lftkryo
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 17 months, 2017–2025
2:22 · 1.2M views · Apr 19, 2017
A Commodore 64 demo by Linus Akesson that fits video and music into 256 bytes, winning the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017. A technical write-up accompanies it.
It is HN's favorite example of extreme code compression, a compelling song and visuals from a program smaller than a tweet.
18 comments from Hacker News
By now when I see "linusakesson.net" I upvote without reading, then I read TFA and watch the vid (or listen to the music in this case). I'm never disappointed. Speaking of which I plan to do something really cool: I've got a "time capsule" C64 (well C128 but close enough) and it still works. It's never been "polluted" by anything modern: no "gotek" SD reader, no nothing: just a real time capsule from the early to mid eighties. And I plan to encode, manually, the 256 bytes (yes, bytes) of linusakesson's "A mind is born" C64 demo. I'll then run it (with the C128 hooked to an old CRT, of course), thinking that technically I could have encoded and ran that in the eighties. Mind blowing stuff: this video
There's an amazing demo called 'A Mind Is Born': this video Amazing principally because the whole thing is 256 bytes: [LINK] I never meet anyone who has even heard of the demoscene, let alone come seen this particular work. I was at a film festival watching a programme of short films, one of which was the well-made AI-box escape romp 'Watch Room': [LINK] And similarly found my interface with my seat disrupted by the closing credits using the music from 'A Mind Is Born'. This being a festival, the director was there, so i could tell him how much i appreciated the reference!
> fwiw, this made me spend a few minutes in youtube looking at old c64 and apple and Atari demos. what people ended up doing with those devices - years after they were mainstream - is still crazy to me. The craziest ever, to me, is the following in 256... bytes. Bytes (including the music ofc, which is the whole point). this video
I still play this video over and over, just for the song, not only because it is 256 bytes, but because it is a compelling song too.
Not MS-DOS, but my favourite 256 byte demo is for the C64: "A Mind Is Born", check it out: this video that music is astonishing.