Tag: demoscene

Categories
C64

Freespin – a 1541 demo

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!

Categories
C64 demoscene

Mahna Mahna

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.

Categories
C64

Cat Vibing To Levan Polkka

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.

Categories
C64

Berniemania

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!

Categories
C64

Memento Mori

remember that you die

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!

Categories
Music

James Last plays the Beatles

In the mid 80’s I found a cassette tape of Beatles music played by the James Last orchestra. While I sort of knew some of the music this was the first time I heard many of the songs and I preferred this orchestra version to the original!

The next time the Beatles would intrude on my life would be when I watch Red Storm for the first time in the early nineties.

I guess I have a thing for instrumental Beatles music. 🙂

Categories
C64

Before I knew about revision control

Going through some of my old C64 discs and I found a bunch of “work in progress” demo parts and routines I was playing with.

Back then I didn’t know about revision control but it was a pleasure to find these bits and pieces of code that I had completely forgotten about. Here’s a few screenshots from Vice, but it’s shocking the difference between Vice and real hardware. The cascading Ozone logo is very pale compared to what I see on another screen. Could it be the screen? Or is it the emulator?

These were found on disc 23, side 1. All those discs are littered with small files, chunks of code that I was working on before throwing them together in the Action Replay monitor.

Kids these days are spoiled with their fancy editors. 🙂

Categories
C64

Scrollwars

Yes, yes, another C64 demo. This is Scrollwars, released in 2013. How, just how?

Categories
C64

Tunnel Vision by OMG

Tunnel Vision, C64 demo

So, apparently this is the first demo by this developer and it’s amazing. Hell of a fire effect.

I discovered this while testing the SD2IEC on my C64. Assembly64 has a “One File Top 200” directory that I was working on because the disk images have characters the filebrowser has trouble with. This small bit of bash shell script will sanitise it before viewing on a C64:

for i in *
do
  mv -v "$i" "echo $i|cut -c13-|tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'|tr -cd ' a-z0-9'"
done

It changes the filenames to lowercase and then removes anything but a-z, 0-9 and space and also cuts out the first 13 characters . There are still a few shortened filenames but it looks much better now.

Edit on July 8th, 2019: The SD2IEC is slow when there are lots of files in a directory, plus the directory contained other directories so I decided to move everything into directories named after the first letter of each directory with this code:

for i in *
do
    new_dir=echo "$i"|cut -b 1
    mkdir -p ../1/$new_dir
    cp -v "$i"/* ../1/$new_dir/
done

Everything’s in sub directories of a new directory called “1”. There are multiple demos in each directory but not enough that it’s too slow. 🙂

Categories
C64

We Come in Peace Demo

This is just amazing. All done on a lowly C64 by Censor Design and Fairlight. Grab the demo from csdb. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in the SD2IEC because it has a fastloader. I should buy an Ultimate II+ or Ultimate 64 shouldn’t I?