PC64k is the main size constrained demo format, where people do seriously impressive things. 256b is the masochists category, where doing anything at all is hard. 4k intros are in between.

It's interesting that the demo scene is very Windows/DOS focused, unlike other hacker scenes. Linux or Mac demos are basically not a thing. You're far more likely to see C64 or Amiga demos.

Well I guess it makes sense after all, because in DOS you kinda have an "API", for instance using the default interrupts you can select video modes, and the video memory is mapped at a fixed offset and so forth. In Linux due to API fragmentation it would be hard to agree on something that works in the future, and even know likely more setup boilerplate setup code is needed.

Agreed. Just as a heads up regarding "future safety", the guys at NVIDIA - for now - seem to keep the door open for Dos/Bios with very high possible resolutions https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63522#c858522 and even without the need for going the VESA way. Nothing i would really rely on in a business case ;) but neat anyway. (Mode List for several current GPUs : https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11672&page=1 )

Because the demoscene culture doesn't mix with FOSS one.

Back in the day we wanted to have the cool demos at the parties to show off how we managed to do something that others deemed impossible.

Part of the challenge is to match what others did and out win them, without having access to how they achieved it in first place.

Older Macs were never a thing in Europe given how expensive their were, Comodore, Atari and Sinclair machines ruled Europe.

While UNIX and demos never were a thing, those were more the domain of cracking competitions. Trying to gain access to some random university server.

(author here) All right, but at least the 1k category for Mac/Intel had some cool productions recently. https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B0%5D=1k&platform%5... Not my field exactly, but it seemed like the boilerplate was a bit shorter than for other platforms, so there was decent interest in it.