The New Hacker's Dictionary

demo /de'moh/

[short for 'demonstration']

1. v. To demonstrate a product or prototype. A far more effective way of inducing bugs to manifest than any number of test runs, especially when important people are watching.

2. n. The act of demoing. "I've gotta give a demo of the drool-proof interface; how does it work again?"

3. n. esp. as 'demo version', can refer either to an early, barely-functional version of a program which can be used for demonstration purposes as long as the operator uses exactly the right commands and skirts its numerous bugs, deficiencies, and unimplemented portions, or to a special version of a program (frequently with some features crippled) which is distributed at little or no cost to the user for enticement purposes.

4. [demoscene] A sequence of demoeffects (usually) combined with self-composed music and hand-drawn ("pixelated") graphics. These days (1997) usually built to attend a compo. Often called 'eurodemos' outside Europe, as most of the demoscene activity seems to have gathered in northern Europe and especially Scandinavia. See also intro, dentro.

demo mode // n.

1. [Sun] The state of being heads down in order to finish code in time for a demo, usually due yesterday.

2. A mode in which video games sit by themselves running through a portion of the game, also known as 'attract mode'. Some serious apps have a demo mode they use as a screen saver, or may go through a demo mode on startup (for example, the Microsoft Windows opening screen -- which lets you impress your neighbors without actually having to put up with Microsloth Windows).

demoeffect // n.

[demoscene] What among hackers is called a display hack. Classical effects include "plasma" (colorful mess), "keftales" (x*x+y*y and other similar patterns, usually combined with color-cycling), realtime fractals, realtime 3d graphics, etc. Historically, demo effects have cheated as much as possible to gain more speed and more complexity, using low-precision math and masses of assembler code and building animation realtime are three common tricks, but use of special hardware to fake effects is a Good Thing on the demoscene (though this is becoming less common as platforms like the Amiga fade away).