Hornet Archive MindCandy Vol. 3 MindCandy Vol. 2 MindCandy Vol. 1 Music Contest 5 Music Contest 6 Hornet MODS vol. 1 Scene.org Pouet
The Hornet Archive
Digital art, rendered in realtime, from the dawn of the PC era.
18,627 demos, songs, graphics, and code from CE 1987-1998.
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Browse:

/code     web ftp scene.org
/demos    web ftp scene.org
/graphics web ftp scene.org
/info     web ftp scene.org
/mags     web ftp scene.org
/music    web ftp scene.org
/party    web ftp scene.org
/tla      web ftp          
(The Lost Archives)


News
October 23, 2020

We just re-published The Lost Archives, a collection of 143 music disks and 2236 songs that had been removed from the archive years ago due to insufficient storage. You can view the file manifest or browse the files directly.

March 25, 2016

8088 MPH by Hornet, CRTC, and Desire wins a Meteoriks award. Great work Phoenix and Trixter!

December 7, 2014

Added YouTube cross-link ability, so embedded videos will now show up in search results. Still need to populate the catalog more. Jeremy Williams joins Hornet.

November 30, 2014

Added additional information about the Hornet Wikipedia page (original wiki markup and some extra notes), as well as the 'Demographics: Behind the Scene HD' featurette to the homepage.

November 29, 2014

The archive is now being fully self-hosted again. A most hearty thank you to Bryan Abshier for hosting the archive on his server for many years.

We now have SSL enabled by default so the NSA won't store your S3M music module preferences in their database. :)

General refresh of the site. Thanks for the feedback and input from the old crew.

November 26, 2014

Removed /code/images/ldpcxtga.zip (PCX and TGA image conversion) by author's request.

November 22, 2014

Confirmed both the SceneSP and Madtracker mirrors are no longer in service. Thanks to their admins for hosting and sorry to see them go.

June 24, 2014

We continue to try to revive the Hornet Archive Wikipedia page. Let's give a shout out to Josh Kellermeier for trying once again to appeal to the admins for reinstatement. Please contact us if you'd like to help with the effort.

December 21, 2010

The Wikipedia article about this archive is being recovered. It'll take some time to get it back up to snuff. Feel free to help out: Wikipedia Hornet Archive Recovery.

The SceneSP mirror at ftp.scenesp.org seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Anyone know what happened to it? We've disabled links to that site until it is restored (or maybe it is gone for good?).

December 14, 2010

The Wikipedia article describing this archive has been deleted by their admins, because all the info in it was "without a single reference to an independent source." We'll do what I can to get it back. Any Wikipedia experts / sceners wanna help lend a hand getting this important article out of "deletion review" status?

June 19, 2008

After a couple year outage, the Hornet Archive is back up at its original location, hornet.org. The official hosting site for this archive is still at hornet.scene.org, but we may put some updated content here.

Thanks to Brett Neely (GD) for hosting a demoparty in the SF Bay Area this past weekend.

Mind Candy Volume 2 was released last year.

September 4, 2006

Finally got the website back up. Mind Candy 2 (MC2) very close now.

May 5, 2004

The following two songs were found to be corrupt, and removed from the archive:

  • /music/songs/1998/z/zai-phar.zip (Pharao's Theme by Zaigamor of Breakthrough)
  • /music/songs/1998/z/zai-swmp.zip (The Swamp by Zaigamor of Breakthrough)

February 15, 2004

Reverified archive mirrors:

  • BE - Yannick Delwiche's MadTracker ftp site. Now has a complete copy of content. Syncing updates nightly.
  • ES - SceneSP. Has an outdated copy of content, and I don't have any contact info for the maintainers.
  • NL - scene.org. Has a complete copy of content, and is being sync updated nightly.

January 22, 2004

A fixed version of /music/songs/1996/k/k_lead.zip has been found, and the file has been readded to the archive.

January 3, 2004
  • /demos/1993/t/tzpython.zip (Monty Python by Twilight Zone), updated party info, reflecting #1 demo at The Gathering 1993.
  • /demos/1993/j/jungly.zip (Jungly Kitchen by Twilight Zone), updated party info, reflecting exhibition demo at The Party 1992.
December 31, 2003
  • /music/songs/1996/k/k_lead.zip (Leadership by Astrid, .IT) was corrupt, and has been removed.
  • /code/library/multikit.zip (Multimedia Library for xmode ops on GUS) was found by McAfee to have a virus, and was disinfected.
  • Note: many directories have a web page index that is leftover from the old days. If you come across one of these pages, don't be surprised of many of the links are broken. I'm keeping those pages around for reference and historical purposes, but they aren't being updated. These pages aren't linked from this main page -- you'd have to go hunting to find them -- but I think some search engines still have links to them.
July 6, 2003

45 songs added from Mekka/Symposium 1997. /music/uncatalogged is no more.

