Відео

Interesting history lesson! :) Really smart kids of the 80s when computers were not as common as today.

For "option 2" packers (ie. control byte + number of occurrences + value), the packer should pick its control-byte based only on occurrences of each of the 256 possible values that do not occur on their own or in a 2-byte sequence, as those are the only occurrences that increase the size of the compressed data. At least, that's how I did it from EBC V1.6 onward, back in 1991. :)

Great explanation on picking which value to use for the packer control byte. WAY back in the prehistoric times I encountered packers, that didn't scan before packing, and used either a hardcoded value or allowing the user to pick which one to use. That would either result in a packer being very inefficient, or the user having to go through a lot of trial-and-error to make sure the packed file wasn't unnecessarily large.

Holy smoke. I am stunned!

1) I learned how to use the Matcham time cruncher as a teenager without internet or help from someone in 1988. Was fascinated. Built a pal->ntsc switch into the machine to gain maybe 10% speed for such stuff, but using it would crash the machine sometimes lol. Apart from that I remember Matcham speed packer on the same disk (it's on csdb). Was very much faster and now I wonder how they achieved that... 2) I also thought on Amiga there's only lossless compression until I recently learned how sample 4bit-delta compression works. One of the rare examples for lossy. Has exactly 50% compression ratio as each byte becomes a nibble. 3) Super episode, thanks!

C64 FOREVER!!!

Very interesting stuff, thanks for sharing.

So nice that you found Matcham and got him to explain & answer questions. He was most def the cruncher king. Also, he didn't live too far from me. Remember 1001 was so proud of their cruncher, the card crucher, which they even put onto cartridge and tried to sell to software houses (going to the PCW show in 1985 or 1986). But compared to Matcham's Time cruncher, it came short. Remember that there were made "special" versions for the biggest groups at the time. So Matcham was respected by the best. I have an HTML file with the code for Time Cruncher, where I made all the Jumps, JSR's and branches clickable so they jump to the correct addresses. It's impressive short. Galleon dived into the source code and came up with his Cruel Cruncher. One that had the 2mhz function for the C128. It shorted the crunching time by a factor of 2.

When decoding the data, is that done on the fly when reading the data from the medium, or is it first loaded into ram, and then decompressed? If so, how can everything be in the memory at the same time?

First thing I think of when talking compression on the C64, Is Turbo 250 by MrZ. If you could arrange an interview with him, then whohoo! :)

Ok. I need to go to X. I heard they were going bi-annual, so only 2026?

I am only 5 minutes in, but the easy explanation of lossy and losless compression is stunning. I had a need to much more words. But, you got it it right, in the simplicity. Impressed.

There are a couple of cases of lossy compression being used on C64’s and Amigas: when people store animations using PETSCII chars that are close, but not identical to 8x8 blocks of pixels, and I’m pretty sure those Blender 3D animations in the winning demo from Xenium 2024 used a limited number of redefined chars to store the animations lossy. And on the Amiga and Atari ST, ADPCM is used for sample playback, because it can be decompressed on-the-fly fast enough to be viable in demos. Great video as always! ❤

The neat delta (=difference) trick 44:50 occurs in the ultra-hot screen update of gosling-emacs/display.c as well. I think. :)

Those rastersplits at the end are visual music.

Huffman/arithmetic are best applied _after_ the LZ stage unless you use something like LHa that integrates Huffman in its algorithm.

I love compression (especially on the C64). Made a huffman encoder just for fun. Looked into package-merge algorithm also. RLE of course also. Tried some opmtimizations (ore formatting the string etc. Encoding of the bytecount etc. Can be done in smart ways. I love this kind of stuff 😂)

Great content, I love it !!!! A lot of your stuff helped me getting back into C64 programming. Soon I will release a new game where you helped with your content.

I know it's not competitive... I know it would be a comical idea on the C64... but I really, really like BWT compression. It's such a weird algorithm.

I built and packaged Exomizer for Solaris 10 on i86pc and sparc platforms. Works like a charm, but lacks a good manual page to go along with it. I wonder who would win: Exomizer or Fast Cruel 2.5+.

