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It stil is is a good computer :) The documentary shows the famous cover for Deluxe Paint 2 by the great Avril Harrison, and we just released a "cracktro" that features a new version of King Tut as a tribute to such great graphic artists : https://www.pouet.net/prod.php... Coding the hardware of the Amiga in assembly language is still fun in 2018, because of the various coprocessors that work in parallel with the CPU. It is a very interesting machine. The documentary is nice. Those who are interested in the adventure of the Amiga may read the great book from Brian Bagnall ("Commodore: The Amiga Years").

"4K"? I guess you'll have to ask Pouët where they get the bandwidth to host 4096 byte videos.

From the Ars article :

and the PC managed just four colors and monotone beeps

Huh ? Nope.

Yes, Amiga's capabilities were incredibly impressive (closer to an expensive arcade machine, than to home computer) (though they came at a price).

But PCs weren't as shitty as that.

By 1985, when then Amiga was launched, PC had a little bit more capabilities than that :
- The original PC (1981)'s CGA card can also output 16 colours (but at a lower resolution of 160x200, and required a bit of hacking(*), so it wasn't much used. Though Sierra Online massively used it on the CGA composite-output of all their games back then).
- The PCjr (1984)'s CGA+ card had 16 colors mode (320x200).
- The Tandy PC (1984)'s TGA card 16 colors mode too (320x200)
- The IBM's own EGA (1984, again) managed 16 colours at various resolution

So the PC was beyond 4 colors. Although, yes, Amiga's 32 with fully programmable palette (and even more hackability) where much more impressive.

Regarding sound :
- The original PC Speaker is PWM (Pulse-Width momdulation capable). So it can in theory play digitized sounds.
In practice, it doesn't have DMA, so it's the main CPU's job to push the samples one by one, so usually it's not possible to do much at the same time.
(And given the low memory, it wasn't even possible to have more than the speech in RAM)
Thus it was mostly used to do speech synthesis in small tools, and only for the title screen music in games. (I only have the 1987's example of Mach3, I can't manage to find a 1985 contemporary example).

- The PCjr and Tandy started a boom of special audio devices.
Their was rather simple (multiple channels - 4 - of beeps and boops, with volume control - making also software controller sound envelope usable by some games).
But it paved the way to later introduction of better audio (1987's adlib, creative music system, ibm music feature, etc.)
- (of notice: Roland was also making a MIDI interface since 1984 - the MPU-PC. But back then that one was exclusively used for professional music.
It was only the arrival of Roland's MT-32 in 1987 that sparked the massive use in games starting in 1988 by - again - Sierra).

So please, the PC's beeps and boops weren't motone - it was either speech (with static screen) or the first arrival of multi channel beeps and sound envelopes.
But yeah, Amigas, having a dedicated chip able to handle 4 channels of digital audio while leaving the main CPU free was an incredible jump forward in sound capabilites, only reached on PC with arrival of Gravis UltraSound and SoundBlaster AWE 32 (and until that, previously emulated with software mixing on older Sound Blasters).

Note:

All the above (recently arrived IBM PC's EGA, and IBM PCjr, etc.) where a bit expensive machines.
(The PCjr was negatively compared to contemporary 8bit home computers like C64)

But given the crazy expensive Amiga's introductory price, it's a valid comparison.

---
(*) That's with the official hacks published by IBM back then.
Of course modern demo maker have found way to take the original IBM PC hardware To infinity and beyond
(thousands of colors by creatively hacking the composite output).

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?...

Here's one done in 4 kilobytes. Hope you've got at LEAST a GTX680 to get it running, because it's some serious fucking code and needs serious hardware to operate.

Since you seem unfamiliar with reality, here are some useful links for you.

http://www.pouet.net/

http://modarchive.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

With a bit of cleverness, very impressive graphics and music can be conveyed using a tiny amount of storage space. Haste makes waste.

VESA + Ad Lib + Sound Blaster and *maybe* GUS support were all you needed. I hate to think how poorly that game must have been coded if you needed three disks just for that. For sound support, you absolutely did NOT need drivers, you just piped PCM audio out to the DAC.

Go look up some of the demos that were released back then, like this one which has graphics and sound support and the entire demo, including music, in 64K.

windows 7 / directx 11 required
high end directx 11 gpu required
ati 7970 or nvidia 680 recommended
due to the intense pixel work, max 720p resolution recommended

INTROjr by Hornet

(and here's the YouTube video.

in the demoscene, which is unfortunately dead

Uh, no it's not?

The scene is still alive and well, and there are still Amiga demos to be found without great searching. Pouet.net is a great place to begin. For more general eye catching demos take a look at scene.org

Compilers can never optimize better than the *best* humans, operating without time constraints. Very few programmers have that level of skill, or the time to spend on the task. That's why optimizing compilers were invented.

