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Demos for modern machines exist. However, instead of focusing on doing "impossible things", since there really aren't impossible things like that on modern hardware, they focus on making the demo code as small as possible. People have done things with full 3D ray traced environments in 64k. The criteria is "challenge" usually. It's not challenging to do impressive graphics/sound on modern hardware. But it is challenging to do it in 64k.
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 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: ua-cam.com/video/QNrT2MSCkzQ/v-deo.html Other examples: Heaven 7 by Exceed (2000): ua-cam.com/video/rNqpD3Mg9hY/v-deo.html 5 Faces by Fairlight and Cloudkicker (2013): ua-cam.com/video/i8hSZGTXTx8/v-deo.html Now, using what's conventionally considered "high quality models and textures" probably _is_ harder, but raytracing is old hat.
Haven't even watched yet but I gotta say this is one of the best recorded convention panel videos ever especially in terms of sound. I'm used to not being able to hear anything when somebody brings back a video from a con.
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 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 UA-cam 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.
Also how eloquent David is. So many UA-cam videos have cuts after every sentence. This live stuff is just as clear and consise as his edited videos. Great UA-camr!
_“So many UA-cam 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.
@@Prizm44 You know downvoting still counts as engagement, yes? The UA-cam 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 UA-camr 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.
David's opening point about needing to understand the limitations of a machine in order to appreciate a demo really rang true for me. It's the main reason I loved C= 8-bit demos, but never appreciated the Amiga scene - not for lack of art or talent, but due to my ignorance.
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.
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.
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. :)
We used to hold raves in the UK and project PC DOS demos onto a wall as part of the lighting setup. 99% of the attendees had never heard of the demo scene (nor were they into computers). However, we got lots of great feedback from the ravers who loved the visuals. I remember one week our projector packed up and lots of people complained about the lack of "visuals". These demos were our secret weapon, nobody knew what they was but everybody loved them. They certainly wasn't aware the demos had their own music. As a computer geek, I was very impressed by the way these demos did seemingly impossible things on limited hardware. We ran the demos live from 2 x 486 PC's and the lighting guy would do crazy transition effects along with controlling all the lasers in time with the music the DJ was playing. Wish we had videos of it. Seeing 500 people all raving with 2nd reality or some farbraush projected onto a mega wall is something else. Demos changed my life as they got me into music production and trackers. I got all my friends into trackers and we all used to produce remixes of songs which we'd play at our raves. Great times!
I would like to stress the social aspect of demoscene. In Europe we have many demoscene parties, and they are called parties for a reason. People tend to go back to the same parties every year or at least every few years to meet with friends they made on these parties. Of course they tend to bring new demos, intros, music, etc. as well if they can, so they can participate in the compos. Winners usually get actual prices, but I guess the bragging rights are more important.
I loved every minute of the early 90s demo scene, such a time-bubble to grow up in, taught me everything about computers I needed to know for the rest of my career. You can always bend them to your will, it just takes time 😇
@@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.
The demoscene is still alive and that's amazing, but on modern hardware the main restriction people put in place is filesize. Like Conspiracy's "Clean Slate" and FMSCat's "Condition", which are a 64KB binary and WebGL demo respectively.
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.
I used to be a well known coder in the C+4 demoscene, it was some of the best period of my life. So much fun! 9:30 we called this Amiga balls and it was a legend :D
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.
14:50 good to see Jim Butterfield's name. He helped us get CUGOR going ( commodore user group of Rochester) in those days Late 70's people still wrote letters. If you wrote Jim a letter with a tech question, he would write you back. RIP Jim Butterfield
Always loved the demo scene, and I regret not learning more assembly sooner. Your presentation was very clear and made the complex subject matter understandable. It looked like a lot of fun; a shame I missed it! Next time...
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.
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.
My favourite demo of all time was “Second reality” from the Assembly 1993, on the PC. I’ve never would’ve thought that my crappy PC would ever be capable of displaying those animations so fast!
@@darkowl9 I’ve seen it but only as a UA-cam 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.
@@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!
21:05 Thank you for the talk and especially for showing 4gentE's demo that was released at our Transmission64 online demo party, appreciate it. We had a good laugh when reviewing it for the competitions and later again when showing it online. We're having another online demoparty on Dec 4th, 2021 btw.
That "unrolling a loop" thing is used in embedded systems too. I use it with display drivers to get maximum possible fps. I just didn't know the name and I also didn't know it's actually a thing that others use..
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 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!!! ☺️
When I got hold of the "Enigma" demo by Phenomena and fired it up on my A500 in 1991 I was pretty damn impressed to say the least, being a professional software engineer and Speccy programmer since 1982. I was amazed and very pleased to see that same demo is part of the "Amiga Forever" package, and I was just as impressed on seeing and hearing it again now, some 30 years later. Wow - just WOW.
