andrewmjenner
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2016–2021
8:33 · 93K views · Aug 1, 2015
The winning demo from Revision 2015's oldskool competition, running on a real 1981 IBM PC with CGA at 4.77MHz. It uses extreme tricks to produce effects, graphics and sound far beyond what the hardware was thought capable of.
Held up as the peak of demoscene hardware hacking, especially for its finale and for how good the PC speaker sound gets.
4 comments from Hacker News
You've probably seen these but I thought I'd mention them anyway. [LINK] [LINK] Piece de resistance: [LINK] (live cheering FTW) / this video (capture card copy) The credits in the 3rd video are an excellent example of using modern tooling. (How this was done has been documented online and is easy to find; it did take some cheating to do it but it's still awesome.) Hrm, the SID music in [LINK] is also amazing (this demo was on two floppies, I particularly like the music in the 2nd part which uses a distinctly different theme) and very obviously produced by modern tools too. (Note, that video is a 50fps capture and uses a real SID.)
> It's like a forum full of carpenters that are using Black and Decker tools to build houses. In that analogy the end result is the same, but the process to get there more complicated. In reality, the difference is between a house that has stuff like insulation and faucets that don't leak, versus than something slapped together in 5 minutes for $50 that costs 50 times more to live in, for as long as you live in it. It's less effort for the programmer, more effort for every machine it gets run on, every time it gets run . And that stuff compounds in non-linear ways, too: The more data has to be read from disks, the more useless the disk cache becomes, the more data has to be shuffled around in RAM, the more useless the CPU cache becomes. Using gigantic frameworks for programs that use 0.1% of them, which still set up and maybe even poll for all sorts of stuff, not knowing it's not needed, is not "wrong" (certainly not ever when it's open source), but it's more wasteful for what it achieves . I just checked, and my Directory Opus with 3 windows open, one of them having 2 panes, and all the custom buttons etc. is taking up 100 MB of memory. The list of features is huge. Another thing I have to think of is audio software. Sure, there's also VST that come with gigantic bitmaps or whatever, but generally, efficiency is king. They know their code doesn't run in a vacuum and they are dealing with customers (even when talking about free software) who pay keen attention to such things,
A PC beeper can sound just as good, when used on a fast enough PC and the beeper output is connected to something better than the built-in piezo speaker. Even on the original IBM PC, you could make it sound almost as good by very careful optimization and close to 100% of allocation of CPU cycles, like shown at the end of the 8088 MPH demo: this video
I don't remember it being widely used for music, but some games did a pretty good job with it. [LINK] The 8088MPH demo also sounds surprisingly good. this video