During this year’s CoSin, about 20 people have put their heads together to discuss and design rules for a new compo at MountainBytes in 2027: the No-Screen Realtime Compo!
What on Earth is a No-Screen Realtime Compo, you ask?
Switzerland is a stronghold for hardware tinkering, with a lot of open hardware enthusiasts and mechatronic artists, with us ourselves spending a lot of time in local hacker and makerspaces as well.
So we would like to give this community its own demo compo, where the actual hardware takes centre stage and can astound people!
This is still a work-in-progress, but we wanted to share the outcomes, thoughts and notes early with you, so you can still give input and start thinking about your very own release!
Writing compo rules together with our community is an experiment in order to hopefully get you excited and reflect what you all would find a worthy compo, too.
Do you have input or further ideas? Get in touch via info (at) mountainbytes (dot) ch until around November(ish), when we finalise our compo rules for MountainBytes 2027!
Preliminary Compo Rules – No-Screen Realtime Compo
- The entry must not run on a commercially-assembled, ready-to-use machine with a screen, dot-matrix display or 2D LED panel.
- The entry must run in realtime and be self-contained (no remote-control), and can be powered by electricity, water/hydraulics, muscle, wind or any other force that can be provided on site
- Only a single input of the force mentioned above is allowed during the presentation
- If no executable can be provided, the entry submission must contain documentation for reproduction, such as design files, blueprints, write-ups or other documentation
- You may provide audio (that you hold the rights of using in your entry), otherwise we will play what the organisers select for compo presentations
- Maximum length of presentation: 5 minutes
- To be presented at the party, the entry should fit on a usual office desk (120x60cm area) and be light enough to not break the desk.
- In case of large-scale or otherwise immobile constructs or remote entries, please contact the compo orga in advance to check if pre-recording by yourself is okay. We may require additional information and documentation to ensure your work is legit.
Other ideas and comments:
- Maximum voltage requirement, similar to size-coding? (—> Let’s fill a compo first, and become more granular later in case of success)
- We’ll need a good deadline, as this compo will require pre-recording to be actually entertaining and enjoyable to the audience (and not a nightmare to the compo orga)
- Give other limitations, like maximum frequency, price-tag?
- Do we want to limit the number of selectable light sources? (to stop people from just creating their own screens. Also: derailed into a bit of a longer discussion how e.g. TFT monitors etc are technically a single light source. Hackers. Yay.)
(—> Let’s not set too many rules, as this might restrict entries from participating that we can’t even dream of yet. Creatively breaking rules has always been at the heart of the demoscene, and we can always make them more narrow in the future: Compo Rules are written in the tears of “unfair” second places from the year before.) - Does this allow for Osci-entries? (—> the room screams YES.)