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I'm surprised the demo scene is still targeting the C64. Why not the browser? Would be a lot of fun to try the different demos then. Would be entertaining and

I'm surprised the demo scene is still targeting the C64. Why not the browser? Would be a lot of fun to try the different demos then. Would be entertaining and educational to see different things you can actually do in the frontend these days. Also, why not directly link the demos to a C64 emulator, so at least on can try them out?

sharpneli 3y ago
With browser it’s the bog standard WebGL and now WebGPU. They bring nothing over just doing normal demo using native graphics apis directly. They are good ways to distribute programs for customers but that’s it.
- z3t4 3y ago
  WebGL is low level, so you need a graphics engine ontop.
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    WebGL is a very high level API because OpenGL itself is a very high level API in this context. People have been coding directly on top of OpenGL since it was first created, including 4k demos. A demoscene demo will itself implement whatever custom "graphics engine" is needed (for a 4k, essentially nothing is needed). Demos don’t commonly use third-party dependencies because the entire idea is to show off your (group’s) programming and art savvy.
pavlov 3y ago
There are browser demos, but it’s not really a unique platform. With WebGL and WebAssembly and soon WebGPU, you can pretty much render anything in the browser. There’s not much difference between making a Windows demo and a browser demo. Old platforms like the C-64 are appealing to a certain kind of clever person because the constraints are fixed and a lot of the possible tricks have already been thoroughly exploited in the past. When you find a novel trick, it will be remembered by the aficionados.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  Pure Wasm is, OTOH, a fairly interesting constrained platform if you keep the JS glue to a bare minimum (essentially requestAnimationFrame, call Wasm, and blit the TypedArray you get onto a <canvas>, plus similar for the audio) and don’t export any JS APIs to the Wasm side either. Then essentially all you can do is pure computation without side effects, writing the results to a fixed chunk of memory to be blitted. No HW acceleration, no OS services, no "unbounded" heap to allocate from at your leisure… Of course you can do all this natively too, but you have to enforce the constraints yourself.
weinzierl 3y ago
What draws me to the C64 demo scene is that they use a fixed hardware in ways that it was never supposed to. Doing all this wonderful graphics and sound in just a couple of bytes on hardware that's less capable than an average washing machine is just mind blowing.
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  I like everything about it except the slightly depressing purple/brown-focused color palette :)
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    The palette is quite clever. It’s optimized for being able to reasonably represent real-world things, as well as gradients, unlike the garish primary color based palettes of some of its contemporaries.
  - weinzierl 3y ago
    It's better than the color palettes of most other machines of that era. Especially CGA, man I hated CGA;-)
    - Aardwolf 3y ago
      Yeah, CGA's white+cyan+magenta+black is a baffling choice for a default palette!
      - Ekaros 3y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc You can make funny tricks when passing image as composite. Where with those you can produce other colours. And state of computers were quite limited and primitive then. On other hand for business use, those are still acceptable, everything was text anyway.
      - Lerc 3y ago
        I once tried to figure out the smallest modification to cga hardware that could be made to substantially improve the palette. Inverting the digital red line produces some amazing options. Not least because the palettes containing red became black enabling the colour that was typically used for black to be reused as this was the only palette entry that could be set to any of the 16 colours.
Aardwolf 3y ago
I really agree that they should have an integrated browser-based C64 emulator to view all those demos. The browser itself is not very a interesting target for this kind of demo, since it doesn't have much limitations and changes over time too.
Ekaros 3y ago
Art is in the limitations. And with browsers, why not just push video? Could pre-render it in some farm. In the end it is not just that interesting platform compared to even native things.
- amelius 3y ago
  > Art is in the limitations. Ok, but then back in the era of the C64 why weren't they making cave paintings? ;)
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    I love this comment. It just cuts through all the pseudo-traditionalist cargo cult BS that surrounds topics like the one being discussed here. To be clear, I think those demos are cool and contain interesting technology. But the pretense that the cutting edge equipment of a specific time is somehow the measure of art and what came after is "just not that interesting" is difficult to stomach. Pity that attitude is so common on HN, I would enjoy being here much more if it weren't.
    - Aardwolf 3y ago
      For this particular form of demo, modern hardware is just too powerful, and the quality of the demo is purely the quality of the assets. So a demo for a modern platform would require the same scale as what big AAA game or movie studios produce. Which is also art, but a different kind. With limitations, more interesting cleverness, and a scale of project a single person can muster, can thrive instead. So there probably really is something to this particular generation of hardware, the order of thousands of bytes is more "human scale".
      - richardjdare 3y ago
        yes, I was a keen follower of the demo scene in the 16 bit days. not so much the C64, but the Amiga, and then the mid-late 90s PC scene. Back then, it wasn't so much about limitation, though size-coding was always a thing. It was about seeing something new and cool that hadn't been done before. Pushing things further artistically and technically at the same time. The Amiga was one of the most powerful machines available to the home market so programming it didn't feel like working under constraint, it felt like pushing the envelope of what was possible. Nobody had anything to compare it to, except maybe SGI workstations, which you'd only see on TV shows about movie special effects. At that time demo programmers had parity with game developers and were sometimes the same people. You generally saw higher quality and more innovative effects in a demo than you did in even the biggest video games. And there was no video playback on computers, so all graphical effects you saw had some element of demo-scene adjacency, which made the whole thing feel unified, progressive and relevant. As time went on and technology changed, it became less feasible for lone bedroom coders and small groups of Scandinavian teens to reach that "edge", and keep pushing the boundaries with the same mindset as before, so the emphasis of the artform seems to have changed towards constraint, and towards working with retro machines as historical artefacts. The scene has had to reinvent itself a few times. I remember reading articles in HUGI diskmag 20-odd years ago discussing how demos had changed from being about hardware hacking, and getting graphics chips to do unusual things, to becoming more of an "algorithmic trip" thanks to the new pc graphics cards that were coming out.
detrites 3y ago
Here you go: https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.10.1/?platform=c64&file=hello.dasm https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.10.1/?platform=c64&file=hello.da... Also has NES, Sega Master System, ZX Spectrum, etc.
Sharlin 3y ago
Demoscene targets whatever platform can display some graphics and make some sound. People write C64 demos because they want to. It’s a subculture within the greater scene, and approximately zero percent of C64 sceners would want to move to writing browser-based demos. The whole point of the C64 scene is to cycle-shave and torture the hardware into performing tricks its designers would never have thought about.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Why not the browser? Because playing in a browser sandbox just isn't very fun is probably the short version.
hgsgm 3y ago
JS demos: http://creativejs.com/category/demoscene-2/index.html http://creativejs.com/category/demoscene-2/index.html https://www.bitsnbites.eu/muon-baryon-in-6k-javascript/ https://www.bitsnbites.eu/muon-baryon-in-6k-javascript/
jacobgorm 3y ago
Fixed hardware platforms are more interesting for demos, because they provide a level playing field, and because anything that the hardware will allow goes.

