"How the Hell Did They Manage That" - Commodore 64 Demos
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- Опубликовано: 21 окт 2024
- I take a look at a couple of jaw dropping demos running on a bog standard Commodore 64. I did watch both of these on my real machine to make sure there was no accelerated hardware nonsense going on which they're wasn't. For the purpose of recording ease and quality these are running on an emulator.
The 2 demos featured are "Wonderland XIII-Censor Design" & "The Shores of Reflection".
I always think of what would have happened if I could go back in time with one of these later demos and put them in a freshly made C64 in 1982 in a C64 selling shop... I'd guess the word computer would have been replaced by Commodore or something...
I always wondered why no one developed a C64 GamePad that plugged into both joystick ports with one controlling the d-pad and left trigger and the other controlling the four action buttons and right trigger.
Imagine the games that could have been made for that and even how existing games would have been enhanced. Oh the things that could have been... I hope someone like the _8-Bit Guy_ or _Retro Recipes_ does it one day.
it couldn't happen since these modern demos are created by using today's PC-s. That also explains why demos of old days couldn't pull those tricks you can se today.
@@alkalomadtan nope. This demo and all others like it run on a stock c64. These demo groups also existed back on the day and were creating demos like this back then too. No pc is required.
@@RussMichaels You don't understand. They run on stock c64, but are _created_ on PC tools. In theory, yes, any demo could be created on a c64 but I doubt that today's demo creators don't use pc-s for digitizing, packaging, testing code. Doing these on a c64 would need much more time - time that wouldn't add to the overall experience of the demo.
@@alkalomadtan actually i do understand as I was also a 6502 developer back in the day and highly active in the demo and cracking scene.
Everything about the C64 these days is going strong: the homebrew game scene is going strong, the demoscene is still going strong, the sid music scene is still going strong, as well as the Remix scene. It's a great time to be a C64 or even an 8-bit enthusiast in general. As well as pretty strong Amiga and Speccy scenes as well.
It's great to witness the scene being as healthy all these years later.
I love C64 scene, and I understand why it's big. I would just hope that it would transfer more to Amiga. Making jaw dropping Amiga demos of course is 100 times as much work, and in a way almost impossible. But I would just love to see something new and amazing done with that hardware.
I don't care about the scene anymore.
I always wondered why no one developed a C64 GamePad that plugged into both joystick ports with one controlling the d-pad and left trigger and the other controlling the four action buttons and right trigger.
Imagine the games that could have been made for that and even how existing games would have been enhanced. Oh the things that could have been... I hope someone like the _8-Bit Guy_ or _Retro Recipes_ does it one day.
@@chainreaction8977 I've thought about something similar too. You also have another register for the paddles. It's easy to imagine what could have been if only the VIC II had 16 more colours and/or a richer multicolour mode, if only the SID had six channels, if only the 6510 ran at 2MHz and had enough cycles on every raster line to do more complex stuff, etc. etc. But given how much Speccy owners love their dinky little machine, I doubt such incremental what-ifs would have me made love the C64 any more than I already do. The joypad is a good idea though. Would be great if someone did create it and make a few games for it so it wasn't just a one-and-done gimmick.
The Smack My Bitch Up demo blew me away. :-o A work of genius. The Shores of Reflection demo is beautiful and mesmerising. My love for the C64 is even stronger now. Thanks for this excellent video, Mamemeister :D
Very welcome fella, there's loads more worth watching and even better downloading for the original machine if you can.
this back in time would bury even amiga 500 ! :O
Can someone explain why the C64 colors looked so unsaturated? Was that a technical limitation or an artistic choice by the manufacturer?
A fantastic collection of amazing demos by such great and talented people. Thanks for uploading. 👍🏻
I can provide at least a tiny bit of detail on the "Smack My Bitch Up" portion. Some clever folks have figured out how to not just put sampled sound through the SID (which itself isn't directly capable of playing samples, as you might know), but to actually bend it to produce higher sample rates and resolution (better than the 4-bit volume channel used previously), AS WELL as pushing up to 4 samples simultaneously through its 3 voices + volume. The trick used here seems to be taking chopped segments of the song and looping them in software to recreate the structure of the song. As you might notice, the song doesn't quite follow the original song exactly, but rather is made of bite-sized segments. So, they load the relevant segments off the disk as it's playing, along with the graphics and routines. The disk-streaming work is the really impressive part, how it can load and play those samples (which take a load of memory!) quickly enough that it doesn't miss a beat.