I´ll be honest here: I found the "Juggler" Demo for the C64 far more impressive than the Amiga version which inspired it, simply because the C64 has so much less raw computing power than the Amiga. On a different note: I too have been waiting for what seems like ages for that Amiga segment of the Commodore History series. ;) In any case: Keep up the good work, David! Greetings from Denmark.
Ahh yes the demoscene, good times.. Also yes, limitations can help facilitate creativity by providing focus. This is one of the many reasons why I love older tech.
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.
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
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.
I had no idea that this "scene" exists, but I'm very happy to learn about it. I have done some "magic" in the game Factorio and it's so fun showing people something they didn't think was possible with tools that they think they understand.
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.
About the "where do you go to learn this stuff" question: There are many good talks about this online now. Linus Åkesson, a.k.a LFT, has a talk called "Poems for bugs" which is a lot like this talk really, except that he goes a lot more in depth on how the basic CPU budget you have on the C64 looks like. He also has really good writeups of many specific techniques on his homepage. There are others that put up videos too, I remember a good video about the disk drive, I could have sworn it was by Krill but maybe not since I can't find it again. In general people are a LOT nicer today about sharing their secrets than they were back in the day, and that's probably why we keep seeing records being broken on the old breadbin :) "8-bit show and tell" (Robin Harbron) has a number of VERY accessible introduction videos to assembly programming on the C64, focused more on how it was done back in the day than how it is necessarily done now.
You must be a Computer science teacher. I have been damn happy seeing at the code and tricks. you answered lot of questions that i always had since 9 years of my studying CS.
I'm 23 and I only started to dabble into assembly language and highly optimized compiler code about 1.5 years ago. Since then I've created an emulator by researching and reverse engineering hardware. This helped me out a ton when it comes to tinkering with 8-bit machines from before I was born, especially learning tricks like carefully timed operations and register writes to literally use more video 'RAM' (i.e. physical scan lines) and simulating PCM audio on primitive sequental sawtooth wave synthesizers. It's a lot of fun challenging myself, which helps me out a ton with other unrelated projects, as it's incredible useful to optimize your code as much as you can and go about limitations in a creative way. (Honestly I sometimes cringe when I see code that's written today.) I think I'm having the same amounts of fun Dave had back in the day. Goes to show how age should never be a limiting factor, and you shouldn't be discouraged to learn to play the piano at 63 (to use an analogy). :P
This gets me in the feels, especially the Trap demo and the Thrust demo. I was a member of Compunet - you mentioned it - as a teenager, it was a UK bulletin board solely for the C64, in the mid 80s. It had a special client which provided a colour graphical interface, you could have your own pages with content, you could upload and download demos, chat, vote on other people's content... Sound familiar? All at 1200/75 baud! It was sad when it died, and a backup was never made apparently, but there are some emulations out there of sorts, I think. It was so amazing, being part of that scene, a lot of the famous people were on there too, Rob Hubbard etc. The phone bills, though... My parents were not happy! It would be amazing if you could do a video on it, and maybe other 8-bit Internet precursors one day. Edit: I was MD13 on Compunet, nickname Bodd. Rob Hubbard was RH6, as I recall!
24:00 "Where do you learn that?" - Back in those days (saying that I now feel old) you would start with self-teaching, curiosity, experimentation... and in Europe you would go to what was called "coding parties" which were organized meetings for demoscene groups; you would at first expand greatly your knowledge by talking to people and exchanging ideas. Then back to experimentation, trying to find new advance tricks; and the next time you travel to a coding party, you'll bring your new discovery to discuss with the groups :-) - Dang, that video brought back some memories :-)
I found it funny that after this whole talk about pushing code to it's boundaries to do the coolest things within the limits of the hardware, the first question was "what about overclocking"
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.
#1 reason why people make Demos (that I'm aware of): contributing to a subculture they love that only keeps existing as long as people make demos. Very enjoyable watch - I like the magic trick comparison!
I'm too young to have been a part of the demo scene, but old enough to remember being utterly impressed by Amiga demos and dreaming of the days when video games could look that good. I also thought it was so cool that the "Front 242" demo played digitized video footage (albeit black & white, very grainy, and only a few seconds long), since that was the first time I'd ever seen a computer do that.
Dread is such a feat coming from the demo scene. It's finally a Doom type of game that runs smoothly on a stock Amiga 500. It has also been ported to Atari ST.
On the subject of more modern systems: They're quite rare, because you usually can get a lot out of them without breaking a lot of rules. I've written a game engine that uses SSE2 to generate more authentic looking retro graphics compared to what polygon-based engines do, and it's often quite amazing what you can do with vector computing. However it's quite hard to find ways to break rules on modern hardware, and even then you often just find out that the hardware is capable of more things, you just weren't taught them since they're not needed for business applications.
@@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 UA-cam. It even has a GUI subsystem that was influenced by old systems.
