Someone just asked me "Why do people participate in the #demoscene? Why should I?"
I don't consider myself particularly qualified to answer (there are demosceners who have written masters' theses on the subject, and even one PhD) but I gave some advice, which I'll summarize here: Some demo competitions have money prizes, but that's not why people compete. They used to do it for bragging rights, but these days it can be for the thrill of having fun making something creative, and sharing it with the community.

I was asked to explain what color and palette remapping capabilities EGA had and thought I would make a thread about it. EGA isn't well-understood these days because of VGA's success, but it's worth going over for people wondering why you can't set custom colors in all EGA modes. EGA was introduced in 1984 with (limited) compatibility with existing IBM CGA monitors: 200-line graphics modes (320x200, 640x200) could use any of the existing 16 text colors per pixel. Only the high-res 640x350 mode could pick additional colors from a fixed palette of 64.