sharpneli 3y ago

With browser it’s the bog standard WebGL and now WebGPU. They bring nothing over just doing normal demo using native graphics apis directly. They are good ways to distribute programs for customers but that’s it.

z3t4 3y ago
WebGL is low level, so you need a graphics engine ontop.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  WebGL is a very high level API because OpenGL itself is a very high level API in this context. People have been coding directly on top of OpenGL since it was first created, including 4k demos. A demoscene demo will itself implement whatever custom "graphics engine" is needed (for a 4k, essentially nothing is needed). Demos don’t commonly use third-party dependencies because the entire idea is to show off your (group’s) programming and art savvy.

pavlov 3y ago

There are browser demos, but it’s not really a unique platform. With WebGL and WebAssembly and soon WebGPU, you can pretty much render anything in the browser. There’s not much difference between making a Windows demo and a browser demo. Old platforms like the C-64 are appealing to a certain kind of clever person because the constraints are fixed and a lot of the possible tricks have already been thoroughly exploited in the past. When you find a novel trick, it will be remembered by the aficionados.

Sharlin 3y ago
Pure Wasm is, OTOH, a fairly interesting constrained platform if you keep the JS glue to a bare minimum (essentially requestAnimationFrame, call Wasm, and blit the TypedArray you get onto a <canvas>, plus similar for the audio) and don’t export any JS APIs to the Wasm side either. Then essentially all you can do is pure computation without side effects, writing the results to a fixed chunk of memory to be blitted. No HW acceleration, no OS services, no "unbounded" heap to allocate from at your leisure… Of course you can do all this natively too, but you have to enforce the constraints yourself.

weinzierl 3y ago

What draws me to the C64 demo scene is that they use a fixed hardware in ways that it was never supposed to. Doing all this wonderful graphics and sound in just a couple of bytes on hardware that's less capable than an average washing machine is just mind blowing.