Quite incredible what some people are achieving with old hardware, astonishing.
The funniest thing is, many modern developers can't do the same with 16-core Ryzen 2 and Geforce GTX 1080.. unless there are some libraries available for everything. The performance difference is staggering. Old machines might process one ALU operation for ~150 cycles (multiply in c-64 asm). New ones perform 64 such operations in one cycle (AVX512) per core x 16 cores x 4000x faster CPU frequency. That's around 2.5 billion times faster.
They simply coded a sequencer
I've never heard the C64 reproduce samples of this quality before. I didn't think the CPU could manage it bearing in mind its loading more samples off disk AND showing visuals at the same time.
There's a few techniques; as you said, 3 sid voices plus 4 bit digi to the volume register, but you can also do 8 bit digi using the test bit and waiting for it to count down to a value then popping it on. The last technique is using calculations to find the combo of waveforms that matches the sample, you can then play this at a low register manipulation rate yet still recreate any sound. It is using pure SID voices but changing at a high rate.
The C64 is a technological miracle. Scary to think that a computer made in 1982 could do all this and I still don't think we have seen the last of this machine. I've seen a demo running an MP3 driver on the C64 so...
Yeah its never ceases to amaze me what they're managing to irk out of the old 8 bit systems.
It wasnt intend to. The limit made the evolution of coding to oblivion. Never gonna happen again... sads me a lot. :(
I have see lot demo C64, but this is very hard and beautiful. In this demo ther is very lot big code tech, this man is a genius.
Pity that you don't even *_try_* to answer the question from your video title. Well? How DID they?
I was baited here by the title. I thought this would be a video discussing the techniques used (or likely used). Not just... showing the same demos you can see on pouet.
I tried to look up how they were doing the masking. I didn't think that was a feature of C64 sprites by default but you could construct a scene with a lot of sprites with holes in them to make masks like that.
The layered 3D could exploit a bunch of sprites. Fill the sprite table and render a line. Fill it again and render another line. Repeat to fill the screen. All of the polys are pre-calculated sprites. Just a lot of them, in layers.
I don't know enough about C64 development to say for sure but those are my guesses. Some of it may be rendering a pixel at a time as the text scrolls are't impossible to do with 1.023 MHz. Still must be some trickery going on there. Pre-calculated sines, etc.
If you follow my channel you'll get used to the original video titles I use. The "How The Hell Did They Manage That" is a series of impressive video games stuff where I'm basically asking the question "How the hell did they manage that??".
:-)
Wishful thinking I guess but it would have been a far better video.
Sorry to disappoint!
First you watch "Poems for Bugs" by lftkryo, and then we try to dissect how they did one or another effect, if you like.
To me, just scrolling a bitmap on the display smoothly is impressive. :-D I can't do even that on the C64, not yet at least. These demos are built on top of a massive mountain of knowledge, spanning decades. They use everything they can come up with to produce these stunning effects. It's very interesting to see, since I've learned the basics of the hardware, I can imagine in simple terms how some of these effects are produced. But it's still black magic in the end, because it's not just about the simple principles of how to calculate such effects, but actually finding the optimal routine that does the thing in as few cycles as possible, how to organize everything in memory, how to load data from disk while other things are happening on the screen, etc.
When the drums kicked in at 8:02 I was fucking BLOWN AWAY! WTF??? How??
Impressive ain't it!
This is pushing the c64 to its absolute limits
Demos like this are far more advanced than any commercial game that was released on the C64.
Think you're right but I guess they're able to use all the grunt just for images and sound rather than gameplay.
this type of demos are pure art
It is too, amazing stuff.
Who would've beeen able to guess that C64 would still be used 30 years into thee future, and the gfx effects wow ! I sold my C64 in 1987 and bought Amiga 500.
Quite incredible isn't it.
That music in the first demo is fantastic.
Mental what people are still irking out of this machine.
The C64 is such a capable machine =D
Think how happy we would have been if we saw it doing this kind of stuff back in the mid 80's.
Not only capable. Those ppl programming a non changing environment, would blow our socks off even today. The programming we got today is just 'day after' stuff.
I would have called a priest too, and I'm an atheist, LOL
True that. Greetings, Apollon/2000 A.D. Fuck the lamer Viral Virt
I prefer the Spectrum.
Going through these myself and am very impressed in what am seeing ..
