The Judges (demogroup)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Judges was a Dutch Commodore 64 group known as one of the earliest dedicated demogroups. The Judges released several demos for the Commodore 64 home computer between the years 1986 - 1988. Groups such as The Judges are regarded as early pioneers of what came to be known as the demoscene.

A technical milestone often attributed to The Judges, particularly the programmer Bart "White" Meeuwissen, is the invention of the FLD (Flexible Line Distance) technique, which was used in the Think Twice series of demos. As the name implies, FLD made it possible to have a variable distance between the individual text or graphics lines generated by the VIC-II video chip. FLD facilitated many new effects used in several games and demos, and it was also used to create new graphics modes with much lesser restrictions in the color placement.

The group's musician Jeroen "Red" Kimmel went on to compose and sell video game music commercially for different platforms such as the C64, Amiga and MSX computers.