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Check out his C64 demo "A Mind Is Born", where he fits a "procedurally-generating" song with visuals in barely 256(!!!) bytes.

https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/



It's been discussed on HN before too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26511266


On one hand I wish there was more, on the other I think it would have been too much? It's brilliant for sure. I love that these guys have been making this stuff since the ASCII scene (for those unaware lot of cool procedural bits like this used to get stuffed into warez greetz and plenty of smaller binaries before that such as coms and what not in the BBS scenes)


I wonder what the demoscene could do with modern CPUs and their AVX multisymmetric parallel whatchacallit and what not. As in, getting the most amount of stuff done with the least amount of instructions.

Does anybody know any examples?


Probably ‘.kkrieger’ would be a more-current inspiration, though it's almost twenty years old itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

My uneducated guess is that perhaps the thing of the day now is proper voxels (not Minecraft's “voxels”) and lots of shaders on top. But then again, this endeavour doesn't really differ from just making experimental game engines.


https://youtu.be/Imquk_3oFf4

I don't think it uses any fancy modern CPU features but this is probably the reigning champion of the 256 byte demo, and its write up[0]

[0] http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories


Well the fact that you are limited by the C64 itself makes you use every bit of creativity to pull off such a demo as A Mind is Born.

I think it is this limiting factor that is partly responsible for keeping the C64 scene alive. While it is limiting, there are also still infinite possibilities of creativity. I don't personally find say, the PC demo scene as interesting because it is not really limited in any way other than size competitions. But still there you get a lot more mileage out of every opcode than on the C64.




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