Reminds me of the Amiga .. Desert Dreams has all the Amigas coding just on a slower FPS .. Totally mind blowing when blasting through an amp ..
Smack my bitch sounds amazing and some very nice visuals in these demos
we are demo is a cracking C64 demo just crazy how the C64 handles code in the right hands .. even the mega drive has one or two demos ... Nice upload Alan enjoyed ;)
As you mentioned the original, you'd probably also appreciate the remake of Desert Dreams on the C64. Very impressive how close they managed to match the original. Also, the SID chip makes the tunes quite enjoyable to listen to as well.
I was shocked the 1st time I saw DD running on the C64 and and very impressed running from the Amiga both demos are fantastic ... the sound from that sid chip is bonkers
Yeah it incredible what coders can achieve on what we thought was very limited hardware. Thanks for the heads up with Desert Dreams lads.
The difference was the C64 could do some really amazing things, but it could only do that. No way to use any of this stuff to the that degree in games. The amiga could do this stuff in it's sleep and therefore in games.
Here is what I have wondered for years and years and years....why oh why oh why oh why oh why is this talent Never put to use in creating C64 games ...there could be cutaway scenes for certain games for example that show off some of these routines....or could be game intros related to the game and the story....i think Pinball Illusions on the Amiga might have attempted to begin using these codera for stuff like I said.
I'm not technical but I think in many cases these graphical techniques really push the C64 and there just simply wouldn't be anything 'power' left for the actual game. Have you seen 'Sam's Journey', it's very impressive?
Mamemeister
I have seen Sam's Journey and its awesome.
Yes these demos probably push the C64 to its limits....but these techniques can still be used as cutaway scenes or to tell the story, or if the game character is being teleported through time, or during the end of game credits.....and in some cases as backgrounds to a game like Arkanoid.
Lemmings-C64 was made by a demogroup (100 lemmings walking at real framerate on screen is pretty heavy duty), so they have certainly have put some of the talent to use.
Manfred Trenz of Rainbow Arts who did the Turrican games also did some demos/intros at first.
the music at 11:58
Holy crap. It's outstanding what they are able to sqeeze out of that little calculator 😀
Hehe, not bad for a 35 year old system.
Actually the 64 was Commodore's BIG calculator. TI forced them out of the little calculator business years prior, so Jack Tramiel had a vendetta and returned the favor in the home computer market.
The demos are wonderful, but like the title implied, I really hoped you were going to explain the different of graphic modes in the demos, how voice sampling works, the different kind of rastersprites etc.
Ah sorry for disappointing you, sadly I'm a complete non techy type and the title was more how in awe I am of what these guys achieve.
My mind is blown 👀
💖💖💖Dankeschön 💖💖💖
717 🙏
whats with the eye cancer scan lines...
Whoever created these demos must have sold their souls to the devil! It cannot be explained otherwise!!
Maybe they spent their time on and focused their minds on getting good at programming? IDK, just saying. LOL, silly person.
my A register caught on fire
You've lost me on that one!
The program counter made an stack overflow between my legs so I had to offload some of my bits into the void…
ALL HAIL OUR LORD, ALL HAIL THE ALMIGHTY 6510, the SID and the VIC!!!
Did he ever answer the question ... I was in the demo scene in the 90s though we focused on the amigas but started on C64... First time ever seeing anything like this crazy
Ive seen so many great demos on the C64 through the years, but always wondered.. was it not possible to make games that looked as good as the demos??
Memory, you only have 64K so all memory is dedicated to gfx and sound.
You should check out mayhem in monsterland
@@jazztracks78 @Liquidcadmus also CPU cycles. The C64 only ran an 8-bit chip (MOS 6510; a 6502 variant) at roughly 1MHz (1.02 NTSC; 0.985 PAL) so computing time was quite limited. Basically when you're watching a demo (a good one, at least) you're seeing ALL THAT THE MACHINE HAS TIME TO DO given the available resources. So, short answer, no.
then lets start to discuss the teqniks of it
the part where it played an actual song.. is that real ? it didn't sound chippy, I never knew it was possible! #mindblown
There are indeed techniques for getting sampled sound out of the SID. Very hacky, but they're widely accepted in the demoscene.
You can do 8 bit digi's and more. See the artist LMan. The SID internally uses a 16 bit digi, we just needed the technique to directly control the output. It uses waiting and toggling of the test bit.
Is the prodigy song a actual c64 playing it ?
Good grief - karada making it in to a demo! Now I've seen it all.