I remember being a teenager and seeing the famous 64kb demo 'the .product', and running it on our windows 98 school computers. Still is amazing after all these years
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 :))
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.
The last amazing demo from the early days of computing that I remember was a demo for the 386/486 PC called Unreal. I remember being blown away by the amount of colors they could produce on screen at one time along with some great music to complete the showcase. I always wondered what happened to the demo scene from back then.
Most of the demos I remember is legit from the cracking scene... some of the keygens (like what C.O.R.E. made) had some of the most amazing music and I would sometimes download software JUST to watch the animation of the cracks/keygens.
Regarding the "death of the damascene" - it's still going strong. Now it's more about making small demos on modern hardware - it's ridiculously impressive how much people can fit in so little space on modern hardware. Fitting a full FPS in 64 KB? NUTS! But there was definitely a cache about "doing things the hardware doesn't seem like it should be capable of" on limited-resource systems. But when a modern PC can do real time 3D graphics that match Hollywood top-tier CGI houses multi-month render jobs from 20 years ago? Yeah, it's hard to "push the limits of the hardware" any more.
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
Thanks for the upload! I didn't get to the Fest until you had already started your panel and by then the entire room was packed! I'm glad I get to see it here! I loved hearing about your background and the nitty gritty details of the UA-cam world during your panel shortly after with LGR. I must say, now finally seeing them in person, the quality of your game releases is absolutely fantastic.
Been watching these demos for over 35 years from the C64 to now on my PC from cracktros to full visual and music videos, it still fascinates me to this day and cant see myself ever stopping watching them.
Like you, I played the Swinth demo on my Commodore 64 all the time back in the day just for the music. About 5-6 months ago I found my original floppy disk that had Swinth and a couple other demos on it which I featured in a video on my channel. 35+ years later I still love my C64 and the Swinth demo!
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.
Man!!! Just started, but you, Clint, and Computer Clan must have been awesome. One of my favorite demo groups back in the day was Future Crew. I actually downloaded Second Reality to my PS3 as one of my favorite things to play when I test out my stereo setup.... I remember that I originally had this demo on a single 3 1/2 1.44MB floppy. I have plenty of single pictures from my rather low end phone that couldn't fit on a floppy without compression or more done to it. I've always loved computers. You make amazing vids and I love hearing about everything you post. Thank you, sir! Keep up the fantastic work!!! ❤️
This was awesome. I was lucky enough to catch your talk on phreaking at Portland Retro Gaming Expo in 2019 and you always put on a great, intriguing show. You rock 8-bit guy
I still remember being blown away by the 1993 demo called Second Reality by Future Crew. It's really great and the music written by Purple Motion still holds up today. It is very easy to find the full video of it here on YT. Also there's a channel called AssemblyTV which has all demos with all different categories in playlists by year. Really worth checking out.
I used to run the C=64 demo group TDM (The Douched Moose) -- and when I added some members, changed it to TDC (The Douche Crew). The only two routines that I claim as my own (and truly unique) were a 192-line $D016 wave that I used in the demo TRANSITIONS/TDM in November 1992 and a $D021 rasterbar swing at both normal and 3X magnification that appeared onscreen simultaneously in my demo MAG FACTOR THREE/TDM that I released a short time after I released TRANSITIONS. The first demo that I actually released to the public (by uploading it to a C=64 BBS) was called PUSSYWHIPPED/TDM and simply had my demo group's logo made of sprites doing a vertical swing accompanied by decent music. If memory serves, I released it in early-1992. My demo THUNDERFLUSHED/TDM (also from 1992) had a picture of a toliet accompanied by the digitised sound of a suicide-resistant prison comby being flushed. I also made several demos with FLI graphics (they broke the color limitations of the Commodore 64's VIC2 chip). One was called WARP DAMAGE/TDC, another was BORN AGAIN/TDC and the last was AIDS DEMO/TDC.
Although the 8 bit guy is a fulltime and paid youtuber, the guy that never had a question but expressed his gratitude for all the effort this 8 bit guy has put into the hours and hours of entertainment for all of us speaks for every single one of us watching, sure some of the information is well known but 8 bit guys knack of the flow in each video is great and I for one join that guy in saying thank you sir, you are very entertaining to watch
I fondly remember the early to mid 90's demos that targeted higher-spec (but still laughable by modern standards) 386 and 486 DOS machines. There was one that looked like a 3D 1st-person flyover of apparently randomized Mars-like terrain that just blew my mind at the time. Aside from the demos themselves, the process of finding and acquiring them was so fun - BBS downloads, floppy discs from friends, crack-tros, etc... good times.
I remember how impressed I was seeing the juggler demo all those years ago. The thing you find out quite quickly is that ray tracing took FOREVER back then. Today I can thro 64 cpu's running at multiple gigahertz at a ray tracer.
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.
