What is fundamental is this: every artist starts out by copying the works of others. It's how you learn.
And in that framing, once you publish your derived work, there is only one question that arises - if you don't credit the original author but sign your own name, you're fundamentally misleading your audience. Your audience implicitly assumes you made the thing. Maybe you made 95% of it, but if you don't give due credit, it looks bad once your audience discovers that.
On more than one occasion my perception of an artist has shifted once I discovered the "brilliant work" they created was actually a remake of somebody else's brilliant work. It's a feeling of being misled. It's never a feeling of "wow, this guy is a total hack and has no ability of their own".
They wouldn't copy each other for copyright infringement as much as it was a mark of respect. They carried each other's arts as an evolution and respect towards each other rather than copying; all bringing a small twist on what was before.
The spirit of the famous - cited in the TFA as well - quote "great artists steal" is exactly that. If you don't know that the inspiration came from somewhere and believe that what an artist did was created in a vacuum, you will certainly think much higher of said artist.
The entire notion of "intellectual property" is the creation of an artificial monopoly rooted in very distinct and separate goals from physical property that requires separate laws if you want to restrict copying or exploitation, because property law explicitly does not cover them.
Most copyright laws are also justified implicitly or directly in the legal texts allowing them as creating an incentive for the advancement of the arts and sciences - a temporary monopoly right granted by the state as a deviation from perceived "natural right" - on the belief that granting that right creates more benefits for the public than not having them, by encouraging the creation of more works.
And no copyright law protects your ideas. They protect the specific expression of them. Patents - which do protect ideas - are by design far more restricted and limited exactly because they are far more invasive in depriving the public of use of the very idea for the duration.
Eventually you get to the point where someone asks why the tree is theirs and they say it's because someone in history planted it, they were a relative, so it is mine now. It is hard to assert a moral justification for long term hereditary ownership without inviting investigations on how it was those ancestors came to have the resources that caused the ownership to begin.
One should not forget where the demoscene is coming from: crackers. The whole point of "intros" was to show off the skills of whoever cracked a piece of software. So obviously, the views demoscene held on intellectual property are not mainstream, if we can say it like that.
The shift to a more creative and law abiding art scene, led by adults and not rebellious teenagers is more recent development.
The Revision demo party is soon. From the competition rules for "Oldskool Graphics" [0]:
> Include exactly 10 (ten) working stages of your entry. All entries without plausible working stages will be disqualified.
Yikes...
The rules for "Modern Graphics" [1] and "Paintover" similarly also require work stages, but fewer.
[0]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/oldskool/#oldsk...
[1]: https://2026.revision-party.net/competitions/graphics/#moder...
My top pick for pixel art would be anything by Made of demogroup Bomb, don't have a good link to hand sorry and need to change trains etc. Also check this amazing pixel art book: https://www.themastersofpixelart.com/
I made the images in Deluxe Paint when I was 16-18 years old. It was a lovely surprise to be contacted two decades later by the author who wanted to print them in this beautiful book among many far more talented artists.
That whole site (and more) is worth checking out of course. My favorite pixel art image at the moment is this: https://amiga.lychesis.net/sceners/Facet.html#Facet_SamTakin...
Snatched the collection. Thanks for mentioning it!
There were plenty of images that amazed me back then even though I was perfectly aware of the source material. It depends on the platform, and the amount of effort going into recreating it. Reinterpreting an image for a C64 or Amiga with a restricted palette is a skill in itself. Copying it for a platform, or in a style / resolution / bitmap depth, where you might as well use a scanner, not so much (and so, of course, the accusations became more and more frequent, often warranted).
Copying it and trying to pass something off as original is of course also very different from acknowledging the original and letting the conversion stand on its own as what it is.
The hidden deciding factor nevertheless was time. And that affected the whole production cycle: coding, graphics, music, crunching, copying, spreading (postal services!).
We had way more snow back then and we enjoyed working on something for hours till the wee hours.
18 was a deciding factor because after that military service killed quite a few scener careers.
Have a look at all the pr0n stuff pixel graphics that were cherished by the young studs as well as all the scroll texts as well as early disk magazines or pictures of programmers in computer magazines, with lots of profanity and simply stating age competition: 14 years old scolding 13 years old…
You will still see plenty of e.g. SID covers of existing pop music, without anyone really batting an eyelid.
There are those who use AI as part of their process proudly, but secretly, because they know they will receive abuse.
I really wonder how some people think of themselves as artists while simultaneously attacking another persons choice of self expression.
Because AI art is not art, and rips off existing artwork in a way that is more than learning from the style and imitating.
