I was going to say this. When the machine is practically unlimited, you impose limits and that's where the challenge is and what makes it impressive. The 4k (size), 64k and other small demos on modern pcs are a good example.

I only knew about the modern demo scene. This video introduced me to the retro one.

And that ties right back into what demos were about in the 80's/90's: making the best piece of code possible with tight restrictions.

I have viewed videos about this a while ago. People trying to pack whole games with a full level of texturing into something under 100K. And personally I love this. I am also a fan of proper compression, being a digital multimedia artist. And it highly annoys me in the modern gaming world. How developers simply don't care anymore to properly compress and clean up their games. NOT being a developer, I certainly don't have business insight, but I doubt to believe that it's necessary to have a normal modern game be 100GB big and receive another 50-100GB day-1-patch. 1TB of space in modern consoles sounds much, but when you have a couple AAA-games at 100GB average size, you ain't gonna store very many of them.

@JOAO DAVI SANTANA DE CASTRO Real-time raytracing has been demoscene fare since the mid-1990s. My go-to example being Transgression 2 by MFX from 1996. Video recording of it: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/h7Sih5V-uKnPqoU.html Other examples: Heaven 7 by Exceed (2000): kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qLSho6dkss2dmI0.html 5 Faces by Fairlight and Cloudkicker (2013): kzfaq.info/get/bejne/n56Yhr14ub64qGw.html Now, using what's conventionally considered "high quality models and textures" probably _is_ harder, but raytracing is old hat.

Thank you. having good audio is #1 priority for recording a speech for me. If I don't have that, I don't even bother trying to do anything with the rest of the material.

@@The8BitGuy it was like you recorded it in a recording booth, good job

@@The8BitGuy Hello again David. I just loved this video on the Demo Scene, I was 8yrs old when I wrote my first "Hello world!" in BASIC in 1991. What a brilliant way to remember how the experience of that time was. I was a little late but I stayed past the end to make up for it! Gold medal video, though I know KZfaq awarded one to you already :) Thank you so much

Sounds great for being recorded by an 8-bit guy. 😂 Just kidding. Great video! I love videos like this. I used to love watching tech demos on my PC in the 90s and early 2000s. I got into the MOD music scene for a while as well and always found it amazing what people could do with such a small amount of resources.

@@The8BitGuy And the fact that the video is captioned is a huge plus for those that don’t hear well (and are also dependent on lip reading).

Good music video too.

2 big hits in one as I recall.

excellent demo from back in the day.. i still have quite a few digitized things like this on c64 floppies

I had the same demo on my ZX Spectrum. These days there are color mods available it doesn't even look like ZX.

Takes me back to my bbs days.

_“So many KZfaq videos have cuts after every sentence”_ I am so sick of that annoying shit. Their voice is just a wall of words for the entire video. I downvote and shut it off.

Oh yes, a lot calmer to watch

@@Prizm44 You know downvoting still counts as engagement, yes? The KZfaq Algorithm dgaf if you hit thumbs up or thumbs down - just that you interacted at all is good enough for them! Best way to 'punish' craptastic videos is...to do nothing, just exiting the video. But you can voice your displeasure by downvoting, just with the awareness it still benefits the video/creator. 🙂

David's puts alot of thought into his presentations probably days or even weeks of preparation. He has been doing this kind of work for so long that He is now a pro at getting the info you want to see with as little fluff as possible. If you watch his old Apple Mac vids, you will see how far He has developed over the years.

@@brendaleelydon True, if a KZfaqr is not going to liston to criticism then yes there not going to get that much succes unless they are one of a limeted number of people making that sort if content. David was one of the first channels to really focus down on just one topic which is 8bit systems. His content serves three main audience 1 people betwean 30 to 40 who lived in the 80s and are looking for that nostalgia, 2 Other Geeks of 80s tech, 3 People who where never into 8bit systems but find it interesting to understand how old tech works and what today's advancements came from. Not only is David's content hitting 3 targets He has a great personality and is very good teacher.