FunFact: DICE (the guys who created Battlefield franchise) started as Demo scene group known as The Silents. Pretty good one as well. Game development would come to fruition later, but they would be known for their talent, starting in early 90s and release one of the best Pinball games on Amiga.
That was absolutely brilliant! The stuff about speed coding blew my mind. How have I never considered this. I briefly did some graphics for Intuition demo group, and also one logo for Fairlight. Great days!
The Amiga demo scene was crazy back in the day. Of course, that was because the hardware was pretty awesome for it's time. But i remember just looking forward to downloading a new demo. My favorite on the amiga was the juggling girl, who was goosed by a bad man, and she pulls a gun out from nowhere and shoots at him. But the bullet doesn't move, she flies off screen to the left and he flies off to the right. Just funny.
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)
About 24:00 - "Start from scratch?"... well, there was a German book called "PC Underground", that even got translated to English at some point. It teached how to code for MS-DOS, with ModeX, for Gravis Ultrasound, the Sound Blaster (though that was really badly documented, I was working with that and it contained to many errors). It also teached basic 3D programming and later iterations also added how to code something like Doom. So yeah, there WAS a book. It wasn't all that good (my MOD player was wayyy better than what they provided for example), but it was a start you can learn from.
Thank you for uploading this! I've always been interested in the history of the scene, particularly since I grew up a pirate and would come across references of old demos, but never completely understood all this. Super cool!
@@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...
@@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).
So much fun to see your explanation of unlooped code. Bob in Censor Design pretty much invented this, and it was actually his thesis at the university. Making a joystick controlled graphic editor that later generated unlooped code. The professors didn't grok much, but he passed.
Great video David. Being someone who grew up playing and not coding, I can say that it was still interesting to watch. What that guy said about you and your channel was so kind. LOL!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back in the day, I got so impressed by the Demo Scene that I learnt assembly language on my own before college and then went for my master's in Computer Graphics.
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.
Dang I live in Madison, WI and didn’t know you’d be there in Chicago at this event, that event looked super cool with LGR and 8-Bit Guy doing a panel?? Can’t believe I missed this, but thank you for having a recording. Btw thank you for putting the music credit at the end of the video ❤️ loved this vid
![[柴犬ASMR]曼玉Manyu&小白Bai 毛发护理Spa asmr](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0TsXQ7z2Dh4/mqdefault.jpg)
Demos for modern machines exist. However, instead of focusing on doing "impossible things", since there really aren't impossible things like that on modern hardware, they focus on making the demo code as small as possible. People have done things with full 3D ray traced environments in 64k. The criteria is "challenge" usually. It's not challenging to do impressive graphics/sound on modern hardware. But it is challenging to do it in 64k.
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: ua-cam.com/video/QNrT2MSCkzQ/v-deo.html
Other examples:
Heaven 7 by Exceed (2000): ua-cam.com/video/rNqpD3Mg9hY/v-deo.html
5 Faces by Fairlight and Cloudkicker (2013): ua-cam.com/video/i8hSZGTXTx8/v-deo.html
Now, using what's conventionally considered "high quality models and textures" probably _is_ harder, but raytracing is old hat.
Haven't even watched yet but I gotta say this is one of the best recorded convention panel videos ever especially in terms of sound. I'm used to not being able to hear anything when somebody brings back a video from a con.
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 UA-cam 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).
Also how eloquent David is. So many UA-cam videos have cuts after every sentence. This live stuff is just as clear and consise as his edited videos. Great UA-camr!
_“So many UA-cam 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 UA-cam 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 UA-camr 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.
10:46 Boys, Boys, Boys by Sabrina. A big hit in Europe.
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.
David's opening point about needing to understand the limitations of a machine in order to appreciate a demo really rang true for me. It's the main reason I loved C= 8-bit demos, but never appreciated the Amiga scene - not for lack of art or talent, but due to my ignorance.
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. :)
We used to hold raves in the UK and project PC DOS demos onto a wall as part of the lighting setup. 99% of the attendees had never heard of the demo scene (nor were they into computers).
However, we got lots of great feedback from the ravers who loved the visuals.
I remember one week our projector packed up and lots of people complained about the lack of "visuals".
These demos were our secret weapon, nobody knew what they was but everybody loved them. They certainly wasn't aware the demos had their own music. As a computer geek, I was very impressed by the way these demos did seemingly impossible things on limited hardware.
We ran the demos live from 2 x 486 PC's and the lighting guy would do crazy transition effects along with controlling all the lasers in time with the music the DJ was playing. Wish we had videos of it. Seeing 500 people all raving with 2nd reality or some farbraush projected onto a mega wall is something else.
Demos changed my life as they got me into music production and trackers. I got all my friends into trackers and we all used to produce remixes of songs which we'd play at our raves.
Great times!
21:26 I'm still amazed that at this moment, David's most famous video on UA-cam is still that one video where he shoot the wasp's nest with guns.