Crunchers are such a fascinating subject matter. I started with the Time Crunch 5.0, spending many a night crunching, but once Galleon of Oneway released Fast Cruel 2.5+, it was game over: it beat everyone in size. I didn't mind trading time for size because I wasn't competing against anyone and I was trying to save as much disk space as possible, since I had no cartridge, size affected loading times and I didn't have any money to buy more floppies when I was starting out. Disk space therefore was always at a premium: the smaller the files, the more floppies could be freed, since every floppy disk was precious. Back in those days, one could only buy floppies outside of the country, so saving as much disk space as possible was no joke.

You should give Dali a spin. It's the zx0 implementation for the c64. But don't quote me on the tech stuff. It's used in Bitfire and packs fast and decrompressor quickly fast aswell.

Great interview with PEX aka Mahoney, who was a huge inspiration for me back when I was coming up with ideas on how to make demos. I liked how he or they designed their demos (him and Kaktus). And also in the last 10 years and his newer C64 productions. He's a legend. When I see a new production uploaded to csdb I am always excited. One thing you two talked about: Pre-Internet, you had to buy technical books (written in English, which was not my first language) and try to figure out how it worked on a C64. I can relate to 6:28 a lot. I was going around to those who were skilled and ask questions, like all the time. I bet some of the people I asked felt I was asking too much 😂 As I was often younger than them, they felt like "will this kid never stop ask about stuff?". But I have a way to get along with most people, being humble and using my social skills. That helped/helps. Soon as I was able to sit alone in front of the computer and try to tweak the memory (with machine code commands) and experiment, so I managed to climb the skill-ladder. There were a lot of people I looked up to back in the early days (1985/86). Legends like 1001, Star Frontiers, Sodan, Pure Byte, Migges (a lot of other scene people as well) and Dave Collier (who made my favorite games working for Ocean). Years later I was able to meet Pex at X2014, I think, and that was one of my most memorable moments. I was so nervous I almost had problem speaking.😂But it was great to meet one of my childhood heroes. I treasure that moment meeting him IRL. Especially impressive that he went on to learn Amiga coding and make stuff for it. Specifically, "His Masters Vocie" megademo and the tracker software. Amiga was a bridge too far for me to learn how to code in machine code. Then PC's took over and I soon discovered I could make stuff without knowledge about machine code. Using software under DOS/Windows I could still be creative and make stuff. I became more of a designer than programmer. I did go back to C64 around 2004, but then other stuff took over. But the last 10 years I have kept an eye with the active scene. I am more of a historian these days... Collecting original software, read up on history of C64 games, etc. But I do like to program some C64 stuff, to see if I still got the skills to make routines on my own. Thanks for uploading this. Very interesting. I have watched it twice now 😆I do like your channel. And btw, I am using your improved Action Replay in Vice at the moment. It's the best cartridge for my use. PS: Pex should dig into his parent's basement and find those tapes - I would have liked to see the progress of how he got better. I am sure others are too.

Awsome.i will jam to this shit for eternity

Well... I think to this day this one might just really be the *best* ... awesome!! ♥

My mind is utterly blown. You guys really outdo yourselves at every turn.

:05 Is that sprites on the side and top/bottom borders at the same time? Impressive!

Nice one!

This is so good. Congrats to team FairLight.

never disappoints

Damn, FLT. Another great prod. Amazing what you folks can do with a 40 year old piece of hardware.

True Masterpiece! Unbelievable. I had to doublecheck whether it runs on real C64 and it does! Greetings from Poland!

Everyone who had C64 saw this intro.

So, the two guys and the girl : are they part of the Fairlight crew or are they just down with Fairlight and shit?

Thanks, Fairlight, for another great production. You're killing it!! And I'm gonna skip breakfast!

Is the soundtrack SID only? If yes, wow, if not, still wow. The song (and the demo) kick ass.

Great work

Insane what you can squeeze out of a C64.

è pura magia!

Great, now i want a Fairlight FTL T-Shirt :S

ça m'a donné envie de bouffer des dragibus

Excellent!🤩

Big YES!!❤‍🔥

Rasters and (sprite) Serpent! + much more cool stuff... GR8 prod again! Love the small detail on the ball in greetz part!

Master Clas Demo Perfect Guys;)

This is how u do it :)

Trident 🤗💪🍺🍺🍺so oldschool yet so much new to show, pure bliss

Do you use in-house tools to create the SID music or is there an available program that's used?

Howdy Hackers!