I've tried to explain why demos like 8088mph for the ibm pc are so impressive, but it's hard to understand unless you know why displaying 1024 colors on that machine is impressive. Even some of my programmer friends don't quite get it at first because it's so trivial on modern computers that we don't even think about it.

I enjoy seeing programmers making hardware do more than it should. A friend that has since died could make the C64 do stuff it shouldn’t...

Same here, demos on 386/VGA level PCs never got me interested in the same way the C64 and A500 ones did. They were pretty, but I couldn't tell which ones were doing the really clever stuff.

i'm always amazed at programmers' skill to break mechanics into discreet parts, then manipulate them toward new ideas.

You should revisit the Amiga scene and watch what impossible things coders do on the 16bit and 32bit Amiga systems. If you like games, you can also check out the ongoing project Dread for the Amiga and Atari 16 bit systems. :)

Bragging rights is all that matters among peers. 👍

Indeed! The social aspect of the scene is as important as the products itself. At least here in Europe.

That sounds awesome

Fun fact: in Europe (or at least Germany); demoscene is literally recognized by the government as intangible cultural heritage.

@@SuperSmashDolls According to Wikipedia it's added in the UNESCO list in Germany and Finland.

Where is that?

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/pbhdaaWa3Lq-iGQ.html

I think that was true in the days of closed architecture computers, when expansion/accelerator were very limited and ultra expensive. Nowadays with the PC, it is only a matter of more CPU core and/or MHz and a faster and more capable GPU. :-/

@@Zebpro Well not really, it still costs money to get a good computer now, just there is so much variety of hardware but it is all still so similar that relatively no one is interested in getting into the details of what this hardware can do, especially not software that wants to be compatible with everything which will just use APIs.

@@bangerbangerbro Yeah, but closed architecture means limits, and after that is just a matter of design and presentation. With modern PC, the limit is gone unless there is some "universal spec" to compete on. :-]

i agree.

I always felt that it pushed the computer past what it could do. Obviously, not really, but also the file size then. Holy crap, I'm still blown away in 2021 and go look for ones I remember and other ones related. Good stuff!!! ☺️

As a young programmer who doesn't fully understand all the code I'm building on top of, this is very encouraging.

@@sonictimm No one understands how computers work. Also they would all stop working if StackOverflow went down.

@@sonictimm Keep working on it. Learn the retro coding can help you understand optimizations, although with modern hardware and multi-tasking operating systems, it's definitely not the same as it was. I work with .NET code and data files in software that are 100-200MB CSV text import files and sometimes just unrolling a loop can increase performance (instead of say looping field to field, you unroll the loop into the 15 data fields), but the same could be said for converting the code into a parallel processing loop, breaking the file down into one line per thread, making it 8-16 times faster alone on a 4 or 8 core system. But the same could be said for converting that processing loop into C or assembly language from .NET and calling a DLL to process it onto 8 cores. But that said, the entire file already processes in seconds on a single thread, so what 4 seconds turns into 1 second? Then you take this super optimized code and fire it off to a SQL database that does whatever it wants and has its own set of table and procedure optimizations as well and that procedure of putting the records in takes 10 minutes and you're a slave to the optimizations of the database vendor. Back in the day you just didn't have the memory to pull it off. Sorting or processing a 100MB file wouldn't be "Read All Lines into a List" as a single statement, but rather opening a file stream, reading characters until you hit a comma, put that into the struct field, read until you get to the CR/LF, then create another struct. Sorting massive files was yet another huge process, often times we went away from sorting the files and created Indexes instead, so you would just sort the file into an index, and just read it back using the index in order then write it back to disk, especially in the big-drive-low RAM era of the MSDOS PC - 640k of RAM but 10 GB hard drives. Definitely learn to optimize code, someday you might be working on the next big game engine and your peers straight out of school might not have learned old-school optimizations and you might end up being the guy to get 15% extra performance out of it on the same system because you did some optimizations. And just because code is high level doesn't mean you can't optimize either - if you can shift your floats into big integers (CAVEAT: and you don't need the precision) you could easy get a lot more performance just because you're saving underlying clock cycles and logic.