Where is that?
ua-cam.com/video/oR-6BiwTZX0/v-deo.html
I would like to stress the social aspect of demoscene. In Europe we have many demoscene parties, and they are called parties for a reason. People tend to go back to the same parties every year or at least every few years to meet with friends they made on these parties. Of course they tend to bring new demos, intros, music, etc. as well if they can, so they can participate in the compos. Winners usually get actual prices, but I guess the bragging rights are more important.
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.
I loved every minute of the early 90s demo scene, such a time-bubble to grow up in, taught me everything about computers I needed to know for the rest of my career. You can always bend them to your will, it just takes time 😇
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.
The demoscene is still alive and that's amazing, but on modern hardware the main restriction people put in place is filesize. Like Conspiracy's "Clean Slate" and FMSCat's "Condition", which are a 64KB binary and WebGL demo respectively.
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 😂
I used to be a well known coder in the C+4 demoscene, it was some of the best period of my life. So much fun!
9:30 we called this Amiga balls and it was a legend :D
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.
14:50 good to see Jim Butterfield's name. He helped us get CUGOR going ( commodore user group of Rochester) in those days Late 70's people still wrote letters. If you wrote Jim a letter with a tech question, he would write you back. RIP Jim Butterfield
Always loved the demo scene, and I regret not learning more assembly sooner. Your presentation was very clear and made the complex subject matter understandable. It looked like a lot of fun; a shame I missed it! Next time...
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.
My favourite demo of all time was “Second reality” from the Assembly 1993, on the PC. I’ve never would’ve thought that my crappy PC would ever be capable of displaying those animations so fast!
Have you seen the C64 de-make of Second Reality? It's _really_ impressive.
@@darkowl9 I’ve seen it but only as a UA-cam 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.
"to enjoy a demo you gotta know the system's limitation" NAILED IT, that's what I always thought from the 1st time I watched a demo in my Amiga 500
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
Would have been great to join you guys there, but travelling from Norway is hell these days. :P Looked like a lot of fun! :D
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!
21:05 Thank you for the talk and especially for showing 4gentE's demo that was released at our Transmission64 online demo party, appreciate it. We had a good laugh when reviewing it for the competitions and later again when showing it online. We're having another online demoparty on Dec 4th, 2021 btw.
do you have a link to the full demo ?
nvm i found it ua-cam.com/video/7n24gneP0Rg/v-deo.html
thanks for your hint
@@shockwaverc1369 Here's the link to just this demo itself: ua-cam.com/video/7n24gneP0Rg/v-deo.html
That "unrolling a loop" thing is used in embedded systems too. I use it with display drivers to get maximum possible fps. I just didn't know the name and I also didn't know it's actually a thing that others use..
Lots of assemblers offer this feature. It's just called in-line macros.
LGR, Computer Clan and The 8bit Guy... *ALL THE LEGENDS*
Demos are so interesting, pushing the older computer's code and graphics to the limit is so cool
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!!! ☺️
When I got hold of the "Enigma" demo by Phenomena and fired it up on my A500 in 1991 I was pretty damn impressed to say the least, being a professional software engineer and Speccy programmer since 1982. I was amazed and very pleased to see that same demo is part of the "Amiga Forever" package, and I was just as impressed on seeing and hearing it again now, some 30 years later. Wow - just WOW.
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.
I´ll be honest here: I found the "Juggler" Demo for the C64 far more impressive than the Amiga version which inspired it, simply because the C64 has so much less raw computing power than the Amiga.
On a different note: I too have been waiting for what seems like ages for that Amiga segment of the Commodore History series. ;)
In any case: Keep up the good work, David!
Greetings from Denmark.
Ahh yes the demoscene, good times.. Also yes, limitations can help facilitate creativity by providing focus. This is one of the many reasons why I love older tech.
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.
A moment of silence for Clive Sinclair's passing, the grandfather of all low budget 8 bits systems.
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
I liked the question about "new" demo scenes, i would've to shoutout the GBA and its demo scene, its fantastic, love that little machine that could.
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
I had no idea that this "scene" exists, but I'm very happy to learn about it. I have done some "magic" in the game Factorio and it's so fun showing people something they didn't think was possible with tools that they think they understand.
In Europe it's a pretty big underground movement. So you've got a lot to catch up on :)
He just breaks everything down so clearly. I love this channel.
On the Atari ST, drawing into the borders was achieved by switching the display from 50Hz to 60Hz and then back again, with precise timing.
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.
Me: "So how does this demo work?"
My computer: "That's the neat part. It won't."
About the "where do you go to learn this stuff" question: There are many good talks about this online now. Linus Åkesson, a.k.a LFT, has a talk called "Poems for bugs" which is a lot like this talk really, except that he goes a lot more in depth on how the basic CPU budget you have on the C64 looks like. He also has really good writeups of many specific techniques on his homepage.
