Thank you for inspiration! Besides the PET Robots, some of your PET related videos were the driving factor, for one, the acrylic case one just popped out when I was deciding which platform to pick this time.

So are your works, David

Thanks, man! I believe the work on the Area 5150 had an effect on me, I learned some stuff here and there just by visually analyzing the thing, and it taught me to work on OST of a great length in the fastest pace possible. I had just three days to compose the music from start to finish in this one, and the first two days I didn't even believe I can possibly do it - but knowing that I actually did it with the larger 5150's OST earlier this year helped me a lot to not give up.

@@shiru8bit The whole production has a polish representative of many weeks of work. Excellent job!

There is also bitmap graphics illusions, when in fact the PET uses a text display. (or should I say "Petscii" display)

I knew it could but didn't know anybody would

I recently showcased it on my PET 2001-N and used the Stupid PET Tricks module to get the CB2 sound. I love this demo.

Zgadzam się

Actually I myself got into PET just recently, a couple years back. It is a very rare machine in my country, and Commodore stuff isn't any common here either (maybe a little bit of Amiga). Very interesting piece of computer history.

To be fair, the machine (all pets) did have a pretty large graphics set for its 1977 (pet 2001) release. Wonder if this affected the market since its main competitors (apple ii & trs-80) did not have any graphics.

It works on my PET 2001! Museum-visitors are very happy :) But... is there a possibility to bring this Demo in a permanent loop? Currently it runs once an then stops with the "END" screen... no restart or reset available. I would LOVE to let it run again and again.

Beware, it might be a Vector 06C demo next time!

@@shiru8bit that would be fantastic!

Late October a demo called Transactor has been also released. It uses an absolutely bizzare trick with displaying pixels during horizontal retrace on the PET, which gives more shades of green and creates a scaled/warped backdrop to the main picture. So weird tricks are totally doable in the PET realm. I just had to stick to a more reliable stuff, as current PET emulators aren't that great yet (but getting better).

@@shiru8bit Thanks, found it - that is a very trippy effect indeed, but borders on looking like a malfunctioning CRT. Yours is easier on the eyes (and ears) ;)

Thanks!

Those original 2001-N models (chicklet keyboard) - Chuck himself talks about this, they just made up a meaning, while also playing to the "PET rock" theme popular in the late 1970s. As for the keyboard, they felt only math-folks would be interested in the thing (people who used calculators a lot) so from that perspective, the chicklet made sense (engineers, accountants) as a huge calculator-transaction "thing". Plus, with only 4K RAM (in that first year) you're not doing too much with it anyway. But after 8K upgrades, then useful stuff can start to get done.

@@voidstar1337 Agreed. I think my middle school's computer club had to wait for the 16 or 32K machines before putting together their Star Trek combat simulator.

@@davegreenlaw5654 Yea, a small terminal program might fit in 4K, that's about it. A picture on the 40x25 screen is already taking 1K. It wasn't until after I made DestinyHunter for the PET till I realized why those old games don't have built in instructions -- there just wasn't memory for it, and loading in more content from the tape wasn't reliable. And RAM chips were expensive since finding quality/reliable ones was difficult (between '76 and '79) .

Actually they did it just recently, PET platform finally has been added to the Pouet's platform list.

Is the CB2 sound emulation in the VICE fixed by now? It was horribly filtered out in past versions, up to the point of some frequencies/notes getting muted altogether.

@@shiru8bit It was fixed during vice 3.6 development. It is working great now.

@@FredericBezies thanks for the info, good to know!

Yeah, some unfortunate tearing is left there as a compromise, because it wouldn't run as smooth if the tearing is avoided. And there are places it needs to be optimized a bit more, title screen scroll stutters a bit because of the extra CPU load from the music - had no time to fix it before the party.

@@shiru8bit Cool, I only brought it up because I didn't notice it in this capture but upon rewatching, it's slightly noticeable. Anyway, awesome work, congrats on the great release!

@@8_Bit by some reason, tearing is way less noticeable in MAME, It shows up better in VICE, though.

@@8_Bit Hi Robin, I tried to run this amazing DEMO on a C64 with the PET one line emulator from your episode. I couldn't make it work. Then, Shiru8bit suggested the PET emulator (by İlker Fıçıcılar). I tried it, loads fine, then freezes after the run command.. no joy!. I was hoping you could provide me with any pointers. I am loading following the instructions using "",8,1, etc. Other smaller programs worked fine on the PET emulator. thanks for your help, like your channel! This was requested by some friends from Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Spain that loved this DEMO running on my 8032...thanks! Al.

@@atarimex2643 Unfortunately I don't think this demo can run as is on the PET emulator on the C64. For sure the audio won't work, and probably other parts of the code won't work. The C64 PET emulators unfortunately don't have full compatibility especially with programs that really push the PET this hard.

This platform only features a 40x25 text mode with a fixed character set, and no sound, with 32K RAM. The sound comes from a serial interface and is generated by the serial interface chip (it allows to pick carrier frequencies with a 8-bit programmable divider).

shiru8bit, Interesting technical detail about the sound source. In addition, I've read that the PET's processor has 1 MHz clock.

@@digmsymii321 yep, 1 MHz only, which makes 60 FPS screen updates quite tricky.

The demo is not loopable by design, it unpacks and overwrites its parts as it goes in order to fit 32K, so when it reaches the end, there is no preceding scenes in the RAM. It would take quite some work to make it compatible with the 80 column (40 centered on a 80 screen).

@@shiru8bit ah well, stunning work.

A lot of it is determining what patterns of characters will make a shape. Stuff like that one famous shadow art animation that gets ported everywhere has been done in such a setup. I've even been doing tools of sorts for making very detailed text art.

It is the PET's built-in audio. I'm not really fond of the idea of using extra SID chip on platforms other than C64, to be honest, I find exploring actual possibilities of a target platform to be much more interesting.

Sure, no problem!

@@shiru8bit Thank you.

One of kinda crazy things about this demo is that the music in fact has been composed as MIDI, complete with the chords instead of the chip arps, then it was automatically processed with my tools (PETCB2 VSTi and custom packers) to be used in the actual demo. So here is the source MIDI file, although I'm not sure how useful it can be in this form: shiru.untergrund.net/temp1/petdemo_ost.mid

@@shiru8bit that blows my mind even more. the MIDI does sound a bit weird at times, i assume that's because of some of the effects used in the Demo. either way i wonder what the Staff at Commodore in 1980 would have said had they seen a PET Kitted out to run this demo run it right infront of their eyes. i'm sure if we were able to handle Time travelling postage, someone would try figuring it out.

@@bionicseaserpent yeah, that's always a cool thought. And I actually experienced a glimpse of this myself with my tools and sound software, when people created things I've never ever supposed to be possible. I can imagine it would be an order of magnitude of that to the enginners, to any engineers of old hardware exposed to the finest of the demoscene productions created ever since, to that matter.

@@shiru8bit i imagine it would be Completely mind boggling to them because they would never have seen something as Advanced as this, where as nowadays we can just look at it and go "Wow the PET is able to do all this?" and go back to Raytraced games. as then it would be the best thing that they ever saw a Computer do.