Demoscene tribute: the discreet charm of oldschool

A little bit late to the party, but maybe someone haven’t seen it yet and it’s definitelly something worth witnessing. Folks creating demos on “smaller” platforms (mainly C64 & Atari) just seem to refuse to acknowledge that golden years are gone. What’s cool, in many cases they manage to “bend” the reality and create stuff that simply shouldn’t be possible. Poster example is relatively fresh demo - Edge of Disgrace by Booze Design (winner of X 2008).

Production of this little gem spanned over period of 7 years (see detailed development notes)! True labour of love. Single effects may not be that breathtaking if you’re familiar with latest C64 release (even if almost every of them is an improvement over existing), but the overall feeling is just flawless + they’re silky smooth. Music, the way different demo parts link with each other (usually, you have to fight to get memory even for the effect itself, forget about transitions), graphics, all top notch (watch this video if you want to hear crowd’s reaction). There’s plenty of demos with great code (in fact, watch whole top 4 from X2008, “credits” effect from Natural Wonders 2 is just sick, Numen [Atari] is another example), but EoD is a rare example of amazing code, graphics, music and design mixed together. I wonder what would Jack Tramiel say after watching this.

Old comments

John Rockefeller 2009-01-26 02:51:50

Great demos, thanks for the links.

Stephen 2009-01-26 07:26:30

This is absolutely UNBELIEVABLE!
They did this with a C64? With 64k of barely available memory?
(What I want to know is whether they had to use another computer to help them write the machine code that did all this funky stuff.)
The C64 will NEVER die! Hooray!
Somebody tell Microsoft. I think they could learn something about efficient coding from these guys.

admin 2009-01-26 08:24:03

AFAIR, most of todays C64 demos is done using cross compilers, but they all run on old, original hardware.

Gynvael Coldwind 2009-01-26 10:12:50

Woaaah…. Pure power… I’m out of word huh, just great ;>
I’m surprided that this would run on a real hardware of C64… 64kb of memory OK, but CPU? What was it? 1 MhZ ? Huh… unbelievable ;>

Tim 2009-01-26 22:11:42

Why? I’ll admit that is some highly impressive assembly skill displayed, but the question remains…Why?

Honza 2009-01-26 22:16:16

64K of RAM? Did they even have that much?