There are others that put up videos too, I remember a good video about the disk drive, I could have sworn it was by Krill but maybe not since I can't find it again. In general people are a LOT nicer today about sharing their secrets than they were back in the day, and that's probably why we keep seeing records being broken on the old breadbin :)
"8-bit show and tell" (Robin Harbron) has a number of VERY accessible introduction videos to assembly programming on the C64, focused more on how it was done back in the day than how it is necessarily done now.
i love how diverse the retro computer scene is
everything from guys with ponytails to guys who exclusively wear cargo shorts
I loved the Amiga demo scene. There were many demos that inspired me to become the pixel artist I am today.
You must be a Computer science teacher. I have been damn happy seeing at the code and tricks. you answered lot of questions that i always had since 9 years of my studying CS.
I'm 23 and I only started to dabble into assembly language and highly optimized compiler code about 1.5 years ago. Since then I've created an emulator by researching and reverse engineering hardware. This helped me out a ton when it comes to tinkering with 8-bit machines from before I was born, especially learning tricks like carefully timed operations and register writes to literally use more video 'RAM' (i.e. physical scan lines) and simulating PCM audio on primitive sequental sawtooth wave synthesizers. It's a lot of fun challenging myself, which helps me out a ton with other unrelated projects, as it's incredible useful to optimize your code as much as you can and go about limitations in a creative way. (Honestly I sometimes cringe when I see code that's written today.) I think I'm having the same amounts of fun Dave had back in the day.
Goes to show how age should never be a limiting factor, and you shouldn't be discouraged to learn to play the piano at 63 (to use an analogy). :P
I find it incredibly amusing that people are asking these demoscene questions and Jim Leonard is the one handing them the microphone!
Good point. He could certainly answer many of them if they weren't Commodore related.
This gets me in the feels, especially the Trap demo and the Thrust demo. I was a member of Compunet - you mentioned it - as a teenager, it was a UK bulletin board solely for the C64, in the mid 80s. It had a special client which provided a colour graphical interface, you could have your own pages with content, you could upload and download demos, chat, vote on other people's content... Sound familiar? All at 1200/75 baud! It was sad when it died, and a backup was never made apparently, but there are some emulations out there of sorts, I think. It was so amazing, being part of that scene, a lot of the famous people were on there too, Rob Hubbard etc. The phone bills, though... My parents were not happy! It would be amazing if you could do a video on it, and maybe other 8-bit Internet precursors one day. Edit: I was MD13 on Compunet, nickname Bodd. Rob Hubbard was RH6, as I recall!
You drove right through St. Louis, my hometown!
Hello, neighbor! I'm in the St. Louis metro area myself.
24:00 "Where do you learn that?"
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Back in those days (saying that I now feel old) you would start with self-teaching, curiosity, experimentation... and in Europe you would go to what was called "coding parties" which were organized meetings for demoscene groups; you would at first expand greatly your knowledge by talking to people and exchanging ideas. Then back to experimentation, trying to find new advance tricks; and the next time you travel to a coding party, you'll bring your new discovery to discuss with the groups :-)
-
Dang, that video brought back some memories :-)
I found it funny that after this whole talk about pushing code to it's boundaries to do the coolest things within the limits of the hardware, the first question was "what about overclocking"
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.
#1 reason why people make Demos (that I'm aware of): contributing to a subculture they love that only keeps existing as long as people make demos.
Very enjoyable watch - I like the magic trick comparison!
I'm too young to have been a part of the demo scene, but old enough to remember being utterly impressed by Amiga demos and dreaming of the days when video games could look that good. I also thought it was so cool that the "Front 242" demo played digitized video footage (albeit black & white, very grainy, and only a few seconds long), since that was the first time I'd ever seen a computer do that.
Dread is such a feat coming from the demo scene. It's finally a Doom type of game that runs smoothly on a stock Amiga 500. It has also been ported to Atari ST.
On the subject of more modern systems: They're quite rare, because you usually can get a lot out of them without breaking a lot of rules.
I've written a game engine that uses SSE2 to generate more authentic looking retro graphics compared to what polygon-based engines do, and it's often quite amazing what you can do with vector computing. However it's quite hard to find ways to break rules on modern hardware, and even then you often just find out that the hardware is capable of more things, you just weren't taught them since they're not needed for business applications.
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 UA-cam. 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
VCFMW was a blast! It was great capturing your presentation live, David!
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?
I remember being a teenager and seeing the famous 64kb demo 'the .product', and running it on our windows 98 school computers. Still is amazing after all these years
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.
The last amazing demo from the early days of computing that I remember was a demo for the 386/486 PC called Unreal. I remember being blown away by the amount of colors they could produce on screen at one time along with some great music to complete the showcase. I always wondered what happened to the demo scene from back then.
