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New Horizons: Otomata Labs Win Deadline 2026 With a Demo for a 1982-Era Japanese PC

Deadline (Berlin) 2026 went to Otomata Labs: New Horizons won the Oldschool Demo compo with 469 points, 1st of 20 entries, and became the most-thumbed release of the whole party (58 up, 0 down). The catch: it runs on an NEC PC-9801 - a Japanese business platform from 1982 - and its source code is public.

Deadline (Berlin) 2026 wrapped on 4 October with one of the strongest oldschool line-ups of the year, and the trophy in the Oldschool Demo competition went to hardware almost nobody writes demos for any more: the NEC PC-9801.

New Horizons by Otomata Labs took first place with 469 points, ahead of Subway Arts by 99.9% (403) and Bytes of the Art by Desire (359), in a field of twenty entries. It is also the most-thumbed release of the entire party: 58 thumbs up, zero down, 60% popularity on pouet.net, and currently the group's best-placed production in the all-time chart.

THE RELEASE

  • Production: New Horizons
  • Group: Otomata Labs
  • Platform: MS-DOS on the NEC PC-9800 series (PC-9801 and compatibles)
  • Type: demo, oldschool demo competition
  • Party: Deadline (Berlin) 2026, ORWOhaus, Berlin, 2-4 October 2026
  • Released: 3 October 2026
  • Result: 1st place, 469 points

WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS

The PC-9800 series is the Japanese business platform whose first model shipped in 1982 - years before VGA existed, and with a video and sound architecture that has nothing in common with the Western PC clone the demoscene grew up on. That is exactly why a PC-98 demo is an event: the tooling, the documentation and most of the tricks simply do not exist in English-language scene lore. As one pouet.net commenter put it: "It's not everyday that you see a PC-98 demo. Amazing work from the mad scientists once again!"

The party version was captured from the VGA output of an Epson PC-486GR+ running a 25 MHz i486SX - modest hardware even by 1990s standards, and far below what the demo's animation and its long 3D city sequence would suggest. The art direction leans heavily into the aesthetic of Japanese PC anime and visual novels: an opening animation, a transition that cuts straight through the screen, then a slow ground-level reveal of a city whose scale the viewer cannot guess until the camera pulls back. Reviewers on pouet.net called it "beautifully liminal", "pretty chilling" and "very artistic" - with one recurring criticism: the ending shows too much of the city at once and weakens the reveal that came just before it.

WHAT MAKES IT STAND OUT

Otomata Labs built New Horizons with an entirely modern toolchain - CMake, NASM, Ninja, OpenWatcom 2.0 and Python, with the audio pipeline running through VGM tooling and the group's own register-dump compressor for the OPN sound chips. The source code is published in the group's public repository, which makes this one of the very few PC-98 demos anyone can actually read and rebuild. The credits are a full-team effort: code by Natt, AArt1256 and wbcbz7, graphics by Grongy, nIkO, PacorexTheTrex and Rairii (ASCII art), music by Abstract64 and Chiyoko, plus Spaztron64 on the opening animation and hardware testing.

There is a track record behind it too: Otomata Labs already took first place in the oldschool demo competition at Revision 2026 with Triplet for the Atari 2600, and their catalogue runs across the ZX Spectrum, Game Boy Advance, TIC-80 and Electronika BK. New Horizons is the group doing what it does best - picking the platform everyone else has written off and proving it can still hold a screen.

WHY IT MATTERS FOR THE SCENE

The 2026 oldschool demo compos have turned into the most interesting corner of the demoscene: C64, Amiga, MS-DOS, Atari and now PC-98 entries competing in the same ranking, judged on the same night. A demo like New Horizons is the argument for that openness. It is not a nostalgia piece - it is a new production for a 44-year-old machine, built with 2026 tools, released with its source, and it beat everything else in its compo. As the verdict in the pouet.net release thread reads: "Well deserved winner of the compo. Enjoyed this a lot."

WATCH AND DOWNLOAD

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