Award-winning assembly-language animation running on a classic Mac
The winner of this year's "oldskool demo competition" at the Assembly 2009 (a festival of low-level assembly programming) is this sweet animation, "3½ inches is enough" by Unreal Voodoo, which is apparently running on some kind of monochrome 68K classic Macintosh.
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Respect to the authors of this demo for using asm today, but OTOH those of us who had the chance to use an Amiga almost 20 years ago (same cpu/speed as the Mac above, plus advanced custom chips) saw much better stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kuYfTCGLg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8mC95RBNBw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tazqUCil7cU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SBJn71fvL8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L40Iy8QbIY
This stuff all run on a 8 MHz machine with half a megabyte of RAM.
The Youtube videos killed the original quality of those demos. If you can, get the binaries and play them through an emulator or a real Amiga, which will allow better A/V synchronization.
Here's the pouet page with a download link in case you actually have the hardware to run it:
http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=53636
Assembly is not and never was "a festival of low-level assembly programming". Maybe a tiny little bit of research (yes, Wikipedia if nothing else) would be nice.
The demoscene pedant in me cringes at "animation" in the title there. Demos generally run in real time - the calculations are done while you watch, not simply played back from stored animation sequences. From Wikipedia:
Also, very few demos are written purely in assembly language any more. The Assembly demoparty was never strictly limited to demos coded in assembly language, and these days, it's not even limited to demos. There are also gaming competitions, and a lot of the attendees are primarily gamers. In fact, a lot of old timers have been complaining that Assembly is getting too commercial and mainstream. In a way, I guess this post confirms that demos aren't so mainstream yet after all. ;)
- Ms Saigon/3some
As an example of what the scene produces these days, here's an entry from the 4k (that's 4096 bytes) intro competition at Breakpoint 2009. That code is packed tight...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE
Assembly eh?
Check this out.
Is there irony in the fact that my dual-core, broadband-connected PC cannot stream the YouTube video with occasional glitches?
Yeah, a demo is a demo (mostly of the computer's power) - they rarely contained animations.
Jackie: Yeah, there was never any requirement for them to be written in Asm. But it was necessary to get the most out of the hardware, which is what it was all about. (and everyone had the exact same hardware - a level playing-field)
Today it'd be pointless, since - to begin with, any gains made by asm optimization would be rendered pointless (or even counterproductive) on a different processor.
Also, modern OSes don't let you do dirty hardware tricks, etc.
It just isn't the same anymore. It's sad the US missed out on most of the 'demo scene' culture.
Demos on a Mac? Just...no.
Demos on a Mac? Impressive!
As one who coded a game on the original 128k Mac (ChipWits) I take my hate off to the coder of this demo whether or not he used asm for the whole thing.
It's interesting to see the 4K demos of today being shown off as amazing feats ... I'm sure it takes a lot to pack things in 4K when you have to do sound and crazy graphics, but when you hand over lots of the computation to the OS and the hardware it becomes less impressive. There was a time when making a demo meant making all of it on your own (or counting whatever external code you used toward your max use) - that somehow gives meaning to the idea of competitions on size.
No offense meant, though - the linked demo looks really cool and I'm sure it was hard work making it take up only 4K.
Alex_M @9 Jackie: Yeah, there was never any requirement for them to be written in Asm. But it was necessary to get the most out of the hardware, which is what it was all about. (and everyone had the exact same hardware - a level playing-field)
Oh, I know. I've been involved with the demoscene since 1993, and was even in a demogroup (as the musician). I've listened to many fascinating coder arguments about the best way to optimize the effects in assembly language. ;) I just meant that "a festival of low-level assembly programming" is not exactly an accurate description of Assembly.
It just isn't the same anymore. It's sad the US missed out on most of the 'demo scene' culture.
Oddly enough, I'm originally from the US, but moved to Finland 10 years ago, partially thanks to the demoscene. I've kind of lost touch with the demoscene since my daughter was born. Assembly 2004 was the last Assembly I attended, but I've noticed a definite shift away from sheer technical skill (not much point when hardware 3D does so much for you) toward the overall artistic effect of the demo. As far as the culture, Assembly long ago ceased to be strictly a scene party. Probably the closest thing to the oldskool style demoparty you're likely to find these days is Alternative Party.
Fake51 @12 when you hand over lots of the computation to the OS and the hardware it becomes less impressive. There was a time when making a demo meant making all of it on your own (or counting whatever external code you used toward your max use) - that somehow gives meaning to the idea of competitions on size.
The thing is, back in the day, hardware tricks were an important part of demos. The reason that they could do such impressive things on C64 and Amiga was precisely because the OS and hardware made it possible. It's just that it's only (relatively) recently become possible on PC. I don't think this necessarily makes intros/demos any less impressive on PC, it just makes them impressive for reasons other than raw coding ability.
@Jackie31337: Sure, hardware tricks were important earlier but the reason that competing on size on the amiga was interesting was that you were given a machine and that was it. Looking up one of the linked demos there was a description on how you need a fairly good gfx card to run it properly - relying on that is externalizing the work.
The reason why the amiga kicked the pc around on the demoscene at first was the hardware, which was truly special on the amiga. However, pure computing power has long ago made up for that in the pc. If you wanted to, you could still easily go for the same sort of competition in size that people did earlier: just restrain the competition to a given cpu with no extras. As it happens this is just not what people are interested in anymore :)
And I agree that demos on the pc can be just as impressive as on other platforms, it's just that the thing that impresses me is not the same anymore.
So... what you're saying is that a modern PC can now match the C64 and Amiga, two twenty-year-old Commodore machines? :)