Most of the demos I remember is legit from the cracking scene... some of the keygens (like what C.O.R.E. made) had some of the most amazing music and I would sometimes download software JUST to watch the animation of the cracks/keygens.
Regarding the "death of the damascene" - it's still going strong. Now it's more about making small demos on modern hardware - it's ridiculously impressive how much people can fit in so little space on modern hardware. Fitting a full FPS in 64 KB? NUTS!
But there was definitely a cache about "doing things the hardware doesn't seem like it should be capable of" on limited-resource systems. But when a modern PC can do real time 3D graphics that match Hollywood top-tier CGI houses multi-month render jobs from 20 years ago? Yeah, it's hard to "push the limits of the hardware" any more.
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
Thanks for the upload! I didn't get to the Fest until you had already started your panel and by then the entire room was packed! I'm glad I get to see it here! I loved hearing about your background and the nitty gritty details of the UA-cam world during your panel shortly after with LGR. I must say, now finally seeing them in person, the quality of your game releases is absolutely fantastic.
Been watching these demos for over 35 years from the C64 to now on my PC from cracktros to full visual and music videos, it still fascinates me to this day and cant see myself ever stopping watching them.
These presentations you do are awesome! Always very engaging the entire way through.
Loved the 'demos' video. I used to attend Commodore shows (C-128 and Amiga in particular) and demos were always a big part of having some fun!
Always nice to see stuff about the Demoscene!
Mad props to Jim "Trixter" Leonard for the Mindcandy DVD and Blu-Rays.
Like you, I played the Swinth demo on my Commodore 64 all the time back in the day just for the music. About 5-6 months ago I found my original floppy disk that had Swinth and a couple other demos on it which I featured in a video on my channel. 35+ years later I still love my C64 and the Swinth demo!
This video has EVERYTHING! A cold open, collabs with other great youtubers, answers to questions I didn’t know I had, Dan Cortese…
I've always loved seeing old hardware and software doing cool and amazing things and seeing peoples reactions when they say "old hardware is bad".
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
Great talk David. Was an avid watcher of Amiga and PC demos in the 80’s and 90’s. There are some awesome demos out there. Really good video.
Man!!! Just started, but you, Clint, and Computer Clan must have been awesome. One of my favorite demo groups back in the day was Future Crew. I actually downloaded Second Reality to my PS3 as one of my favorite things to play when I test out my stereo setup.... I remember that I originally had this demo on a single 3 1/2 1.44MB floppy. I have plenty of single pictures from my rather low end phone that couldn't fit on a floppy without compression or more done to it. I've always loved computers. You make amazing vids and I love hearing about everything you post. Thank you, sir! Keep up the fantastic work!!! ❤️
This was awesome. I was lucky enough to catch your talk on phreaking at Portland Retro Gaming Expo in 2019 and you always put on a great, intriguing show. You rock 8-bit guy
I've been looking forward to another 8-bit Guy video for what seems like forever! Thanks for uploading, Dave!
Always remember Budbrain and Jesus on E demos on the Amiga 🤘
I still remember being blown away by the 1993 demo called Second Reality by Future Crew. It's really great and the music written by Purple Motion still holds up today. It is very easy to find the full video of it here on YT. Also there's a channel called AssemblyTV which has all demos with all different categories in playlists by year. Really worth checking out.
Always enjoy your presentations, David. Thank you 🙂😎
LGR, Krazy Ken and 8-bit guy. The Holy trinity
@@Skellotronix lol what?
@@Skellotronix attention seeking kids award
I used to run the C=64 demo group TDM (The Douched Moose) -- and when I added some members, changed it to TDC (The Douche Crew). The only two routines that I claim as my own (and truly unique) were a 192-line $D016 wave that I used in the demo TRANSITIONS/TDM in November 1992 and a $D021 rasterbar swing at both normal and 3X magnification that appeared onscreen simultaneously in my demo MAG FACTOR THREE/TDM that I released a short time after I released TRANSITIONS.
The first demo that I actually released to the public (by uploading it to a C=64 BBS) was called PUSSYWHIPPED/TDM and simply had my demo group's logo made of sprites doing a vertical swing accompanied by decent music. If memory serves, I released it in early-1992.
My demo THUNDERFLUSHED/TDM (also from 1992) had a picture of a toliet accompanied by the digitised sound of a suicide-resistant prison comby being flushed.
I also made several demos with FLI graphics (they broke the color limitations of the Commodore 64's VIC2 chip). One was called WARP DAMAGE/TDC, another was BORN AGAIN/TDC and the last was AIDS DEMO/TDC.
Great presentation! I hope you will keep coming to these in the midwest.
What an incredible presentation! I’m a throughly upset I missed you here in Chicago. I hope you return next year, I’ll be there!!