Aardwolf 3y ago
I like everything about it except the slightly depressing purple/brown-focused color palette :)
- Sharlin 3y ago
  The palette is quite clever. It’s optimized for being able to reasonably represent real-world things, as well as gradients, unlike the garish primary color based palettes of some of its contemporaries.
- weinzierl 3y ago
  It's better than the color palettes of most other machines of that era. Especially CGA, man I hated CGA;-)
  - Aardwolf 3y ago
    Yeah, CGA's white+cyan+magenta+black is a baffling choice for a default palette!
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niKblgZupOc You can make funny tricks when passing image as composite. Where with those you can produce other colours. And state of computers were quite limited and primitive then. On other hand for business use, those are still acceptable, everything was text anyway.
    - Lerc 3y ago
      I once tried to figure out the smallest modification to cga hardware that could be made to substantially improve the palette. Inverting the digital red line produces some amazing options. Not least because the palettes containing red became black enabling the colour that was typically used for black to be reused as this was the only palette entry that could be set to any of the 16 colours.

Aardwolf 3y ago

I really agree that they should have an integrated browser-based C64 emulator to view all those demos. The browser itself is not very a interesting target for this kind of demo, since it doesn't have much limitations and changes over time too.

Ekaros 3y ago

Art is in the limitations. And with browsers, why not just push video? Could pre-render it in some farm. In the end it is not just that interesting platform compared to even native things.

amelius 3y ago
> Art is in the limitations. Ok, but then back in the era of the C64 why weren't they making cave paintings? ;)
- p-e-w 3y ago
  I love this comment. It just cuts through all the pseudo-traditionalist cargo cult BS that surrounds topics like the one being discussed here. To be clear, I think those demos are cool and contain interesting technology. But the pretense that the cutting edge equipment of a specific time is somehow the measure of art and what came after is "just not that interesting" is difficult to stomach. Pity that attitude is so common on HN, I would enjoy being here much more if it weren't.
  - Aardwolf 3y ago
    For this particular form of demo, modern hardware is just too powerful, and the quality of the demo is purely the quality of the assets. So a demo for a modern platform would require the same scale as what big AAA game or movie studios produce. Which is also art, but a different kind. With limitations, more interesting cleverness, and a scale of project a single person can muster, can thrive instead. So there probably really is something to this particular generation of hardware, the order of thousands of bytes is more "human scale".
    - richardjdare 3y ago
      yes, I was a keen follower of the demo scene in the 16 bit days. not so much the C64, but the Amiga, and then the mid-late 90s PC scene. Back then, it wasn't so much about limitation, though size-coding was always a thing. It was about seeing something new and cool that hadn't been done before. Pushing things further artistically and technically at the same time. The Amiga was one of the most powerful machines available to the home market so programming it didn't feel like working under constraint, it felt like pushing the envelope of what was possible. Nobody had anything to compare it to, except maybe SGI workstations, which you'd only see on TV shows about movie special effects. At that time demo programmers had parity with game developers and were sometimes the same people. You generally saw higher quality and more innovative effects in a demo than you did in even the biggest video games. And there was no video playback on computers, so all graphical effects you saw had some element of demo-scene adjacency, which made the whole thing feel unified, progressive and relevant. As time went on and technology changed, it became less feasible for lone bedroom coders and small groups of Scandinavian teens to reach that "edge", and keep pushing the boundaries with the same mindset as before, so the emphasis of the artform seems to have changed towards constraint, and towards working with retro machines as historical artefacts. The scene has had to reinvent itself a few times. I remember reading articles in HUGI diskmag 20-odd years ago discussing how demos had changed from being about hardware hacking, and getting graphics chips to do unusual things, to becoming more of an "algorithmic trip" thanks to the new pc graphics cards that were coming out.

detrites 3y ago

Here you go: https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.10.1/?platform=c64&file=hello.dasm https://8bitworkshop.com/v3.10.1/?platform=c64&file=hello.da... Also has NES, Sega Master System, ZX Spectrum, etc.

Sharlin 3y ago

Demoscene targets whatever platform can display some graphics and make some sound. People write C64 demos because they want to. It’s a subculture within the greater scene, and approximately zero percent of C64 sceners would want to move to writing browser-based demos. The whole point of the C64 scene is to cycle-shave and torture the hardware into performing tricks its designers would never have thought about.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Why not the browser? Because playing in a browser sandbox just isn't very fun is probably the short version.

hgsgm 3y ago

JS demos: http://creativejs.com/category/demoscene-2/index.html http://creativejs.com/category/demoscene-2/index.html https://www.bitsnbites.eu/muon-baryon-in-6k-javascript/ https://www.bitsnbites.eu/muon-baryon-in-6k-javascript/

jacobgorm 3y ago

Fixed hardware platforms are more interesting for demos, because they provide a level playing field, and because anything that the hardware will allow goes.