Boulder Dash has been written by Peter Liepa & Zoltan Scserbin. I assume you aren't both persons?

Rút kiskacsa! :)

MC/EDC it's now time for you to fEcking come back to the scene! :D

Ligma Balls?

That's really cool. I recently dug out my late grandpa's C16, on which he taught me my first steps in programming. I wanna refurbish it properly. Unfortunately it doesn't have its original case - he moved it to a C64 case for some reason.

Yes, and c64 demoscene is again bigger and bigger , too :)

It saddens me to see how near-nonexistent the 3DS demoscene is. Aside from VR, the utter flop that was 3DTV, and the migrane-enducing Virtual Boy, where else would you find stereoscopic 3D? And given that boot9strap exists, you could go nuts with the bare metal of the thing.

@@KopperNeoman Give it a few years.

They're still alive for the old machines too

@@KopperNeoman What scares me is the idea of a Virtual Boy demo scene 😂

Furst coment!

Hello Retrobits, from Morebits :D

Many of us loved the demo scene back in the day but had zero possibilities of ever becoming part of them. There was NO information available at the time, you did not know who to contact.. Those who could afford calling BBS or happened to live close enough to one that you could use local calls were super privileged. I learned assembly from C64 user manual, had zero help and was stuck in the end because all kind of tricks how to manage more complex code was just impossible. Even a few pointers would've helped but it was solitary job back then unless you were really lucky. Learning assembly is never too late, it gives a whole new understanding how to code with higher level languages.

ARM assembly language is confusing as heck.

imo if one is actually inspired by some creative effort it'll get done no matter the limitations in time, tools, experience etc. it might not live up to the vision exactly but it'll happen. also if they're inspired to learn something challenging it'll likely happen over time but neither is causally linked, just learning some fancy programming won't guarantee any particular output. as younger person I found after some years of frustration that I don't enjoy the creative process, only discovery and challenge of learning. maybe one day I'll create something but I'm no longer holding myself hostage to it.

That's exactly what make demos a bit pointless on modern hardware, there's no point when you can do anything you can think of

Have you seen the C64 de-make of Second Reality? It's _really_ impressive.

@@darkowl9 I’ve seen it but only as a KZfaq video, not on the C64 itself. It was impressive though even as a video to watch. On my PC, I think that I had an AMD 386/40Mhz at the time when I saw it for the first time (1993) and I really couldn’t believe my eyes, compared to the graphics and animations speed of the best games that I’ve seen until then. Obviously a demo can be much faster than a game because it doesn’t need to calculate any game logic in the background along with the graphics that it’s displaying, but still they’re so impressive because they make every CPU clock count.

I remember that one, I watched it again and again. And I still remember, that I was fascinated by how the Spaceship at the beginning sounds like it is really flying over you from behind to the front with only stereo speakers.

do you have a link to the full demo ? nvm i found it kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bdRiZ8qfyraUgps.html thanks for your hint

@@shockwaverc1369 Here's the link to just this demo itself: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bdRiZ8qfyraUgps.html

Legend

What the heck!? All I hear about is C19 and doom and gloom. When something as important as Clive's passing occurs, Nothing. Nada. Zip. The MSM need to get their priorities straight! RIP

Check out “the Spirited Man” or Van Neistat if you haven’t heard of him. A lot of his channel is all about that principle in general life. Really shows you how computers and their progression mirrors us.

Hello, neighbor! I'm in the St. Louis metro area myself.

Lots of assemblers offer this feature. It's just called in-line macros.

In Europe it's a pretty big underground movement. So you've got a lot to catch up on :)

They're not _actually_ new?

What's the GBA?

I've always loved the GBA, I didn't know there were demos for it!

