evoke 2004 report

after a 5 hours lasting train and tram ride i arrived at around 13:00 at the digital playground, namely the 'essigfarbik' in cologne quite near to the city center. some people like sir garbagetruck or tomcat were already here. the organizers were still busy with setting up the partyplace. not much later also rob arrived (thanks to him for the train ticket), but he had to wait several hours for an amiga compatible monitor. on the afternoon we tried to get some 'kölsch' (cologne beer) in nearby supermarkets, but we failed. later at a gas station we had more luck. the partyplace filled up now quickly with the usual suspects, also some more foreigners. the computers were working now, but the network was absent until later evening. also the soundcheck for the netlabel night in a club directly under our location was done at this time. rob was allowed to use franky's c64 monitor for some time so that he was able to fix some problems with his part of my demoshow. the rest of the evening was mainly some chit chat with several people. this time we had also food support (turkish food like 'döner'). in the short opening ceremony you could see mainly haujobb's 'evoke, evoke' and the evoke invitation. a bit after midnight it was time for the 5th anniversary of my demoshow, as usual with the good mix of dos, amiga and windows demos. rob was presenting the highlights of the breakpoint amiga compo. according to xxx a person from intel (again sponsoring the party with powerful pc's) was very enthusiastic about what he could see in this 2 hours so that next years evoke is maybe already safe. after the show i was visiting the netlabel night for some time when the labels 'stadtgruen' and ' lego lego' were playing. the good message for me came from mbb since he will give me a not needed geforce4 ti card. hopefully the card will work well in my old system. we talked also about tum 2004 a bit. some more visitors than last year would be definitly nice, so please attend this year!

smash designs have released the c64 game 'turrican III: the return of darkness' at evoke (as announced in the past weeks). at the 'painstation' you can play a round of pong the painful way with electric shock and other 'goodies', at the other wall there is a console corner with several different game consoles. the network is still not really good working, especially the party www is still not reachable. i heard also from attempts to attack the upload server. nevertheless at around 12:30 it was time for the ansi/ascii compo. after this it was time for a first fun compo: build a paper plane and let fly as long as possible. today also digisnap was arriving and he had good news: the berlin scene meeting will be held again. come to berlin on 9th october for a cozy meeting with many demos on the big screen. more info here. the weather is better today and so quite many people are actually outside drinking and eating. on the afternoon tomcat talked about his soon to come demoscene book 'freax'. he showed some sample pages on the big screen. this book will definitly be more interesting for scene insiders than the finnish book and will cover especially the c64 and amiga. the 4k compo after the presentation had some quite ok entries, but no clear favorite. during the music compo on the early evening i was playing a round of 'mensch ärgere dich nicht' at the infodesk. later when returning from the supermarket the wild/animation compo began. aenima are again the clear dominators, but this time not with a classic computer animation. on the evening some students from hannover made a filmed interview with me about the demoscene as a part of their diploma. later the keywords for the surprise handdrawn compo were announced: hippie, giraffe and pain. the 64k compo on the late evening had some pretty good entries, but unik will probably win with 'anruf aus schweden'.

in the wild/alternative platform compo most probably the tum orga crew and smash designs will win with their kickass c64 version of fr08 (invitation to tum 2004). the democompo as last event had some quite good entries and some fun stuff. lkcc made a good invitation for the berlin scene meeting and smash designs for tum 2004. farbrausch contributed with a new minus release (cargo cult). like in the last year you could purchase a release cd after the compos. the pictures from the handdrawn compo will be shown right before the pricegiving. since i have to leave the party before the pricegiving to catch the train the report ends here. evoke 2004 was maybe the best evoke so far, with around 350 paying visitors atleast the biggest (some of them were probably mostly outside the hall)! last years location was more special, but the atmosphere this year was nearly perfect. thanks to the organizers for the great job. some results (received via sms on my trip back home): 4k compo was won by tales, followed by dbcdemo and 0x80. 64k compo was won by unik, followed by cubalid7 and lofi. wild/animation compo was won by aenima. democompo was won by tum orga & smash designs, followed by nuance and tournesol.