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Life & fun · June 17, 2025

IR

I recreated 90s Mode X demoscene effects in JavaScript and Canvas

After 25 years of writing software, I was feeling nostalgic for the kinds of things that got me into programming in the first place: the old DOS demoscene. I spent a weekend seeing if I could recapture some of that INT 13H VGA magic using today's web tech, but with the old-school constraints of doing it from scratch. The result is this portfolio of ten classic effects running in a single HTML file. It's all vanilla JavaScript writing to a element, with no external libraries. It was a fun challenge to implement things like: * The color palette cycling and smooth fading in the Plasma demo. *…

I recreated 90s Mode X demoscene effects in JavaScript and Canvas launched on June 17, 2025 with 189 votes, #174 of 8,000 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.

Visit jdfio.com ↗Alternativestop 2% of June 2025

In plain words

This project recreates ten classic effects from 1990s DOS demoscene graphics using modern web technology. Built with vanilla JavaScript and Canvas in a single HTML file with no external libraries, it demonstrates retro effects like plasma cycles, fire simulation, and tunnel flying. The creator implemented these effects from scratch as a nostalgic weekend project, capturing the visual style and technical constraints of early computer graphics programming without modern frameworks or dependencies.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

After 25 years of writing software, I was feeling nostalgic for the kinds of things that got me into programming in the first place: the old DOS demoscene. I spent a weekend seeing if I could recapture some of that INT 13H VGA magic using today's web tech, but with the old-school constraints of doing it from scratch.…

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