Speechless as usual. Being born in 68 i grew up with a c64, and even was playing around in the dutch demoscene. Damn proud we were able to figure out raster-interupts for a simple scroll, bordershit and some music. But this is waaaaaaay out of my league...pheeew if only there where some tutorials to explain how they did it 🙂
I do not even know how to put a simple dot outside 40x25 screen. Long time trying to find way to went onto Assembler but finished at Basic with some cracking copycat programs from demos, speech simulators and fun.
For those that keep asking, there's two ways to put graphics in the border: one byte that shows only black pixels, and sprites. With raster splits you can make limited patterns with the black byte. Easier to use expanded sprites. Removing the borders is about tricking the VIC by changing a counter dynamically, keeping it one step ahead so a certain function is never triggered.
This is one of the best if not the best demo I have ever seen on a C64. No idea how u pulled this off but there are some serious magical skills involved to do this. Respect.
Agreed. I've seen so many C64 demos and for some reason this is absolutely one of the best! Not the most complex, not the one with the best music...but it has everything. Entertaining, with captivating atmosphere, great story, great effects, amazing skills. Overall, one of the best ever, no doubts.
A real masterpiece ❤️ Didn’t saw such an impressive demo on the C64 before - with a continuous story, such incredible effects and wonderful soundtrack. I enjoyed every bit, every pixel and every second of it! Thank you very much for this outstanding experience, didn’t know, that this is ever possible on my lovely bread bin 🤩
I've followed the demo scene for many years and remember when PCs got good mid Pentium life, I lost interest in demos because you could get them to do anything you wanted and became more of a film director instead of a tech demo. I still followed the demo scene but only the limited categories such as 64k 4k 1k and 128byte demos as that's where the skill was. I remember seeing a demo showing 99 shade bobs where they explained that they said 16 shade bobs was supposed to be the limit. Now we see a C64 carry out even better tasks, it's truly astounding. Farbrausch 008 is still a favourite of mine for 64k PC.
I remember back in 87 leaving my C64 behind as I grew up and entered the work force and started to carve out a career for myself but the SID music always stayed with me listening to the music on cassette tapes and then CD and then MP3 all in my car. And as PCs were introduced into our day to day running of our business I remember downloading demos over modem from BBS sites and our 1993 high range 486 DX2 66 struggled to display demos this good and now the humble C64 blows it away and even some Pentium demos from a little later. If this was released back then the demo writers would definitely had been burned for witch craft. Amazing work. Even today I'm still surprised, Full screen graphics? WTF!!!! That's impossible but I'm seeing it, I don't believe my eyes. To the youth of today this means nothing, but for us old gits it's highly impressive. I'm expecting Crysis to be running on C64 in the next few weeks now.
Watching this Demo on Twitch during the competitions, I was simply speechless. Fairlight, you are a phenomenally talented group of people! I am sure that this Demo will go down in the history of the C64 Demo Stage as an amazing event that provides amazing audio visual experiences. Hearty congratulations to coders, graphic designers and musicians!
My guess is a lot of precompute and clock accurate manipulation of the vic chip registers, this was too difficult before the existence of good emulation of the vic chip. Keeping the screen running smoothly while changing the registers during the scan of the display requires a lot of CPU cycle accurate code. Music is handled during the blanking period and the CPU is 100% cycle accurate during the display period, keeping the VIC chip registers changed at the precise timing to generate the display. In short, a lot of work. ❤
Bloody nora that was some demo. The C64 has a special place in my heart. Banging tune. Unbelievable graphics. Fairlight still one of the best demo makers. Well done. :)
Oh my gosh! This demo has it all! What a gem! What a masterpiece! So many (impossible) effects ... unlimited :-) colors, a story ... music! Thank you commodore, thank you Fairlight! This is 1337! This is love! How long has this been in development ... just curious?
Hi its Colwyn of the old group The Force here wow this is one of my all time favorite demos i especially liked the no borders and the demo just showed off a mix of everything that max's out the c64's capabilities with a interesting script to follow. Imagine if we could go back in time 40 years ago and release this demo back then in 84 or in fact most of the demos being done now. Back in 80's theres no internet minimal modems so each creator has to learn from scratch late 80s early 90's modems meant we code coloborate more and copy partys talk about routines and codes together.
