Here’s a cracking demo by DJ_Level_3 and Marv1994 done on an Oscilloscope, with the music creating the visuals. The music is great too, but of course, it’s not really responsible for the visuals, there are high-frequency sounds doing that, which we can’t hear. Utterly amazing stuff.
The demo got 1ST PLACE in Wild, and 1ST PLACE in Crowd Favorite at the recent demo party, Revision 2025.
Thanks Hackaday for featuring it.
Even if you’ve never been curious about what computers in the 80s looked like, you might like to see all the emulators on this page.
Multiple computers are covered here, including the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, the Spectrum 48K and a few others I’ve never heard of.
The nice thing about these is that they run in the browser, so nothing else to install. The files are tiny by today’s standards, and they run immediately. No need to learn an arcane set of commands to load and run your programme.
It’s also given me a whole new appreciation for the Amstrad CPC and Speccy as demoscene platforms. The graphics and sound of the Amstrad platform are quite impressive!
There were some great demos, music and graphics released at Transmission64 2021 yesterday but one of my favourite demos was Mahna Mahna by Mahna Mahna. You can watch it above but if you have a C64 emulator or real hardware then grab it from CSDb and watch it there. So fun. I love it.
I loved the PETSCII King Tut too. An amazing piece of work when you realise it was made from the characters available on the C64 keyboard and not drawn pixel by pixel.
Find more of the releases on this page at the Transmission64 website but before I leave you here’s a selection of the stunning graphics entered in the competition this year.
The entire stream of the Transmission64 demoparty is available on Twitch.
How did they manage to squeeze all that into a 64k executable? Watch it fullscreen. Amazing.
Reading the top voted comments on this post gives the impression that some /. visitors are not altogether that geeky but the replies are a lot more interesting.
I can’t seem to make heads or tails of this post. It’s techno-babble and word salad. I guess I should remember this feeling when I talk about programming with my non-programming friends.
Sort of sad as a programmer you have no knowledge of some of programming history.
Batman Forever is an amazing looking Amstrad CPC demo made last year and won first place in the CPC Demo compo at Forever 2011.
Stunning artwork, great effects but perhaps a little bit of the old school yard “my computer is better than your one” in there too. Not too fond of the Commodore 64 are they? 😉
Also check out pushnpop.net, an Amstrad demoscene website! It even has an article on cross-platform development using Linux and Vim!
Thanks Keith for leaving a comment in my last post about this demo. Well worth watching!
In related news, the 1541-II I ordered last week arrived this morning. I’m waiting on the zoomfloppy USB interface to connect it to my laptop now. Fingers crossed it’ll work and it’s not too late for my 20 year old Commodore 64 5 1/4 discs. I tend to agree that if it wasn’t for piracy ancient games would be lost to history now ..
This Amiga demo blew me away when I first saw it. There are better ones out there but I think the dancing figures were such an unusual feature at the time it struck a chord with a lot of people.
Check out the follow up demo, Nine Fingers and other releases by Spaceballs. Of course, you should grab the original disks for State of the Art and 9 Fingers and watch on a real Amiga rather than watching a low quality Youtube video!