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.
Eon is an astonishing Amiga demo released a few years ago. It runs on a bog-standard Amiga 500, a machine that first saw the light of day in 1985. Here’s how it was made.
Andreas shared a comparison that will make it clear to any developer on a modern machine just how much slower the Amiga 500 is compared to a modern machine.
Let’s MD5 ~800Kb data, using reference RSA MD5 code.
- On an old, but modern, Surface Laptop 2 that took 2ms.
- The Amiga 500 took 29 seconds.
This CPU is more than 10,000x slower than the CPU in your PC or Mac.
One of my WordPress plugins will do an MD5 calculation of the URL on every request, and it’s like nothing. It’s not a big job for a web server to do. An Amiga could not do that.
However, it can, in the right hands, seemingly perform miracles and create cool looking demos that even today impress! There’s something to be said for programming in a constrained environment.
An amazing C64 demo. The quest to find a friend.
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!
Oh dear. This will be so niche that nobody is going to read. Anyway.
Long before MP3 files were a thing, the world had mod files. It had s3m, xm, and it music files. There was a thriving scene of musicians creating music for the love of it. Files were distributed on bulletin boards, by swapping disks and in the early internet of the mid to late nineties, by downloading from Hornet or ftp.cdrom.com.
Before I was really online I frequented BBSes in Ireland and every Sunday morning I’d download the latest week’s worth of new scene music from a BBS in Northern Ireland. Luckily, the telephone system here was loosening up, and we had pretty cheap rates at the weekend and in the evenings. There was a huge amount of rubbish there but some classics too, all sadly rotting away on some long forgotten hard drive.
The days of using a modem meant a slow connection to the world. Thankfully, the files weren’t huge. Unlike MP3 files, mod files were instructions on using embedded samples to play the music. The samples were short 8 or 16 bit sounds that were used over and over to make the music. That resulted in tiny files. For example, the title music to Cannon Fodder, a piece of music that is over 2 minutes long, is only 245Kb, and that was a fairly large file for the time.
Want a taste of amazing mods without doing any work? Many years ago I purchased a compilation CD called Freedom with some remarkable tracks. Here are a few songs from it. YouTube really doesn’t do them justice, however. You can grab MP3 rips of the CD from scene.org or look for the songs on The Mod Archive.
How do you play mod files today? The simplest way is by using VLC player. That player natively supports several mod formats. Install it and double-click your mod files to load them. Another option is Open Cubic Player. You’ll find the original DOS version on that site, but a separate Unix port is now maintained on this GitHub repository. Opinion on how good a player it was is divided in the community, but I loved it.
It’s a command line application you can install on macOS with brew install ocp or grab the Linux version from the GitHub repository. A DOS version is available from their homepage, which might let you run it on Windows. I created a macOS application using Automator. I had it “run shell script” and entered the following to change the directory to where my MOD files are stored and then launch the player:cd ~/retro/MODS/ && /usr/local/bin/ocp
Save that as an application and copy into Applications. I couldn’t get it to load mod files by associating them in Finder but it’s possible to use the file navigator built into the player.
If you were active in the PC demoscene in the 90s, you’ll probably remember this player, and I think you’ll enjoy revisiting some of your old mod favourites. You can download mod files from a few sites listed on the Open Cubic Player GitHub page, but the best place to look is The Mod Archive. Best of all, you can play the mods in your browser, so you don’t need to worry about this ancient player at all. Their “About Modules” page lists other players for Linux, macOS, and Windows too.
Demos come in all shapes and sizes, 4k, 64k, intros, demos and more, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen a demo running on a Commodore 64 disc drive, or 1541 drive. You can read more about it on the Freespin homepage.
The 1541 family of drives have the same CPU as the Commodore 64 so adapting code to run on it will be easy for anyone familiar with the machine but what’s different here is that the drive is hooked up directly to the monitor to display the demo.
Sound is supplied by the drive, and as expected is the usual buzzing sounds until the end when it changes and becomes slightly more musical.
Worth a watch, even if you have no interest in demos. The idea of running software on a disc drive like this blows my mind!
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.
Remember that cat vibing to Levan Polkka?
Well, C64 demo coder Logiker created a C64 version and it’s awesome! It’s a one part #PETSCII production and a funny addition to the #demoscene. You can find it in the usual places but if you just want to watch it look here.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have been added to a C64 demo called Berniemania by the talented Pretzel Logic. Even includes the knitted mittens!
Older readers may recognise the setting for the demo looks very like the classic Batmania by the same group. Nice bit of work reworking an instantly recognisable demo!
Memento Mori is a stunning Commodore 64 demo released by Genesis Project that won first place at the Function 2020 demo party recently. The picture above was shared by Raistlin/G*P on Twitter saying:
Razorback delivered this stunning piece for Memento Mori. This is a 408 pixel wide multicolour bitmap that we scrolled, right through the side borders, at 25fps, streaming from disk as we went. A world first on C64 🙂
Raistlin/G*P
Watch it here on Youtube!