warhead, Bacter, TomCat, Vickey, Picard, Citrus, Reg, Havoc, and Keen. In particular I was happy to meet Bacter in person for the first time - he was born on the same day in the same year as I and we used to send each other birthday greetings for many years. It was also nice talking to TomCat about the Hugi Compos which I organized in the years 1998 to 2009 and some of which he participated.

There was also a corner where some old-fashioned hardware was presented, and you were allowed to play games with it. One of the highlights, in my opinion, was two Atari Jaguars. The Atari Jaguar was the earliest 64-bit console, a great piece of hardware, equipped with a very practical controller that made typing numbers easy. Too bad that the games released for this platform were not so good and, for this reason, the Jaguar was not a commercial success.

All in all I loved the atmosphere at the party and I will definitely be there again next year, unless something happens that prevents me from doing so.

Claus Volko


Rrrola making his presentation about 256 byte intro coding in x86 Assembler.