Support The 8-Bit Guy on Patreon: / 8bitguy1 Visit my website: www.the8bitguy.com In this episode, I explore the 1982 Commodore Christmas Demo for the Commodore 64.
I remember running the Christmas program for my Grandparents in 1983. When the snowman started to dance, my Grandmother was amazed. I was 12. Good times.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943 "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 "Apple is already dead." Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, 1997 "Two years from now, spam will be solved." Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 2004
Ahhh.. a Commodore Christmas. The feels! It was a great morning every year as kid waiting to see what new Commodore device/upgrade/peripheral/game/etc was waiting for me under the tree!!
This takes me back. My brother got a C64 for Christmas, my dad wasn't prone to extravagant spending but the guy in the shop convinced him it was the 'future' hence we woke up expecting a spectrum or similar and there it was a C64! wow the power.
I was so into SID music back in the day that I actually recorded it to cassette tapes so I could listen to it when I wasn’t at the computer. I must’ve had 50 floppies filled with songs I had downloaded from various BBSs back in the day. It was truly amazing what could be done with that chip that seems so limited by today’s standards.
Yeah I did that too but with Amstrad CPC tunes as I did not have a C64 back then (I do now). However there were some brilliant ones on the CPC, they just have a different sound profile and character to the C64.
A very merry christmas to you, and thanks for creating such cool content! I very much remember 'the demo scene' from when it was big on early PCs. Back then the whole MOD, S3M, XM and IT 'tracker scene' was big too. Been to a few of the 'compos' (competitions) too. The ever astonishing graphic feats. Some of that stuff should be really cool to make a vid about. Check out the Mind Candy DVDs: www.mindcandydvd.com/ - awesome.
Heh. Remember when all downloads from BBS'es came with some .com-format 'demo' with horizontal scrollbars? Or when you saw the 'plasma'-effect the first time? ;) Oooh trip down memory lane.
I still have my 1040st and Mega2 st, both work still. Atari over Amiga any day. Same goes for Atari 800 over the Vic20. Own an 800 too and that still works. I am in the USA.
I remember this demo well - as I come from the UK I had it on tape. Amazingly, it was the one time of year that my parents liked having my C64 on the main TV in the house so they could play it as a rudimentary sort of screen saver during Christmas dinner and the like. They even put up with the music! Great times, great memories 😊
now I may be a lowlife teenage computer geek but imagining being a kid wandering a snowy outlet mall and looking through a window and seeing that being displayed on a TV with a beaming commodore next to it and being amazed at the graphics just makes me smile. Yeah, it's early August but screw that merry Christmas.
Well well well, maybe the first c64 demo. And so nice. But the demo scene really started with the cracktros probably on the c64. And at least in the begining, the scene was really centered in europe. There is some documentaries about, but the definitive one need to be made!!!
I really loved the demo's that would draw outside the regular screen in the borders. Or showing more sprites than available on-chip. Of course all trickery using the raster line interrupt...
Excelentes videos los del 8bit guy. Acá en Chile el Commodore no fue tan masivo como el Atari, pero recuerdo jugar el Special Delivery en la época cercana a navidad para darle "ambiente" a diciembre. Feliz navidad para todos.
There was also Jingle Disk for the IBM PC, which LGR did a video about. It spawned C64 and Apple II versions as well, but those were half-hearted conversions which didn't take full advantage of the extra graphics colors of those systems.
I definitely had a demo like this on something. I want to say it was my TI-99. I remember a scene almost exactly like the wreath, and another with a fireplace. I also coded a pretty great, for the time anyway, Christmas Tree decoration kit game for my Atari 8-bit machine in BASIC out of a Family Computing magazine. It took me the better part of a day, maybe even spanned over two, typing it on that membrane keyboard. It let you build a tree and add decorations by moving branches and all the bits around, all in ASCII characters, then when you were done it'd display it and play "Oh, Christmas Tree." This was before I had my tape backup so I did all that code input just for it to vanish as soon as I turned off the Atari.
@8:05 has my whole existence in question because I always thought it was “up on the house top reindeer paws”. Obviously I know they don’t have paws. I assumed it was a dumb rhyme that meant they were walking around. The song makes so much more sense now.
+Sentry Gun I would hope most people can read that lol, pretty sure we learned all those words in our required year of spanish :p at least i'm pretty sure most states have that...
Ahhh, the C64 Christmas demo. I first encountered it when I worked for Commodore as an intern in 1983 and have played it every year since... Thanks for sharing and Merry Christmas!
Very interesting. From your description of your design process for PX2, I didn't realize that it was possible to combine character graphics and sprites on the screen at the same time. How did that work? Just print characters, then draw pixels?