Almost every respected art form today was birthed to cries of "That is not art"
"Danny leaves the scene" (because it's just a bunch of kids with scanners and he's got a job at Eidos now) never forget!
People wanting to explore the use of generative AI for vintage computers is happening not just for graphics but for code too.
I think in the case of code though, it's still interesting because I don't believe there's been any success yet. I hear of people having success with Claude in contemporary settings but it seems to fare less well when working for older computing platforms. There's a reason for that of course and it's worth exploring.
However, it will cease to be interesting as soon as the first person manages to create something substantial. At the point, the scene should probably shun it for the reasons stated in the quote.
Questions: 1) Which AI platform did you use? 2) Did it create a binary image of the floppy disk (an ADF perhaps)? If not, what form did it take?
INSTALL DF0:
Just type that and your disk is bootable.
What I find mind-boggling is the handwave over the rest. "Loads the network driver" - ok, which one? There's no standard network driver, only a specification for writing drivers (SANA-II). Was it a driver for SLIP/PPP over the serial port, or a PCMCIA Ethernet adaptor, or something else? Was it a copy of a driver someone's already written?
Also, it would be madness to try doing this in a bootblock, or insinuating that the bootblock did it. Demo bootblocks take over the hardware and start using their loading routines, eschewing the main AmigaOS, and that's the implication of saying something was done in the bootblock (you have under 1KB of space so the first thing you need is your own loader).
What's much more mundane and normal is a standard bootblock which returns control to AmigaDOS and lets it run the startup-sequence, whereupon you can use normal files, libraries, devices, including a full suite of other people's networking software, including BOOTP (AmiTCP comes with a client) and TFTP (see Olaf Barthel's tftpclient: https://github.com/obarthel/amiga-sana-ii-tftpclient). But it stopped being the "bootblock" that did it as soon as it started AmigaDOS.
It referenced the Amiga ROM Kernel Reference Manual, appendix C to create a boot block in assembly. It's a raw sector-mapped image, the build process creates a blank adf, which then writes everything at it's fixed offsets and we go back with another tool to patch the bootblock with the right checksum so the kernel accepts it.
I copied that adf to the A1200 so I can then write it to a real floppy.
Successfully integrating many disparate parts has always been the big ticket item. Dealing with the rough edges and making different ideas play together nicely is where all the value lives in most businesses.
Thus, some demos, like the one where Lazur's image came from [0] were just slideshows of very colorful images that were more than likely traced from something.
[0] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3715 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmhffwhGiK0
e.g. I zoomed in to view the matchbox texture described in the article, and found it a blur. (Clicking loads the uncompressed PNG.)
Personally, I think for this page, loading full res images inline is warranted. The resulting 3MB page size would be more than justified :)
Well - the edited image looks clearer in the rendition, but also more fake. So unless that was the goal, I prefer the more blurred image, simply because it is more authentic than that digital edit. Many AI images have a similar problem; they look very out of place. I noticed this in some games where AI generated images are used. The images look great but they simply don't fit into the game at hand or they have a style that looks alien. Case in point was mods for the game Baldur's Gate 2 EE, where these images are great but they look very outside-ish. And that's a problem that seems to be hard to get rid of from such generated images, at the least for most of those I saw so far.
Increased efficiency also seems to be part of its appeal. The limitation is you can't increase efficiency by just upgrading computer specs, but instead have to find innovating ways to use the existing resources as efficient as possible to make something great. These kinds of optimization or compression problems seems like something AI would be very helpful for, so I think it is premature to try and ban its usage.
Are you talking about some sort of hypothetical future Super-AGI?
You can crib techniques from other people but unless you also show that you understand them deeply, e.g. by creative adaptions, you'll still be considered a lamer even though your results match those of someone else.
This is one of the reasons why the demo scene still has a lot of physical events, it's part of the socialisation process to be in the same room as other people, putting in your final touches while they observe and produce distractions that in practice validate your abilities and respectable refusal to take shortcuts.
I think things can look much better for pixel art that is either very low resolution (e.g. the small characters and objects in a SNES game, which would usually be just a few pixels wide, so every pixel has to be placed deliberately) or has a very low color depth (a pallette between two to ~16 colors, like the backgrounds in a PC-88 game), or both (like the sprites in a Game Boy game).
An example where higher color depth can ruin the visuals is "Snatcher" by Kojima. The backgrounds for the original PC-88 and MSX versions were relatively detailed (200x100 pixels perhaps), while the color depth was very low (8 colors?), which greatly accentuated the pixel-art look. However, the later re-releases added more and more colors and smooth gradients, which only made it look worse, like a mediocre comic book.