Haha, I had to Google to see what you meant!
Nice, didn't know the C64 could do that, that's really your Amiga, right, lol.
Amazing what folk can do with older tech, watched a Mega Drive demo a while back where they pulled some amazing music from it and had it doing things like mode 7 effects, sprite scaling and rotation.
Yeah it's amazing how they can continue to irk more and more from the hardware.
Yeah it was Overdrive by Titan. They released Overdrive 2 in 2017 and it's way more impressive. If you haven't seen it, go!
These developers need to make some games! Check out Sams Journey. It totally looks like its come out of the demoscene!
Imagine if this was an advert for the C64 in 1982
Well, we would live in 2140 now. Sad they didnt.
Haha, that would have put paid to the other 8 bits I reckon!
which music is playing in your intro? it sounds like a cross between c64 and amiga music!
It was taken from a demo which I can't recall off hand. I dont think it's either a C64 or Amiga. I'll try and find it.
Thanks!
thats Daniel Wressle or "Carter" when he made the song
here you go!
ruclips.net/video/-Cc09YsWDQs/видео.html
I like old-school demos more.
What about some demos that use the 6502 in the disk drive?
♥
I also ask the question, that is the title... and also at the same time,
I am afraid, that I am afraid of the answer... some bizarre ASM, etc.
My C=64 can do this?
Mind=Blown!
Great feature Alan ive never seen any of this stuff before.
Thanks Scott, it's amazing just how many of these awesome demos there are.
It is for sure making me want to rig the c64 up again :)
I never knew that fishes were on the right :)
Damn. I have no idea how they did this!
Amazing coding skillz!
Demos on all Commodores from the PET to the A500 are impressive for so little RAM even more impressive for so little sound chip power as far as the non 64/128 8-Bits are concerned not so much for the C64 and AMIGA because you know the sound chips are expected to do that on those but the very little RAM thing goes for anything up the the 512k A500 normal.
The music being less impressive on the C64 and AMIGA compared to the little Commodores because of being good soundchips means nothing though it's just more impressive when a crap sound chip has banging tures from the demo perspective but there is really good music on the good chips though just that the video is more impressive demo wise than the music because you know the chips are good at music but it's important to have good music with your good demo though so I guess if the video is in sync with the music thats what makes C64 and AMIGA music impressive on the demos although you know they can pull the tunes off.
The sound is impressive in the demos of the better machines because of the syncing with video and it fitting perfectly and being a good tune rather than musical impressiveness as they are good soundchips so I guess they still impress demos wise in a different way sound wise to the crap soundchips ones.
O man i was a graphics/sprite program back in tha days. Need to do it again some day xD,
amazing 8 b bits art
Yep, it's a bit special.
OMG at Smack my b*tch up :O
Yep, it's a bit nice ain't it!
Wait.. is that being produced by the C64 chipset? Jesus fucking christ.
Yep. As some one who used to reconstruct known music (like Smack My Bitch Up) on the Amiga, this is quite easy. It's basically looped samples of the track captured at a slow sample rate in 8 bits mono (much like sampling a sped up sound and playing back on the low notes/keys on a synth keyboard) you can capture more music without running out of memory too quickly. But still, it is amazing what the SID chip can do if pushed to it's limits.
Those fake scanlines look weird. Show us on the real deal?
Shape demo is recorded with wrong SID. Listen to filters at 15:40. Should be 8580 :)
I'm afraid you've lost me with this, wrong sid?
The first C64s used a different SID chip, the 6581, found in the breadbin C64. The C64C used the 8580. They have quite distinct sounds and different capabilities. For example if you play Impossible Mission on the 8580 - you don't hear the "Another Visitor...." speech as the 8580 couldn't do it. Try a program for the pc call SIDPLAY2W. and load a few tunes into it. It lets you change which SID is being emulated and you'll be able to hear noticable differences. Ocean Loader 3 sounds very different in certain sections on the different chips
My understanding is that the original C64 SID 6581 chip had a design _flaw_ that meant it would make a popping noise when a channel's volume was changed (or something - I'm not really sure). The SID was never meant to be able to playback sampled sound, but clever programmers realised they could exploit this flaw to produce 4-bit sample playback. This effect was driven by the CPU hammering away at the SID chip, so the programs that use the sample effect had to stop doing everything else. God knows how they managed to get sample playback in these demos. The 8580 was the _upgrade_ to the 6581 that did generally sound better, especially with the filters. Unfortunately Commodore _fixed_ the _flaw_ in the 6581, so I don't think the 8580 can playback samples.
