TRIAD 2017 NEON (C64) 

True, they never stop to amaze me!

Today all the talk is about the gazillion Mhz/bit GPU and the quintillion CPU's with even an offensive speed in Mhz. And then I remember the c:a 1 Mhz 8 bit CPU and the co processors of the C64 and watch this and all I could do is laugh and think how fucking awesome! And you can definitely see the progress from around 83 with the same hardware confinements to today. And it is software only... If my old Geforce 4 Ti was still getting some love with software only it would probably been great today :-) but it's a shop and throw away culture today, the rein of the hardware and not so much software...

these 8-bit wizards are true champions at REAL programming!

Back in the days when all you had was one set CPU and a limited amount of memory. And you had to make do with what you had. Ok. the C64 had the 20 MHz SuperCPU and 16MB of RAM if you were rich. But that was cheating, hehe.

@@alerey4363 Yes there are all a lot of tricks involved that the knowledgeable eye sees. This one like many others uses a lot of PCG's instead of bitmaps

I bet your Mom feels the same way about all the great dinners, holiday celebrations and birthday cakes she had for you :)

Just tell her that she just witnessed the equivalent of a VW beetle doing a backflip and a jump over a bridge at the same time while speeding at about 200 mph.

@@christianherbst674 Funny thing is, she was not too blown away by the demo but the idea that I can load a game and then REMOVE the disk from the 1541 and keep playing was super surprising. Go figure.

Thank you Mark!

did you write it / co write it Antti? Its phenominal

Amazing!! Instant ear-gasm! (No shit!)

Kye Huelin Thanks! The main tune is 100% mine and the end tune is my version of "Tristesse" originally composed by Drax (Thomas Mogensen).

KODUS on both.. what a version af Tristesse.. splendid job !!

Yeah, first I was like "What?" then that tracking text cracked me up!

What do you mean 1984? ------------------------------- When was the Commodore 64 released? August 1982

Thanks a lot gustav! With regards, Antti/Flex.

Why? Thats what the games looked like back then. Not like they put Modern Warfare animations. Its clearly low pixel graphics.

Bastille Of course you can tell that itt's low pixel graphics, but if you spent enough time with a C64 back in the day you can clearly see the difference. Demos like this one are pushing the limits and do things that might seem impossible unless you figure out the trick used for the effect.

I get that but what I'm saying is there were games out at that time which at the very least had a few cut scenes just as good as this. So anyone actually using one back then, would have seen this level of quality(relative) wasnt invented or discovered or pioneered by these contests. These contests just present a different presentation than a game would and are meant to be what they are start to finish. Whereas a game is going to need to be something else. But the cut scenes were absolutely there back then at this level.

As you say, a demo can afford to do advanced effects compared to a game, because it only needs to do one thing. But the devil is in the details. Demos routinely do things that were not fully discovered back then, or were too expensive in terms of development time to be economically viable for a cutscene in a commercial game with a budget. Some tricks require knowledge of obscure, and unintended, behavior of the hardware that was literally not known back then. Some effects use pre-computation of data aided by modern computers. Though this demo might actually be a relatively bad example for this since it's deliberately made to have an old school aesthetic. Let's look at a few effect in this demo: 0:43 High color graphics. This effect requires the code to rewrite the palette many times during the screen redraw, and might require the artist to specifically design an image to work within certain restraints. 1:07 Software rendered image distortion to simulate 3D movement. 1:40 Software rendered plasma effect on the car's glass pane. Also, the moving grid effect is not TRIVIAL to create, although not super difficult either. 2:17 Zoomer effect. Again, a CPU expensive software effect. 3:10 Those rotation effects. Looks deceptively simpler than they are to program. 3:37 And this effect... Takes some planning to create effect an effect like this one that works both technically and aesthetically. This is another example of a typical "new school" effect that becomes more impressive when you know what goes into making it. I can almost guarantee that you will see NOTHING like this in early ('80s/'90s) games or demos. 4:15 Another CPU intensive effect. Image distorsion with rich colors. 4:46 Yet another deceptively simple one. This, just like many other C64 demo effects requires the code to sync up with the pixel output, to be able to change the palette at exactly the right time as a line is drawn. (If the effect is made in the way I think it is.) The program must also take care to avoid so called bad lines, where the CPU is stalled for one raster line as palette data is transferred. 5:12 High color graphics. Fancy in/out transition for the background image. The text (sprites) need to be rewritten after each line, as the screen is drawn, because there's a limited number of sprites available. Not super difficult, but combine this with high color graphics and you need to make sure your code is optimized. So, all in all, I disagree that this is "basically" what things looked like back then. There have been HUGE developments in both knowledge and technique since then. But please, if you know of C64 cut scenes from the '80s that have anywhere near a similar quality to a modern demo, please tell me the name of that game. I would be super interested!

Maybe you've never seen Samantha Fox on a c64 either!!! lol

Disk image here: csdb.dk/release/?id=153521

Antti Hannula nice!! Going to see if it runs at proper speed on my ntsc commodore 64 I love this computer even today.

We (Triad) celebrated 30 years in the scene a couple of years ago, i.e., we never left the scene :-) Thanks for the positive feedback for this production. I really put a lot of time and effort into this one to make it happen so it is always great to hear when people enjoyed it.

Yes!!!! We always enjoy your productions :-) Thank you for the many-many Triad cracktros games :-) You are the part of my young years :-) And i wish you another 30 years on the Scene!!!! :-)

helvetin hyvä sid :D

Yes. You can get it (and other amazing demos) here: csdb.dk/release/?id=153521

if you want to run it on a C64 emulator (or a real one with some additional hardware...)

There's plenty of people right now that won't get it. You kind of have to appreciate what programming on these old systems is like to really 'get' what this means...

yeah, just like nobody today appreciates classical music... ;)

ansiaaa for this demo we mainly used photoshop and grafx2 for the final adjustments to the limitations of the VIC chip. Some of the graphics is also generated using Java 3d.

Made in 2017. The theme takes it back to 1987.

Awesome! I'm so glad to see people are still programming demos and other stuff for the C64.

precisely what i thought ....

Mordi - Tristesse ;)

@@lucashfilm666 Tristesse is originally composed by Thomas Mogensen (DRAX) in 1996 and for C64. Mordi's version is probably the most played/ famous and for reason, that's awesome!

@@anttihannulaakaflex1336 Yes! :)

It's called "Tristesse". Originally composed on C64 by Drax (Thomas Mogensen). Furthermore remixed by many but that version in Neon is the 1st time it's been remixed on the same platform as the original. /Flex

Thank you very much! :)