It's a cool resource-saving design feature. Do you have to redraw the character graphics if a sprite obscures them, or does the hardware take care of that?
Systems with sprites likely had Display Priority flags. This would determine if a sprite was opaque or transparent, and if text or bitmapped pixels displayed on top of or behind sprites. Sprites do not affect anything they pass over.
Is basic on the commodore an interpreted language like python? I'm trying to make sense of why they would ship the disk with source code on it rather than just a binary.
xcvsdxvsx Python isn't even a real programming language, since you can't make a stand-alone executable with it. Any computer that runs a program made with Python has to have a Python installed on it. It's just a scripting language.
Commodore programs were frequently written in mostly BASIC (which is indeed interpreted), with any parts that needed speed (especially true for games) in machine code.
@ct92404 He never said it was a programming language, but interpreted; meaning the computer interprets the human code as it is executed. Which is how BASIC is treated, however BASIC can be compiled as there were BASIC compilers available for the C64 which made the application run a LOT faster,
I remember seeing this demo in the stores when I was a kid and always wanted it to play it in my house. Never thought I’d see it again. Thank you for posting this.
I’m pretty sure Christmas demos can be found on other platforms as well, There’s the Sierra Christmas demos as well as IBM’s own, both for the PC. I believe I heard about them from LGR? Could be wrong tho.
I got my first computer, a VIC-20, on Christmas Day 1982. That, and my C=64 were the best computers that I have ever owned. Thanks for the memories, Dave.
I remember going into my local Radio Shack during Christmas season and seeing a Tandy 1000 HX running a Christmas demo similar to this. I tried for years to find it but never could.
Thank you so much for making this video! I still remember the Christmas our first C-64 was all set up beside the tree, running this very demo, flashing that $595 price proudly. At the time, I was actually a little confused and even disappointed, since I was 10 years old and really wanted a cartridge-based game console like my friends had, such as the Atari 2600 or ColecoVision... but my parents in their wisdom knew better, a decision I will always be grateful for. That Commodore put me on a path to graphic design and Web coding which shaped my future interests, career and life path. And it all started one Christmas morning... with this wonderful, timeless Christmas demo. Today I play the Christmas demo every year on my Powerbook G4 (in emulation) in my office. It's not Christmas in my home without it.
Tie a vertical blank interrupt to drive the Atari POKEY and you could still get _4_ voice audio waveforms out of it. And it all depends how it's used. BTW: Family Computing from Scholastic in the 1980s would publish yearly holiday BASIC programs.
Merry christmas david!!!! I just want to thank you for outputting such amazing videos This has taught me a lot about retro computing This channel inspired me to buy a commodore 64 (or a 128 if im lucky) Happy holidays to all -SH
Love this stuff. One of my first computers was a Commodore 64. They are amazing machines. They all hold a place in my retro heart. Keep making these amazing videos. Great work.
My computer history... Tandy Color Computer, Vic 20, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, IBM Dos compatable unit... Pc's from all years through all windows up to Windows 7 Then went to Mac... Have played around and used Windows 10 here and there and currently exclusively
I love this video. It really takes me back many years. I got my Vic 20 for Christmas of 1982 I was 5 years old. And I finally got my C64 for Christmas in 89. I made use of that C64 bigtime GEOS was very useful.
Here’s a little tidbit from Italy: I’m pretty sure this demo was recycled and altered a couple years later by an Italian magazine about the C64! I bought a C64 with a bunch of cassette programs a few years back and one of them had a Xmas demo on it, which dated to Xmas 1984. I definitely remember the sleigh animation and the outro with the Bach piece, only the writings were changed to say (in Italian, of course) something along the lines of “Merry Christmas and Happy 1985 from” whatever the mag’s name was, probably “Tutto Commodore”. I wish I could go back to Italy to fire up that C64 and check...
Heh. “May not be able to appreciate SID music like you do”. :D I just found my old C64. Thought it was gone but it is all there except from the joystick(were they compatible with the amiga. I might have kept the joystick for that) I made a boring “unboxing” video of it. Merry Christmas.
Invention 13 was something I always associated with the C64. When I got my first computer myself, a C128, I spent a while typing in the code to play Inv 13 on the SID chip. A few years ago, I did modular synth variations. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-1FjIcHkS6fA.html
OMG I remember this.... HAHA fun times... I spent hundreds of hours on my Amiga 500 playing Earl Weaver baseball.. I had my own team and oplayed many seasons and printed out stats on my dot matrix printer.
I saw this as a little kid at a computer show and was blown away. I was used to seeing Atari 2600 graphics. I HAD to have one of these. My dad eventually got me one when they got down to $200. He was pissed when I asked him to buy the 1541 disk drive next. (I think it was another $200) It's not like you could do very much without it!
