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#demoscene #retroComputing #c64

Wow! What a technical (but also stylish) achievement!

Never seen what this demo shows on a C64. and I've seen A LOT.

The first part is already amazing with completely borderless hires pictures. The borderless thing is: The writable screen area of a C64 is surrounded by a border (Top, Down, Left, Right) which is quite large but can only change color. Now people could change the color per scanline, so there are "copper effects" possible - horizontal often metal looking bars in the "border zone". People also found out you may place sprites (hardware overlays independent of the running graphics mode) within the border area and with a trick make them visible there (Wizball was one of the first games that did that - in 1987). But the C64 has only 8 sprites which are quite small, especially when they are hires. Showing those completely borderless images means a lot of beam racing and video chip register fuckery - respect for the perfect execution.

But the second part is, what really blows my mind.
The C64 has only so much bandwidth to bring individual pixels on the screen. Sure there is lots of (charset) trickery happening here, but this looks like very decent full blown 50Hz VHS noise glitching all over the screen in a way that makes the colors look like FAR more than the 16color palette of the C64 can normally provide. In a way that makes a 16bit system from the later 80s (Amiga, ST, Archie) blush. Totally smooth and visually more hires appearing than this actually is. Just wow!

Yeah it gets boring after some minutes because nothing new comes in, but still. Breathtaking. Really!

Congrats at Extend who did this demo

Fishbomb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk6TVhm7IzQ

This Youtube capture is taken from a real C64 video output which makes this close (not similar) to a CRT experience. That's why I recommend it hard to watch it there - unless you have an own real CRT. That with a real c64 would be the perfect way to exoerience this. In this case the download of (and the discussion about) the demo can be found i.e. on Pouet here:

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=101498

Have phun!