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To be fair, many old school demos are calling out to specialized hardware in their demos, for example the C64 SID chip, or Amiga graphics chipset. The API for a
by tbirdz 11y ago
To be fair, many old school demos are calling out to specialized hardware in their demos, for example the C64 SID chip, or Amiga graphics chipset. The API for accessing this hardware is not as high-level as DirectX, but it still serves as an external library of sorts for performing graphics/audio operations. All the software-based graphics routines these demo coders created are very impressive, don't get me wrong, but in the end there's still a large part of the pipeline that the coder relies on that they did not create themselves, and isn't factored into the overall code size.
Additionally, current OSes make it really hard, if not impossible, to get down to this level of bare hardware. There's many layers on top that you're forced to go through, closed graphics command stream, closed graphics driver, closed kernel, closed userspace libraries, and the hardware is much more complex. Really DirectX does serve as the lowest level standard way on Windows to access graphics card hardware.
- gcb0 11y agocalling out hardware != using software libraries
- vog 11y agoIt is the same issue, just moved around to a different component. In today's world, most of the time "calling out hardware" means just triggering some piece of software on a separate chip. Nevertheless, I do think that the demo scene is impressive - for a different reason. I believe this is not about the absolute code size, but the relative code size: Within each demo category, all demos run on almost the same hardware architecture and same software platform. Yet, some of them manage to create effects in 4k which most other programmers wouldn't manage to create in 64k. It is not about where the limits are (4k, 64k, 32 bytes, ...), but that there are limits at all. This inspires creativity, pushing the border of what people believe is doable within these limits.