Well also on PC, specially GPU architectures have these scenes. Some made just as in the case of commodore by the companies themselves to sell certain features, example NVidia with RTX raytracing, some incorporated into benchmarking software, but also completely independent groups either for fun, skill, competition etc.

@@evanbarnes9984 the gameboy advance

everything from guys with ponytails to guys who exclusively wear cargo shorts

Michelle Rodriguez just visited Norway and told us to stay home, because its crazy out there :-P

Friends: Anders, why didn't you come to the convention? Anders: Because there was Norway I could join you. ...I'll see myself out now.

It's a shame that you didn't. That would have been epic!

@@AFFL1CTED1 😂😂😂 But in all seriousness: There’s so much time spent regarding Covid tests and all that now, it really puts me off even getting near any airport. Plus ticket prices have gone way up… :/

@@AndersEngerJensen so true! I think a lot of people share the same sentiment as I work in aerospace and it has significantly affected business. You're not alone. Let's just hope that we return to some type of normalcy sooner rather than later. We want to see you at said conventions! Btw, thank you for all the great music all these years! Your music, for the most part, has this really happy, endearing mood to it. It evokes the feeling I used to get as a child when sitting down on a Friday evening to watch my favorite television shows, knowing that I had the whole weekend ahead to play NES and not have to worry about school... I don't know, maybe that sounds kind of silly, but anyway, that's kinda how it makes me feel. Keep up the good work, sir!

Good point. He could certainly answer many of them if they weren't Commodore related.

Do you have video of it?

@@kolkoki somewhere on my hard drive yes, and I posted it ages ago on twitter. Once I'm out of work I'll record some new ones, then post a short demonstration to KZfaq. It even has a GUI subsystem that was influenced by old systems.

Nowadays you aren't focusing the demos to look like real life, because it was reached years ago

Enigma was a milestone. It's heavily driven by the excellent music. The effects were cool and their presentation really nicely tuned to the music.

all people need to do is put: Demoscene into the search box. Loads of it out there. It's not about stretching the hardware anymore, but modern PC's are so powerful, there are some great demo's out there. Best enjoyed late at night, with lights off, and favourite beverage

Yeah, but it was a good question, really. I was surprised myself to find out that the venerable Atari 2600 console (from 1977) not only had basically the same CPU as the C64, but it was clocked faster! It was all those extra chips that made the C64, but it came with the challenge of keeping it all in sync.

On the C64 you do it by switching from 25 to 24 character row mode just before the VIC is about to begin drawing the bottom border. It is then fooled to think it has already done it. Same goes for the vertical borders. Switching from 40 to 38 columns does the same trick. This has to be done with pretty careful timing on each raster line though, so it is way more cpu intensive, and therefore not as common.

@@Farull Oooohhhh! I was wondering how they did that. Is that what they did in some of the cracktros? Some have side scrolling, sometimes even bouncing and flashing text that comes from and goes into the side borders.

@@stylis666 Yes. The limitation is that you only can display sprites in the borders, so if you want something that looks like characters you have to simulate that with sprites.

and it caused havoc with the memory bit map for the video shifter, but hey thats how it was done.

1001crew was the first to do it on the C64.

fr-08? That was amazing at that time, still impressive today due size but back than...games I play at time didn't have graphics that good (playing them on my celeron 300a with gpu without any 3d acceleration :))

@@gorjy9610 yup that's the one! We would play that in school just for the soundtrack too, lol

Seeing this presentation show up in my feed made me instantly think of fr-08. I remember being completely blown away that they stuffed all of that into a 64kb executable.

I've never heard anyone say that, not hardware this old at least, maybe like some P4 PC. But demos don't prove that old hardware can somehow compete with new hardware, it just shows the extent of what they can achieve which is often surprising.

old hardware isn't bad, it's limited, very limited.

@@bangerbangerbro i've heard some people say that before

Before I learned what the demoscene was, I thought the C64 was a total piece of junk in every aspect. Man was I wrong on every level

@@cfothough Yeah Iikr

Indeed! Loved seeing you there and here at DFW events too!