July 4, 2003

16 new /graphics/images have been added to the archive. In a routine check of files in the database vs. files on disk, a few missing entries turned up. Most were from the Kernel 1997 graphics compo. These files were uploaded 6 years ago, but never got cataloged properly. Well, now they are.

Additional files cataloged: 20 songs from Takeover 1998, 33 songs from The Gathering 1998, 1 song from MOV97, and 34 songs from Remedy 1998.

May 13, 2003

Major site revamp. You can now limit general searches to a single subdirectory. The Suggestions feature has been added to highlight some of the best productions. Browse ability lets you inspect individual directories via FTP (see the 00_index.txt file in each dir). Some of the site links have been replaced with graphical buttons. Search output has been reformatted for better readability. Mind Candy Volume 2 is on the way, and there are even rumors of a Music Contest 7 in the works.

April 20, 2003

It's official. scene.org will be hosting hornet.org. All web and ftp content has been migrated over. Just waiting for DNS to kick in.

April 7, 2003

The archive has been saved! I've found places to host files and content, following the Apr 26 relocation.

April 4, 2003

This archive (web site and file server) will be going down before April 26th, 2003. Over the past year, I've been paying to host this machine out of my apartment. I'm moving, and hosting will not be possible in the new place. I want to keep this archive online, but don't know yet how it can be done. Stay tuned.

About

This archive hosts productions from the PC Demoscene released from 1987 to 1998. Musicians, graphics artists, and coders all uploaded their creations to the /incoming directory on our ftp site hosted by Walnut Creek CDROM. Our team of dozens of reviewers rated and catalogged these productions.

We released news and reviews in our weekly newsletter DemoNews. In total there were 150 episodes. Check out our final issue, DemoNews 150, a more representative issue like DemoNews 147 including file uploads, our futuristic spoof issue DemoNews #314, and Hugi's review DemoNews.314 - What is true?

We hosted 6 international Music Contests; the most recent still have their original contest pages online: MC5 and MC6. We also released many albums, CDROMs, DVDs, and Blu-ray disks: Escape (1994), Freedom (1995), Hornet Underground vol. 1 (1996), Hornet Underground vol. 2 (1997), Hornet MODs vol. 1 (1997), Hornet MODs vol. 2 (1997), MindCandy vol. 1 (2002), MindCandy vol. 2 (2006), and MindCandy vol. 3 (2011).

We hope you find something entertaining here at the archive.

New to Demos?

Try watching our documentary Demographics: Behind the Scene HD, a classic demo such as Second Reality by Future Crew (1993), a modern demo such as Masagin by Farbrausch & Neuro (2008), or even a demo we made with OTM Explicit which placed 3rd in the NAID 1996 democompo.

History

Arguably one of the best writeups about the archive was on Wikipedia. However that page was deleted in 2010 due to a lack of documented sources verifying the archive existed. We have been trying since then unsuccessfully to reinstate the page. If you have energy or inclination please help us restore the Hornet Archive Wikipedia page by throwing in your support in the comments section.. Here are additional links to the original wiki markup and some supplemental notes which may help.

The Hornet Archive was opened on Sep 4, 1992. It ran continuously for the next 6 years, and 16,234 files were catalogged (7.1 gigs in total). On Sep 22, 1998 the archive closed, and for the next several years was idle.

Several years later Jim decided to put together MindCandy, a collection of demos on DVD. On Feb 17, 2002 the archive was partially restored, and a new search engine was created. Thanks to scene.org for hosting and mirroring our site in the long years since the archive closed in 1998.

We also would like to thank Bryan Abshier for hosting the website for about a decade, ending 2014. Currently the website and main ftp site are hosted with Digital Ocean, and scene.org continues to mirror the files and make them available via ftp.

Hornet includes Jim 'Trixter' Leonard, Pim 'Stony' van Mun, Brett 'GD' Neely, George 'Snowman / r3cgm' Mann, Andy 'Phoenix' Voss, Jeremy 'Jer' Williams, Dan Wright, and several other alumni and friends of the family.