Lunus Sakesson's 256 byte Commodore 64 demo "A Mind Is Born" took first place at the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at the Revision 2017 digital art festival. From his program notes:
The demo is driven by its soundtrack, so in order to understand what the program needs to do, it helps to have a schematic overview of the various parts of the song.
The three voices of the SID chip are used as follows: Voice 1 is responsible for the kick drum and bass, Voice 2 plays the melody and Voice 3 plays a drone that ducks on all beats, mimicking the genre-typical side-chain compression effect.
All in all, the song contains 64 bars in 4/4 time. It is played back at 112.5 bpm by means of a 60 Hz timer interrupt. The interrupt handler is primarily responsible for music playback, while the visuals are mostly generated in main context.
"A Mind Is Born" by Linus Akesson
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Graphical demos created with severe code-length limitations sometimes betray the techniques used to fit a world into a few kilobytes: tessellating textures, featureless fractals, repetitive sequences, and so on. Final Stage, by 0x4015, is not one of those demos. [via]
Here it is rendered on a XEON x560 with a GTX 1070 video card and 24GB of RAM. Check out all the other uploads from the Revision 2017 demoparty.
Eidolon, by Poo-brain, won in the 64k category:
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tv.pouet.net plays a random computer demo. Then it plays another, and another, and on until you are bored of demos. [via HN]
remember !
you're watching a cheap copy ! always watch on real hardware if possible !
The picks aren't limited to the usual Commodore highlights, either. I landed on some wild ZX Spectrum stuff that I'll doubtless never be able to find again. Read the rest
"Because there are so many technological world-firsts in the demo, and because we’re bending the hardware in ways that people have never thought to do so, it’s only fair that we try to explain exactly how this was achieved."
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