C64 Demos
The C64 is a legendary machine. It contains some ingenious pieces of chip design, such as the graphics and sound chips, which were highly innovative at the time they came out. This was in 1982. That’s 40 years ago - half a human lifetime.
I have a lot of admiration for the C64 demo scene, wherein people write programs that run audiovisual presentations in real time. Take this in: these aren’t animated movies that are computed frame by frame, this is software running and producing imagery and sound as it is running. There’s also a kind of competition to make these programs really small, and it’s frankly amazing what output a small amount of code can produce.
Just browse this page to watch some of the demos. Yes, you can watch these play in real time in a C64 emulator running in the web page. That’s what today’s technology has to offer, and you may yawn at the lo-fi audio and lo-res video. But never forget I could pull one of those old C64s out of my closet (five of them are in there, just to make sure) and run the demo on that very, 40-years-old hardware.
Tags: the-nerdy-bit