Databases are not sentimental. The entry for the Italian Bad Boys on Demozoo carries one line of plain prose under the roster, and until this summer it was the last word on them: having not made releases since 1995, the group is considered disbanded. Around it sits the evidence, some hundred and fifteen productions between 1987 and 1995, mostly Amiga, the usual Italian mix of demos, intros, cracktros and diskmags from the decade when a 500 under the desk and a modem on top of it was how a teenager got onto a network.
In the week after midsummer somebody added a new row to that page. Windows, demo, June 2026, first place.
Watch it first: Roma Splat on YouTube, or fetch the real thing from scene.org and let it run on your own processor, which turns out to be the point.
One name in every field
The credits take one line. G-Lock: code, graphics, music. That is the entire team, and Demozoo and Pouet agree on it.
His other entry on Demozoo is worth looking up, because there is only one. Slow, May 1995, MS-DOS, code. Thirty-one years lie between the two rows, and the second one came with the group's name on it, which is the detail I keep returning to. He did not release this under a new handle or as an unaffiliated coder. He put IBB back on the screen.
What appears on that screen, by the way, is a greetings section. In 2026, in a production that won a competition, somebody still took the trouble to scroll a list of names past the viewer in vector lettering, and labelled it VECTOR GREETINGS. The scene remembers its manners.
The constraint is the graphics card
Every Bytes of Art piece has a restriction at its centre, usually counted in bytes. This one is counted differently. The demo renders on the processor.
G-Lock put it in a single sentence under the video, and it is the only thing he has said publicly about how the demo works: this demo uses less common forms of rendering and does it on the CPU, which IMO is much more fun than using GPUs these days. Demozoo files it under the tag software-rendering, which in a database stuffed with shader work is a rare enough label that you can browse the whole of it in three pages.
Consider what is being declined there. A modern graphics card exists to do exactly this, in parallel, at a scale no processor can approach, and every tool in the pipeline assumes you want it. Writing a renderer that runs on the CPU in 2026 means giving up the hardware that the last twenty years of graphics research were built around, and then finding out what is still possible without it.
Which algorithm he chose, I cannot tell you. There is no source release, the repository named in the build manifest is not public, and that one sentence is the whole of the public record. Guessing the rest from the footage would be me inventing it. What can be said is that the file is 1.1 megabytes, that it runs as a single executable with a small pack of assets beside it, and that the thing deciding how it looks is the same chip that is reading this sentence to you.
There is a joke buried in the binary, and I think it is deliberate. Among the title cards sits the line NO SPLATS JUST LINES. The demo is called Roma Splat.
The first new party in Italy for twenty years
ROMA.EXE ran on the twentieth and twenty-first of June 2026 at the Fusolab 2.0 on Viale della Bella Villa in Rome, organised by Tristar and Red Sector, Inc. It was the first edition, and the organisers describe it in a sentence worth quoting in full: the first ever edition of ROMA.EXE, and the first new demoparty in Italy in two decades.
Two decades. Italy had scene people the entire time, as the Italian Bad Boys page and a few hundred others demonstrate, and what it did not have was a room to put them in. The first attempt at fixing that drew over two hundred attendees and ninety-seven entries across two days, with seventeen in the pixel graphics competition, fifteen tracked tunes, nine games, and the eight-and-seven split between newschool and oldschool 256-byte intros that tells you the hardcore turned up as well. There were seminars on Deluxe Paint, on the Commodore 65, and on the history of Italian game development.
The competition
Four demos went up on the big screen on the Saturday night, and the hall voted.
Twenty-six points between first and second, with a Finnish production in the field. For a man whose previous release ran under MS-DOS, winning the demo competition at the party that brought demoparties back to his country is the kind of symmetry nobody could have arranged on purpose.
What it costs to come back
The arithmetic of a thirty-one year gap is not kind. Everything he knew in 1995 about getting pixels onto a screen is now a historical curiosity: the hardware, the operating system, the tooling, the file formats, the people he would have asked. A coder returning after that long is not resuming anything. He is starting over, with the single advantage of knowing that it can be done, because he did it once.
And he came back to write a software renderer, of all things, at the exact moment in computing history when nobody has to. That is the part I would put in front of anyone who thinks the scene is a nostalgia society. Nostalgia would have meant an Amiga production, or a DOS executable, or a careful reconstruction of 1995. What he actually did was take the oldest constraint in real-time graphics, no help from the hardware, and apply it to a machine from 2026 to see what came out.
The group page now reads a little differently. The line about being disbanded is still there, because it is still true of the roster from 1989, and underneath it sits one row from June 2026 with a first place against it. Somebody will have to update that paragraph eventually.