it wasnt the 8580 itself it was the series condensator. You are 100% correct. The 64C was just a waste of money. Ppl actually sold them and got a old one, with trade and bucks between. (those who didnt know, got a bargain, until they realized their mistake)
I made a 1 bit sampler back then... put a normal music cassette in the casette player, pressed play.. and 1 bit sound came out.. hard to tell the musicpiece but... it worked :P
Ok these proved me wrong music is just as impressive as the video on these I know the AMIGA could do music sampling but not a C64 although both can do very good music but not the other ones unless it's a good programmer so they are more impressive than these music wise if pulled off into a good tune because we wouldn't think the weak TED chips could do anything like a C64 or AMIGA can.
Yep, these demos really push the 64 beyond what most thought it was capable of.
The sid chip volume control caused a small static sound when put the volume on and off. That is the way of making the samples. on/off by Hz. Simple. When the latter 64 came on market idiots on Commodore put a condensator in series of the volume control, to get rid of the 'click' sound. That killed the 64 immediately. Less than 1 year the sales dropped below 50%... rotfl marketing and enginering geniouses. =)
@@MikieSWE so does that mean that on a C=64 with an updated SID chip, you couldn't get digitized audio? Like Impossible Mission wouldn't talk? Lame. But that was what Commodore was best at... fixing stuff that wasn't broken and shooting themselves in the foot!
11:25 sli rastra , good gfx
There's still plenty of games released for 64 :)
Yep, some awesome arcade conversions!
Excellent demos, a tip when recording from the emulator you might want to do away with the scan lines as they do create an inferior picture.
Ah thanks Marko, bear that in mind for next time.
Mamemeister
I LOVE Scanlines...it makes it look like one is looking directly at a real CRT
HOWEVER people might be complaining because these scanlines dont quite look centered or something...almost as if is a mask
@@eijentwun5509 simulated scanlines always look shite in emulators. That's why I don't use the "feature" (it's not a bug, it's a "free enhanced feature!").
It is simply Amazing what they would squeeze out of a primitive home computer with only 65Kb memory ! Nowdays they dont bother much they keep relying on Raw power and extreme graphics cards to get somethint done instead of smart programming and innovation.Back then the things they did on ZxSpectrum 48k and C64 its almost like using a remote control fuel canister to move some Commercial Big ass Airplane !
Yep, incredible what they irk out old hardware.
Usable 58.5kb as I remember. (or I just sux memory) But yeah... I have seen most of it. Even on a PC, back then, a 3D demo, 3D graphics, FPV, with techno music!, really mindblowing.... 53kb! and 4.5 mins long. Im so sad I lost that file. It would blow ppls mind of today. It was a old C= coder that made it for a PC... =)
You know... the old hardcore days will never come back. :P
Indeed so i would really like to see it that demo,Real Hardcore days back then
Promise: if I find it somewhere on my (working) old shit disks from -96 in my basement, the day I really want to dig in there, I will post it.
@9 minutes THERE IS NO FUCKING WAY THAT MUSIC IS COMING FROM A C64!
petti78 Yes, it is quite good isn't it!
This must be an emulator? Surely not in a humble c64??
These demos are made to run on real hardware.
Yeah it's gorgeous!
I'm really having trouble believing that the sample (the prodigy smack my b up) with that audio quality and sample length would fit in 64kb... Sorry, I don't buy it.
It runs off a disk image but I can promise you this runs perfectly on a bog-standard C64. I was as blown away as you hence the video title.
@@mamemeister Nonsense, that's not a C-64. The graphics look like they are Amiga.
@@WebSprocket Sadly you're wrong, I'll make a video showing this running on my C64. Prepare to be amazed.
@@WebSprocket Here you go, video just for you.
ruclips.net/video/OZJU1JFB0sk/видео.html
@@mamemeister I have done some digging around. It appears that the sample is split into several small pieces which are loaded into memory while the previous sample is still playing. Very impressive! Thanks for the video: you proved me wrong, sir!
where to you get these demos from ??
You can get them from here.
csdb.dk/
thanks :)
I recognise that voice, Kris be it thou?
Not with that fella, what voice would that be?
I'm always a little afraid of IRA bombs when I listen to this.
Agh, horrible and unnecessary CRT filter applied >_
Quessir imho, great