"that max's out the c64's capabilities" I have never seen any demo which achieves that. The reason being demo writers are obsessed with doing only things which can be done at 50fps or thereabouts so you haven't maxxed-out anything. A
@@vapourmile Ill rephrase what i meant to say, max's out the diversity of the type of demos noramlly done, some focus on borders some music. Didnt specify that it actually maxed out litteraly .
@@vapourmile That's complete rubbish - the amount of complex self-changing code and literally requiring accuracy to ONE CPU CYCLE (e.g. to do all the side border opening which is all over the demo), never mind using hidden (i.e. not published in any c64 manual) opcodes some of the time for additional speed, which is required for most or even close to all of the effects in this demo. The whole point of demo coding is optimisation and having things run in realtime not doin some shitty ray tracing which runs at 2fps and can't run natively on a c64. For most of the complex effects if you open a disassembler and look at the code it won't make sense at all as it's in massive self-changing lists for speed. The fact that you think its 'fairly elementary' to me shows you know precisely ZERO about demo coding - feel free to post some of your own coding examples if you l ike though.
@@MrYazbo You are funnier than you can imagine. The code required for cycle-accurate timing is very, very simple. Self-modifying code is very easy to write. The quasi-opcodes are all very well known and easily understood by anybody already familiar with assembly language. A ray tracer which takes even an hour to render to basic scene uses more complex programming and substantially more complex knowledge than anything you have listed.
@@vapourmile I never said writing a ray tracing algo was simple however saying the effects in here are 'easy' or 'elementary' is comical. If all this stuff is so easy why don't we see tens or hundreds of demos doing these same effects like the side border tricks and ghost bytes in this demo used all over? Feel free to also link some of your demos as well if this stuff is so simple (I do actually know both 6502 and 68000 as I was a scene coder and musician in the Amiga scene in the early 90s and there's even some of my intros kicking around on YT if you scout around)
Hey, I was a co-founder of the C64 group CRAZY, and in the beginning times of CENSOR-DESIGN, I helped it to race the charts to the very top back then, as my main work was the import-export things by modem to & from the U.S. So I wasn't a coder back then, and I am not a coder today... BUT MY GOOD GOD!! I CAN TELL YOU GUYS, THIS IS A DEMO OF QUALITY AND ONE TO REMEMBER. 🤜🏿PEACE💋RESPECT🤛🏻 DEREK.B/C64.
Several moments where I went "wait what", amazing stuff, pushing the 6510 hard. Fun silly story and having the great music and story "interact" was very cool - the whole thing really kept my attention until the end.
Holy crap, what a ride. Took me straight back to childhood, sitting in my room late in the evening watching the latest demos or, more likely, playing the latest games...
how....how......HOOOOOOOWWW?!?! I created some Intros/Demos myself back then - I always imagine: WHAT would the creators of the C64 have said to something like this back in the time ☺🤯😇 Just so f-awesome geniusanity!!! 👌✌
Hands down the BEST C64 demo I ever saw!! Technically and emotionally. Especially "To us, it... is... love." I really started leaking at that point. :') Thank you so much!
There is one thing about the C64 that I'm jealous of. It's the people who create those Demos around the given hardware. The ideas and how they were put into the demo and to tell a story . Congratulations. Now I'm not sure which demo impresses me more "Edge of Disgrace" or this one.
Born in 1980, this C64 was my first computer in 1986 in Belgium. 64 kilobytes... 64 kilobytes x 1000 is 64 megabytes... x 1000 is 64 gigabytes... These days 64GB is almost the new normal for PC gaming (32 whatever)... It's 1 million times more RAM than in the 80's and yet they had to run the operating system, the graphics, music and the thing you actually wanted to do all in that 64kb... Nowadays if you don't have enough place in your RAM, add more! Back then... well... you can't... It's hardware limited. So the real software coders had to figure out stuff to do more with less/limit. 4 colours? Want 8? Too bad... no room in RAM for more colours. Find a way to fake more colours. Higher res? Nope not enough power. Add empty lines between each line to create bigger pictures. Hold RAM, clear RAM, Restore RAM ... Etc, etc... Those where the real coders! (and I'm an electrician who knows nothing about coding lol) That said, i had C128, A500 and A1200 after C64 😊 good memories! Thank god for retropie and amiberry stuff etc.