Although the 8 bit guy is a fulltime and paid youtuber, the guy that never had a question but expressed his gratitude for all the effort this 8 bit guy has put into the hours and hours of entertainment for all of us speaks for every single one of us watching, sure some of the information is well known but 8 bit guys knack of the flow in each video is great and I for one join that guy in saying thank you sir, you are very entertaining to watch
A demo that impressed me (still does), is 'kkrieger' = a game (FPS) in 96k.
It won that category @ Breakpoint 2004.
I fondly remember the early to mid 90's demos that targeted higher-spec (but still laughable by modern standards) 386 and 486 DOS machines. There was one that looked like a 3D 1st-person flyover of apparently randomized Mars-like terrain that just blew my mind at the time.
Aside from the demos themselves, the process of finding and acquiring them was so fun - BBS downloads, floppy discs from friends, crack-tros, etc... good times.
You give great presentations, very well structured and always informative, it's a pleasure listening to them!
absolutely love this channel
I remember how impressed I was seeing the juggler demo all those years ago. The thing you find out quite quickly is that ray tracing took FOREVER back then. Today I can thro 64 cpu's running at multiple gigahertz at a ray tracer.
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 UA-cam deleted my comment.
FunFact: DICE (the guys who created Battlefield franchise) started as Demo scene group known as The Silents. Pretty good one as well. Game development would come to fruition later, but they would be known for their talent, starting in early 90s and release one of the best Pinball games on Amiga.
Yeaaaa ... but why nobody talks about Thalion
That was absolutely brilliant! The stuff about speed coding blew my mind. How have I never considered this. I briefly did some graphics for Intuition demo group, and also one logo for Fairlight. Great days!
Making demos was fun. I enjoyed programming ST more than Amiga because it was so much more of a challenge for most effects.
Sounded like the person asking the Picard question had about 18 masks on. 😂
Oh the horror if one simply removes it while speaking..
It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.
i love these lecture videos. glad to see your able to do them again.
Thanks for sharing this presentation with such good quality audio and video. Very rare to see that from convention footage!
The Amiga demo scene was crazy back in the day. Of course, that was because the hardware was pretty awesome for it's time. But i remember just looking forward to downloading a new demo. My favorite on the amiga was the juggling girl, who was goosed by a bad man, and she pulls a gun out from nowhere and shoots at him. But the bullet doesn't move, she flies off screen to the left and he flies off to the right. Just funny.
The demo scene I knew was PC 64kb - now these guys were amazing (still are im sure) at compressing stuff!!
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.
About 24:00 - "Start from scratch?"... well, there was a German book called "PC Underground", that even got translated to English at some point. It teached how to code for MS-DOS, with ModeX, for Gravis Ultrasound, the Sound Blaster (though that was really badly documented, I was working with that and it contained to many errors). It also teached basic 3D programming and later iterations also added how to code something like Doom.
So yeah, there WAS a book. It wasn't all that good (my MOD player was wayyy better than what they provided for example), but it was a start you can learn from.
Thank you for uploading this! I've always been interested in the history of the scene, particularly since I grew up a pirate and would come across references of old demos, but never completely understood all this. Super cool!
“A magic show for programmers”. I’ve never heard a better definition for demoscene. Definitely stealing that one!
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.
Man, i never understood the code very well, my part was mostly the tunes..this brings back so many memories 😁 regards from Germany 👋😉
Love your analogies, they are really excellent! =)
I really enjoy watching your presentations. Hope I can catch one live sometime!
demoscene teaches programmers how to code efficiently
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).
Amiga Demo scene was generally my childhood.
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.
So much fun to see your explanation of unlooped code. Bob in Censor Design pretty much invented this, and it was actually his thesis at the university. Making a joystick controlled graphic editor that later generated unlooped code. The professors didn't grok much, but he passed.
Great video David. Being someone who grew up playing and not coding, I can say that it was still interesting to watch. What that guy said about you and your channel was so kind. LOL!
I remember in 85 or so being very jealous of the Finnish educational system that produced all these genius coders.
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.
"a lot of software was copy protected"
Because no company would even think about doing something like that nowadays
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.
Great session, so interesting to see how people pushed the boundaries of the hardware. The color effects were amazing
Thank you for this video and all the content on the channel ! :)
Back in the day, I got so impressed by the Demo Scene that I learnt assembly language on my own before college and then went for my master's in Computer Graphics.
Wait, how did Krazy Ken manage to escape the lair long enough to attend?
Also; An LGR, Krazy Ken, and 8-Bit-Guy panel sounds like the best thing EVER.
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.
Great video! I really liked the Schoolhouse Atari 400/800 demo with the Disco Dirge soundtrack.
Dang I live in Madison, WI and didn’t know you’d be there in Chicago at this event, that event looked super cool with LGR and 8-Bit Guy doing a panel?? Can’t believe I missed this, but thank you for having a recording.
Btw thank you for putting the music credit at the end of the video ❤️ loved this vid