>It's a place of refuge from the constant churn of increased efficiency

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.

In the Lazur's 256 colour rendition, it is curious that they got the details in the front very well but messed up the third guys face completely.

As it happens I'm just on a train to Airbnb with large group of demoscene and fractal art friends, full week ahead of the Revision[0] demoparty! Hells yeah

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/

[0] https://2026.revision-party.net/

> Farting around with Amigas in 2026 means actively choosing to make things harder for the sake of making things harder. Making that choice and still outsourcing the bulk of the craft and creative process is like claiming to be a passionate hobby cook while serving professionally catered dinners and pretending they're your own concoctions.

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 of 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.

These people literally gods to me growing up. My parents were poorer than others so we never had any computer better than an acorn electron but the demos my friends with amigas and Atari ST’s showed my blew my mind.

It's hard to get in the era of ubiquitous 32 bit color depth, but back in the day, part of the show was making merely your hardware output picture very close to the reference in as many colors as possible and good resolution too. This was where Amiga's special video modes could really shine.

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

This reminded me that demo scene graphics competitions these days tend to include work-in-progress images, as evidence of originality.

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...