Be an instant legend by Retroporting

Demo’s are – of course – a way to show the 1337 skillz of the creators to show that they are able to stretch the limited hardware to extremes and show you things you thought weren’t possible on your homecomputer.

Sometimes demo’s are like battleraps; they dis other demogroups and their creations by taking an effect from another demo and improving on it, rendering the original effect obsolete or second-rate.

The ultimate blow in these friendly battles comes in the form of retroporting demo’s to a platform that is older and less powerful, for example porting an amiga demo to a c64 version. Take a classic amiga or pc demo – a demo that has stunned people by the way it stretched thecomputer’s capabilities – and simply make a c64 version of it, disregarding the breadbox’s inferiority regarding memory, processor speed and graphic capabilities, and you will be legend. Check out the examples below:

The legendary PC demo “Second Reality” by Future Crew:

… and the c64 remake bu Smash Designs:

The classic Amiga demo “Desert Dream” by Kefrens:

… and the c64 remake by Chorus & Resource

Computer animation avant la lettre

How to do computer animation when your machine just isn’t fast enough? You create a really slow animation, film the screen and then speed it up, as this video from 1985 demonstrates.

Of course there’s nothing old-fashioned about the technique itself; animation movies like Shrek, Happy Feet, Ice Age etc. are not real-time animations either. It takes a lot of time and computers working at the same time to render each frame in such a movie. And it will stay like this for quite some time into the future, because as computers are becoming faster, the images will become better looking, demanding more processing power.

Renoise video tutorial: from sinewave to basedrum

Here’s kaneel showing you how to use the render-to-sample function in renoise to create your own sounds. Renoise is old-skool style music creation software, a so-called “tracker”, with new shiny features.

Headbangers made of clay

Watch these funny little clay creatures wander around on a commodore 64 and do some serious headbanging

Also check out the site of these musicians, golgoth13, it’s a fine piece of retro art.

Basic Poetry

A poem programmed in Basic on a 1979 Apple ][

The second Second Reality

Remember Second Reality? The PC demo by Future Crew? Well at the time it was state-of-the art PC demo wizardry. Impressive stuff! Enter Smash Designs, a commodore 64 demo. To show that the old breadbox is not dead, they recreate the whole demo on a c64, that’s like, a 100 times less powerful then a PC at that time. And they got it nailed right down to the music!

Happy 8 bit pop from YMCK

Japan based YMCK makes me smile Their website is cute, and you can even download a bleepy VSTi from there. If you don’t know what a VSTi is you probably don’t need it

Crazy cool animation by Cyriak

Just been laughing my head off at these zany animations by Cyriak. They’re brilliant, go ahead, taste them Afterwards, go to his website to check out his tunes.