Demo effect

Because of this, demo coders have often attempted to create new effects whose technical basis cannot be easily figured out by fellow programmers.

Sometimes, particularly in the case of severely limited platforms such as the Commodore 64, a demo effect may make the target machine do things that are supposedly beyond its capabilities.

Effects are rarely stand-alone content elements anymore, and their role in programmer showcase has diminished, particularly in PC demos.

As for today, PC demosceners are more likely to demonstrate their programming skills with procedural content generation or 3D engine features than with superior visual effects.

A lot of effort was put into the reverse-engineering of the hardware in order to find undocumented possibilities usable for new effects.

Effects based on software rendering into chunky-pixel framebuffers were typical in the mid and late 1990s and were usually first implemented on the PC or Falcon030.

They became popular as systems with pixel-addressable high speed video memory and faster processors (to allow for more demanding real-time calculations) became common.

Rather than general-purpose 3D algorithms, democoders often used special-purpose tricks highly optimized for the rotation and rendering of a particular object such as a cube or a sphere.