And even most PC demos today are coded in high-level languages like C++. The guys writing space-constrained demos (64K and less) will turn to assembly. But on the PC you generally can't beat the compiler performance-wise, and in the few cases where you might have squeezed out a couple of percents better performance your time will be better spent polishing your effects.

Source: I discussed this with one of the coders in Andromeda, who has experience both from the Amiga and PC scene.

One 4KB Demo maybe then : Chaos Theory 4k (KK remix).

Why don't you try writing a demo in Java ?

It'll develop the creative part and help you discover Java in depth. And it's easier than writing a game !

Here are some examples:
http://pouet.net/search.php?what=java&type=prod&x=0&y=0

Don't forget Debris, which at a moderate 197kB beat a lot of multi-megabyte sized other demos at Breakpoint 2007...

Also, it comes with full source.

Not JS, but if you are impressed by large results in small code you'll probably love this and maybe this

isn't he referring to standard 3d graphics (momentarily nsfw), not "fixed optical stereo"?

Where'd all the pro-software-patent types come from?

Apparently Slashdot started to be visited by people who live off of creating software, i.e. professional software developers. Myself being one, I'm divided in patents case: when I think about it from "weekend programmer"'s point of view, the patents are certainly bad. When I think from my professional point of view, they are a mixed bag: sometimes we have to give up certain tech to avoid unnecessary payments, sometimes we license, sometimes we benefit from what few patents we have...

I wouldn't call patents unreasonable. They have both good and bad sides, they motivate people to engage in organized work (i.e. not as a single individual programmer, but as a part of larger business entity). Whether this is bad or good thing, is another matter. Software produced by large organized groups tends to be more reliable (benefit of established QA practices) than products of the individuals, OTOH I like to have pet projects that I can self-publish without much hassle...

Here is a 13 bytes version in 6502 machine code:

7C 00 20 D2 FF A1 85 29 01 E9 92 D0 F5

(Save this as a .prg file and run it in your favourite C64 emulator or on the real thing itself. Please note that the first two bytes are actually required by .prg file format to indicate load address. The actual code is 11 bytes).

For more information:

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=60810

The closest I know of is the 4k demo Elevated by RGBA and TBC. Everything except audio is done by shaders on the graphics card. Even the camera movements are done there (as the cpu don't even know how the terrain looks).

Actually, most current 4ks work that way. Rendering is done by just drawing a quad the size of the screen and doing all the work in the shader. The most common use is to draw fractal shapes that would take way too many vertices if rendered classically (an example from Revision: Hartverdrahtet).

The first one Gaia Machina ran (slowly looked like about 10-15 fps) under wine.

http://pouet.net/toplist.php?type=64k&platform=any+platform&prodlimit=9999&dayspans=9999

enjoy :)

Probably because the only good demoscene group from the USA was Renaissance and they've been gone for a long time now.

do these write directly to the video hardware?

No, that would be impossible on modern computers (unless you would only run the demo on one gfx card - and maybe even only on one specific firmware version at that). The closest I know of is the 4k demo Elevated by RGBA and TBC. Everything except audio is done by shaders on the graphics card. Even the camera movements are done there (as the cpu don't even know how the terrain looks).

IIRC they started with an OpenGL initialization to get the shader code to the GPU, but later switched to DirectX, because that used 100 less bytes in the finished product.

But people still make C64 and Amiga demos, and lft's Craft and Phasor is even more extreme, as he does everything himself :)

Yeah, and I've been part of almost every production from outbreak but I didn't come here to brag ;-)

(I'm thec of outbreak btw)

Plenty ? How about almost every demo ever made. http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=926 --- Amiga demos I was part of :D

.. in 128b, check this out for size: sponge

There are plenty more demos at that site.

Well, the smileys should suggest I had no malice or intent on bickering :-) I think we've established that you know more about ruby and I know more about python. I didn't ignore your points, I just didn't prefer their recommendations. I'm a bit of a language nerd (I would happily write our 64k demos in D if only for the fact that 'hello world' in D is 128k, so a VERY odd use of C++ and a bit of assembler it is then..), so I remember the first announcement on slashdot years ago that some japanese guy had come up with a new scripting language, and thought "ooh, new language!" and clicked. It went on to say how putting an @ in front of member variables is better than "self." (you don't have to call it 'self' btw). So some characters are different, but semantically, the prefix does the same thing, BUT, making '@' or 'self' a variable you accept as an implied parameter makes member functions of the same type as global functions and can be passed around as such. C++ can't do this. You can't pass a member function from a class to something that doesn't know about that class and just call it, which means if you want to use threads, you have to resort to good old C and void*

I have been using ruby probably as little as possible, but learning what counts becase I've been using puppet for about 3 years. I need to add extensions to it. I would say I understand the basics of using it as a scripting language, but I wouldn't attempt anything hard-core in it, and my way of learning is a bit of a barrier to learning it.

