The Latin Demoscene

When someone asks me where I live and I answer "South America"
he or she says: "Oh, so you live in Texas?". It is obvious
that this big part of the American continent is forgotten
for most people. Maybe you would think there is not normal 
people who lives here, just a banch of indians who don´t
even know what electricity is :). Well, the things are far 
different, in fact there is some scene in this continent,
and that´s the subject I choosed for today.

I was born in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, but I
live in Asuncion, Paraguay (this country is located just
in the heart of South America). I begun with 8-bits machines
like most did; My first computer was an Adam Coleco Vision,
then I got a C-128 and a Spectrum. I started to love the
demoscene with the C-64 of course). But I started 
making real contacts since I got my Amiga 500,
2 years later I got my PC. I coded for years with HLL
but the moment came and I started with x86. Nowdays I
don´t code in any HLL anymore, just plain asm, but I´m
realizing HLLs such as WATCOM C++ are very good. :).

There has been a very respetable C-64 cracking scene at
Argentina and Mexico which continued up to even 1994,
but with the 16/32-bits computers, things changed. Most
games used to come already cracked from Europe and
the CD-ROM killed the elite cracking scene. Now there
are no more than lamers with CD-ROMs recorders around :)
I´m not meaning cracking a CD-ROM game is lame, but I
prefer those old C-64 games with 5 intros together.

The scene in latin america is very small, but
we are trying to make it bigger. Most groups are 
"ansi" groups rather than demo groups. In Argentina there
are not many coders but there are a lot of good
musicians and ansicians who formed groups such as
ETHERIAL, MASAKRE PRODUCTIONS, and others. I know there are
a lot of groups in Brazil, but they don´t know
each other. :) In Brazil there is a group called
MAIDEN which does real awesome ANSI graphics. I have also 
seen a demo, but I cannot remember the name
or the group. At Chile, there is Pel (Peulsa) who
released the fake demo and is known by his music
routines (SEAL). At Guatemala, we have Vertigo, which
released a few but very good products. From Mexico
I know DW from Style (a still alive C-64 scener) and 
Edmz who is forming a new demo group. Of course, I
know there are a lot of groups which I don´t know. 
A lot of these ones, release their productions locally,
so we never see them at cdrom.com ;). 

Edmz is making a web page dedicated to the latin
demo scene. There, groups will be able to know about the
existence of each other, and of course, if possible,
there will appear some text information in spanish
(saddly, a lot of dudes don´t know english very
well). I have written myself a 68000 tutor in spanish,
it does not make much sense for the PC scene, but
I´m thinking on doing some x86 tutorials.

My group is called QUASAR and has 8 members:

Cry0 - code
Dr.Stain - swap
Insane - gfx
Int13h - code
Jeu Azarru - swap / code
Jever - swap
Light - code
Sexton - code, swap, music

We haven´t released so much, but at the time you would
be reading this, our 64K intro will be ready :)
As you can see, we need a musician coz I am the
only one and feel to busy with coding :). 

If you want to contact me for any reason (even 
friendship), go ahead! :) I will reply all letters,
as soon as possible. I will be writing more in
the future. Have fun!

                                        Sexton / Quasar
                                     quasar@inorbit.com