Demo’s are – of course – a way to show the 1337 skillz of the creators to show that they are able to stretch the limited hardware to extremes and show you things you thought weren’t possible on your homecomputer.
Sometimes demo’s are like battleraps; they dis other demogroups and their creations by taking an effect from another demo and improving on it, rendering the original effect obsolete or second-rate.
The ultimate blow in these friendly battles comes in the form of retroporting demo’s to a platform that is older and less powerful, for example porting an amiga demo to a c64 version. Take a classic amiga or pc demo – a demo that has stunned people by the way it stretched thecomputer’s capabilities – and simply make a c64 version of it, disregarding the breadbox’s inferiority regarding memory, processor speed and graphic capabilities, and you will be legend. Check out the examples below:
The legendary PC demo “Second Reality” by Future Crew:
How to do computer animation when your machine just isn’t fast enough? You create a really slow animation, film the screen and then speed it up, as this video from 1985 demonstrates.
Of course there’s nothing old-fashioned about the technique itself; animation movies like Shrek, Happy Feet, Ice Age etc. are not real-time animations either. It takes a lot of time and computers working at the same time to render each frame in such a movie. And it will stay like this for quite some time into the future, because as computers are becoming faster, the images will become better looking, demanding more processing power.
Here’s kaneel showing you how to use the render-to-sample function in renoise to create your own sounds. Renoise is old-skool style music creation software, a so-called “tracker”, with new shiny features.
Maximum Overdose 8 is coming. I’ts a party for vintage systems lovers, systems like c64, atari, speccies etc. There will be live acts providing some serious 8bit swingin’, and of course there will be scene competitions.
Maximum Overdose 8 is held 25 to 28 may in Luebeck, Germany.
A new batch of mp3’s has just come in at The SID Recordings Archive, with a bunch of tunes from my favorite composers, Laxity and Drax! They’ve been around on the scene for a long time in groups like Vibrants and Maniacs of Noise, creating some of the funkiest and tightest stuff heard on a c64. Since creating these tunes, Laxity has moved on to create music for video games, and video games themselves. Drax has also moved on, but both guys haven’t forgotten their roots and still pop out a ’scene’ tune now and then on the Vibrants site, or even competing on the c64 at parties like X2006. Get down on these funky ass mp3’s!
Remember Second Reality? The PC demo by Future Crew? Well at the time it was state-of-the art PC demo wizardry. Impressive stuff! Enter Smash Designs, a commodore 64 demo. To show that the old breadbox is not dead, they recreate the whole demo on a c64, that’s like, a 100 times less powerful then a PC at that time. And they got it nailed right down to the music!
The High Voltage Sid Collection is the biggest collection of SID tunes (commodore 64 music) available. It is well maintained by a team of fanatic bleeplovers and definately worth the download.
The new HVSC #46 just came out with something like a 1000 new additions.
To play SIDs I recommend sidplay2 if you are using linux or windows. You can also find plugins for winamp and other audio players. Just look for ’sid’.