I learnt python in 2001 after turning up to work with a massive hangover and struggling with \${$(wait, have we dereferenced enough yet?}\perl#, and thinking "there MUST be better than this". 3 hours of company time wasting, I swore never to program in perl ever again. Actually, I still use it for when I would use sed/awk if perl didn't exist, which is what it did very well at and was a breath of fresh air at the time. Alas, adding "bless" to create classes, and writing a 400 page "man perloo" man page on how to make it look a bit like OO was so alien and WRONG to me at a time when it was winning "open source project of the year" and people were saying how great it was. I actually got BANNED from coding in python at that job, because my luddite boss thought perl was brilliant. 3 years later he was invited to leave for not being creative enough :-)

What I like about python is the fascist devotion to correctness they have. Ruby is more like "anything goes if it's great". Python is more like "it's not going in if I can find one single edge-case where it might be a tiny problem". That's how it, as a language as old as perl, has survived so long and is expanding so well. They spent THREE YEARS arguing on the development list about how to implement the ternary operator and what syntax to use. Eventually, nobody could come up with something exact enough, so they said "just use 'if'". You can write "x += 1", but not "x++". Why make TWO things to learn, when adding 1 is the same as adding 2?. It's only got about 30 keywords.

Anyway enough about python. I also code in D, OCaML, haskell (went off OCaML when haskell got more 'useable' with REAL libraries, like opengl and directX), REBOL, and when drunk, SDL basic :-D

As for the demos and picking up tips - you'll get some very good answers back from pouet.net - and about 1000 flames from wankers, some of whom probably answered about an hour prior with a really good answer.. it's almost a running joke now that you have to act like a cunt on pouet.

Here's our last effort:

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=53833

YES... the linux version is 71k.. much as I hate to say it, MSVC makes smaller binaries than GCC. Also, if you're on windows, your virus checker might kick up a stink.. the packer we used.. "kkrunchy" by a group called fairlight, something which is very good at compressing about 200k of code down to les

Speaking of art, I recommend that you download and unzip the best demos for PC on the USB key.
You can download them here:
http://www.pouet.net/

Explain them what a demo is:
1) a very small program (much smaller than a Youtube video)
2) a spectacle
3) a form of art
4) mathematics applied in realtime

Some people may feel so amazed by these technical pieces, that they'll learn how to program.

Still going strong :)

As much as I love Farbrausch I think cdak by Quite & orange demonstrates that even better - lots and lots of geometry, textures and sound stuffed into a 4k Windows executable (and videos if Windows is not your thing). (Look here for an explanation of how it's done...)

np: Flight Of The Conchords - Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenocerous (Flight Of The Conchords)

As much as I love Farbrausch I think cdak by Quite & orange demonstrates that even better - lots and lots of geometry, textures and sound stuffed into a 4k Windows executable (and videos if Windows is not your thing). (Look here for an explanation of how it's done...)

np: Flight Of The Conchords - Hiphopopotamus Vs. Rhymenocerous (Flight Of The Conchords)

You should check out what they do today!
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938

Also...you gonna tell me a winamp visualizer can do this?
  http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5&howmanycomments=-1

You should check out what they do today!
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938

Also...you gonna tell me a winamp visualizer can do this?
  http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5&howmanycomments=-1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCMo-bJQC8A

Heaven 7 by Exceed.

64kb executable. Raytraced. Over 10 years old.

Oh, and while wer'e doing cool demos that use raytracing : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK7jkVAvA_Y (pouet link : http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=49856)

Is this list looking better to you? And some of those are even released on multiple platforms :)

the scene is still alive you know there's a whole category for js http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=18327

I submitted this to /. a few days ago, but I guess no one cares:

"The Demoscene Documentary, with an embedded video that seems to show English closed captions/subtitles overlay correctly, and Pouet mention a seventeen minutes and 10 seconds Finnish YouTube video (turn on its "Transcript" option to read the English texts to go with the video) showing a "documentary episode about the world famous Finnish demogroup, Future Crew. First presented at Assembly 2010..."

>> there is not a single thing that REQUIRES paper in todays age.
> A paper aeroplane? Try that with your laptop you'll have to get a new one.

Actually, when I got it I did :) I ran the 1996 64k intro Paper which features LOTS of digital paper aeroplanes! I can confirm that due to Statix's excellent programming skills that my laptop is still working fine but thanks for your concern! :) Note: Paper works best now days under DOSBox or you can watch it online here.

weighing in at 179kb, it's Hello World, the sequel http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244

Well, making something "work" and making something "work out-of-the box for dumb user" are pretty different things.

Both of which have happened, for every Linux game I've tried in recent memory. Do you have a counterexample?

