OSCILIFE // VX-99

Life began as a signal.

A green dot sits on the graticule of an oscilloscope. It starts to move. The trace draws a mountain range, then an ocean, then a single cell floating in it. From there the camera drifts along the axis of time: fish, a creature crawling onto land, dinosaurs, birds, apes. It stops at a cave. A fire is lit, and the music turns to a major key. Pyramids rise, then temples, houses, towers and radio masts, until a rocket counts down and leaves the pad.

Then the camera pulls back, and you see that all of it was playing on the screen of a VX-99 scope. The rocket hits the glass from the inside and breaks out into real space.

That is the whole of OSCILIFE, about two minutes from first dot to last shard, and it is the kind of ending a demo hall remembers.

The setup screen

Before the show starts, a period setup screen asks how it should be run, and the answers change what you see.

Video mode: from 320×240 Mode X up to 800×600.
Renderer: a software renderer for a Pentium MMX, with hard pixels and a scope screen that wobbles at an angle, or 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 SLI modes with filtering, fog and glowing lines.
Sound device: Gravis UltraSound, with echo on the lead and pads, or a drier Sound Blaster 16.
Phosphor persistence, which leaves soft trails behind the beam, as on a real tube.

The soundtrack is four voices plus echo, synthesized live with no samples, credited in the .nfo to a musician called Fjordbass.

FIELD TEST. Run it once in software mode at 320×240, then again on Voodoo2 SLI at 800×600 with phosphor persistence on. Same demo, two different machines.

Four seconds at Polarlys

The release notes credit Kathode, a three-person group from Bergen: Hexe on code, Lysbue on graphics, Fjordbass on music. According to the bundled README, the demo was entered in the PC demo compo of Polarlys Party 4 in Tromsø in February 1998, and the compo machine had a single Voodoo Graphics card. OSCILIFE froze four seconds in, still looping the first bar of its music. It froze again on the restart and was disqualified.

The .nfo on the disk answers it in two lines: if it freezes after four seconds on voodoo 1, we know. we will fix it for the next party. The group never released a final version. The surviving copy reportedly comes from a Zip disk labelled KTH / OSC / FINAL?? / DONT FORMAT, found at a Bergen estate sale in 2025. In this copy, the Voodoo Graphics mode runs to the end.