@@The8BitGuy you should probably hide your house address from google maps at the beginning of the video.

@@jeffreypomeroy6173 It's not the first time he doxxes himself.

@@jeffreypomeroy6173 He's already said that he isn't worried. Did you see the bit about him being a gun owner?

Yeaaaa ... but why nobody talks about Thalion

Or do it on an rtx

@@JB_inks exactly ;)

See, now I'm wondering if there's a modern version of that juggler demo that uses real-time raytracing for the balls' reflections and requires RTX to run.

@@stevethepocket do you know if rtx can reflect the reflections multiple times? All I've seen so far are single reflections

@@stevethepocket I tried to reply but as expected KZfaq deleted my comment.

@@Skellotronix lol what?

@@Skellotronix attention seeking kids award

He shows in this video that the demo scene uses inefficient code to runs things faster...

@@Okurka. That is speed efficient and memory inefficient; twice the speed at the cost of 21 to 30 bytes extra memory is still a good deal in almost all cases. And it's still used today for speed sensitive stuff like compression, encryption, etc. Most compilers even have explicit flags for this, besides manual unrolling loops...

@@skillaxxx The code itself is inefficient...

@@Okurka. The useful code is not a poem, nor a shopping list - in this case it's meant to just do things (looking) right and fast. These techniques are similar to those used in microcontrollers and DSP world for speed efficiency (like pre-calculating trigonometric functions' output with deliberately limited accuracy and storing it in memory).

Now they use keys.

@@WolfgangS worse, now they use stuff tied to the internet that phones home.

And people willingly accept it. See Google Stadia. If Google ever decides to shut that service down - and let's face it, they don't have that great a track record of keeping their stuff alive - it's byebye game library.

I was actually a little surprised he didn't toss in, "It'd be called DRM today."

And if you had a RAMBOard (ram upgrade) for your 1541 and the correct software (fast hack em among several other nibbler programs) you could copy practically any copy protected program. Of course, copy parties of already cracked games and software were a big deal.

Oh the horror if one simply removes it while speaking..

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

It also has many hiphop vibes. The skill battles, the bragging, the number of disciplines, the teams, the illegal/gangster roots ...

@@thamessinclair2010 Where the biggest nerd could become the coolest guy on the block.

He has actually mentioned a couple demo's over the years! the ones I remember was the christmas one that's also in this video. And one that's back to the future themed that I think was in the CGA video? maybe some others as well but this is what I could remember.

The 64k intros are still alive and well. Although, some may argue the really impressive stuff moved over to 4k intros, while 64k became what the "no size limit" demos used to be (but with generated textures)

And also 4ks have been pretty good for a decade or two already.

Mine too mate, Red Sector 9 was one of my favs

Same here. I only got to see some cracktros on C64 and musicdisks but a lot of demos on the Amiga back in the day.

@@thedigitalemotion I think you meant: Red Sector Inc. Regards

@@ITTom Yes, you're right, cheers bud.

Well coding was not any part of the education system. You either had it or not, the full interest in computers and coding.... And if you even had a computer...

@@muurimc Education systems of some other European countries used to overwhelm students with too much homework. There was basically zero time to be creative as a kid. From the little I know about the Finnish education system, it's still praised to this day and from what I've been told (correct me if I'm wrong) there was little to no homework and almost anything was done in-school.

I always attributed such skills to those crappy northern winters

Tasavallan tietokone ftw!

Plenty of kids just had computers and spent time hacking with each other. I don't know that many who would have learned to use them that well at school. They started to introduce cool stuff in school with computers relatively late. When I was in senior high school they organized one class where we developed some demo routines with MS-DOS and VGA mode 13h, around 1996.

Oooooooo...

I thought about attending... I now have many regrets.

I think he managed to fool the guards that he was still there, possibly through a tape of his voice. The fact that some people don't know the lore of the channel and can't understand why I said that makes me sad.