With games, no - I don't really play Linux games. But I can complain on Linux demos - try downloading not-so-recent ones from Pouet and see for yourself. I have a recent counter-example with [recent] system software ;) NVidia-supplied OpenCL profiler (binary only, shipped with its own copy of Qt 4.6 libraries) crashes at start under my Kubuntu 9.10 ;) Okay, we were talking about slightly different problems, but see, that's also a compatibility issue and it does not work "out of the box" :)

You can do compatibility testing with XP SP3, Vista SP1, Win7 to make sure that game runs on each of those (sometimes you need hacks, too). With Ubuntu, you may make much less assumptions.

How so?

Because user is free to install different kernel? Or whatever else he wishes, even replacing GNOME with a later version? It isn't probably supported by Canonical (I hope so!) so that's why I stated that you should stick with Canonical-supported stuff... or you are going to bundle everything that your game relies on - and that's a problem if you want to integrate it with the rest of system (in more or less Games For Windows way).

Realistic option is to stick to particular Ubuntu release (perhaps an LTS one) and only declare support for things installed from Canonical-supported repositories.

Yeah, which kind of falls under a "duh" heading.

Of course, it's very likely that it will continue to work with future releases -- again, I cite pretty much every game released for Linux, ever.

See above why I mentioned Canonical-supported stuff only. As for "very likely that it will continue to work" it's probably not a good definition of a platform. Microsoft, security issues aside, goes to great lengths to ensure that their updates break minimum amount of software, sometimes even creating separate "hacked" system libraries for specific products. It also has a certification program which you can submit your application to (for money of course) and be sure that you are (and will stay) compatible. Why major distros (like Canonical) don't do these things? (sure, it's all about the money).

weaker backward compatibility between releases (some distros have no well-defined release at all).

Weaker than Win7's "backwards compatibility" called "XP Mode"?

You will have to link statically as much as possible (to minimize damage of incompatible or just newer libraries)

...just like on Windows. Or include the libraries inside your installation directory, just like OS X -- I'd prefer that, actually, as it allows them to be patched individually, or by users -- but again, I cannot remember that ever being needed.

Sure, but there's a clear border what you should bundle with your Windows game and what you shouldn't.

you are still facing problems like significant driver changes that break sound or video for you.

...just like on Windows. And again, a counterexample: Quake 3 still works. In case you've forgotten, Quake 3 was released in 1999.

Well, Quake is a C program which only depends on OpenGL - IIRC it has zip (for packages) and whatever they used for cinematics linked in.

Nowadays, games have grown a lot large... There's plenty of third-party software, like various voice-over-ip libraries, codecs, telemetry, physics, cus

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=63

IT HAS ALLWAYS BEEN THE YEAR OF THE AMIGA DESKTOP!!!

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=12034
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=1483

IT HAS ALLWAYS BEEN THE YEAR OF THE AMIGA DESKTOP!!!

http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=12034
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=1483

You've got some years on me. I appreciated their pc rips for those years when iso's had taken over and I was still 56k-ing it. Who cares if the video was missing and it took 3 hours to unpack the sound, their cracktros always made up for it. I don't know if I'd even run a cracktro if I somehow got one these days (there's no trust anymore). Here's their deathtro: http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=11416

Actually, there was a new demo released quite recently for the ZX-81. Find it at pouet - http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=53834 , or you can just head straight to YouTube to watch a video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X92xvLlbnVg

The famous production people usually refer to when it comes to small files with procedurally generated graphics is .the .product by farbrausch. If you read that site, you'll find out many of the tips and tricks that can be used to really pack down the size of executables and still make amazing 3d scenes.

Actually, I (and probably hordes of other people) was even more impressed by their demo Debris that won the Breakpoint 2007 full demo compo that allows filesizes up to 64MB with a 177kB demo that runs for 7:19... :)

(Posting anonymously so my mods here don't go to waste...)

np: Tosca - No More Olives (J.A.C.)

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50688

By the same author a year ago, so no news there. Do you think the improvements are really worth the extra 3K?

Google for mars.exe, it should run very smoothly on a 100-MHz 486.

As a matter of fact, Elevated is just a single example of the "impressive landscape in a couple of kilobytes" genre that has been around for maybe 15+ years now.

For another recent example, try Himalaya by TBC from 2008 (it's 1K, by the way): http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=50688

Never heard of pouet, and never been to a demo party, but Google brings up the first BADGE killer demo contest. Badge was the Bay Area Amiga Developer's Group (don't ask me about the acronym). Our unimpressive demo was entered in one of the later contests.

I'm not much of a hardcore demo hacker, but I am a hardcore real-time programmer who started on a machine with less than 512 bytes (that's just plain bytes, not kilo, mega, or giga bytes) of memory. So when I see someone talking about fitting something into 4k, I expect to see something running in 4k. :D

While i certainly admire the technical skill involved, the demoscene is more than that. It's a form of art.

Just look at http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31571