64KB Demo's How?!?

T

Tahir2

Veteran
Supporter
64k-intro_fr019party1.jpg

fr-019b


This is a screen grab from a 64KB demo that is about 3 minutes long and has music in it too.


I first saw one of these demo's about a year to two years ago and it blew me away. Now there are more people doing similar things but the first demo called Heaven was by the same guys that made the demo above IIRC. Even now it's one of the most impressive demo's I have ever seen.

64k-intro_heaven.jpg

Heaven


There is this demo called Doas which is not as visually impressive but has an awesome soundtrack to it... and its only 48K!!!!

doas.jpg

Doas


I just want to know in absolute layman terms how the hell these crazy democoders do that?!
 
AFAIK, there are no textures included in the file. All textures are done by algorithms.

Kalbaz
 
Fractal compression? Procedural textures?

Pretty amazing stuff! You have got to see Heaven running... I was like.. 'eh 64KB?'
There must be some kind of compression going on as these demo's seem to unpack before running taking about 20-30 secs. Maybe something like what Atari did with its cartridges which ran JPEG and then JagPEG compression to squeeze more data in a tight space.


Wonder if these techniques would be possible in games...
 
yeah I know, this section of the demo scene is the most amazing. Been looking at these for the last few years and its incredible some of the stuff they can do with some very decent (or should I say, unholy :eek: ) coding skills. They give a lot of credit to the sound/music coders as well, considering the quality of music included in the 64kb
 
How those demos were made ? How about with pure skill, dedication and passion... ;)

That first pic is from Fraubrauch (sp?) intro and one of the main coders is former Chaos / Sanity. A Amiga 500 democoder legend. Sanitys demos were allways bit rough, but technically they were, well let's just say reaally good.

To answer your question, the key to build those small intros is to generate the data needed (textures, samples, even geometry as much as possible "on demand". Usually those intros just build up all the data while intro is starting up.

If you have possibility to run realmode dos programs, I suggest that you try to find a 4 KB intro called "Animate!". It's rather old, but still one of the best 4 KB intros ever made. Also a 64 KB intro called "Paper" is nice one to see.
 
Bah, that’s nothing! :) I once made a very small two part game on the C64. The first part was a standard done-a-thousand-times-before game where you were falling down a wiggly hole, (or driving down a road, whatever), and it just got tighter and tighter until you crashed, the further you got the higher the score. Then for the second part a random maze was drawn on the screen, and you had to find your way out. For each step you took you lost a point. When you got out your score was displayed. The entire game was less than 500 bytes (0.5KB). Although, I have to admit the gfx were a little less spectacular than these demos :)

But seriously, it's actually quite easy to squish some 3d code and procedural gfx into an exe less than 64KB (it’s till impressive, though), I've never done anything advanced like this, but I have done some simple stuff in 8KB, and I could make it better, if only somebody would kick my ass into motion :)

(Now I'm afraid that after this post, somebody will kick my ass! :) )


edit: I need to learn how to write...

Oh, and don't take my post the wrong way, I still think that what they've managed to do in demos are very impressive...


edit #2: argh! I appear to be unable to actually include my corrections, now it should be right...

...oh, and I think it's called Heaven7, not just Heaven... that one impressed me the most, realtime raytracing, not just HW rendering...
 
Looking at the tools they made for fr-08 can give you some hints on how the textures and geometry are defined.

http://theproduct.de

Do you have a link to 'Heaven'?

[Edit]
Oops didn't see your post Brent. Still, I can't find heaven.

Thowllly:
Just to stop you from being so corky. :D ;) Did you see farbrauchs 16B-demo. :eek: No, i didn't mean 16KB.
http://www.farb-rausch.com/fr-016.zip
OK, there got to be some kind of cheating in there, but it's cool anyway.
 
Thanks misae.

Note, fr-016.com is half the size of the download URL. :D

I just wrote a program that reads 16 bytes from one file and outputs it to a new, ran it on fr-016.com, and then executed the output. - Still working.
I thought they did some trick so that file properties showed wrong size, but that can't be it. And it even works correctly with Alt-Tab, that can't be said about all games. :D
 
The "demo scene" has been around for quite some time. There are many get-togethers were people try outdoing each other in events such as 4k intro, 64kb intro, 1mb intro and unlimited size intro. I remember those parties from back in 1991. I think the "scene" was at its peak about a year after Future Crew's truly epic demo called "Second Reality", which won the Assembly 93(?) competition. If you do a search for "assembly demo party" you can find many more demos. When 3D graphics hardware came around any idiot could draw a triangle, and that's when the "scene" sort of died for me.

Ahh the good ol' days :)
 
Just on a side note, the Bitboys CTO was one of the main coders of the legendary Future Crew, they did such stuff too and won lots of prices at demo parties like Assembly.
 
I think this thread should combine about the *bloatware* games thread that's going on also. Since the demo coders do as much to impress as the game coders, but in a tenth of the space :D

The original intros, and demos are still the most impressive bits of software you'll ever see IMO. Now that the demo coders are using DX and OGL they are starting to look the same. But still manage to impress.

My current favourites are Glon by Cocoon and SINUM by T-Rex. Both of these are full demos, not intros. That's why I got an Amiga emulator, so I could look at all my old demos :) Sigh...

Petty the Hornet archive closed down, it's not as easy to grab any demos anymore.
 
misae said:
...
There must be some kind of compression going on as these demo's seem to unpack before running taking about 20-30 secs...
Click to expand...

AFAIK they usually use UPX, so unpacked size could be say 150-200 Kb.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

iroboto
  • Locked
Are current games less effectively executed than previous generations? *spawn
2
Replies
27
Views
3K
Shifty Geezer
Shifty Geezer
A
Dynamic framebuffer resolution
2 3
Replies
42
Views
17K
chris1515
C
G
I found a folder with a bunch of old scene demos on my harddrive...
Replies
13
Views
4K
Kurt
K
Shortbread
GemhisKhan 2014 (All Companies)
7 8 9
Replies
168
Views
19K
Deleted member 11852
D
N
How do you feel about next-gen gaming? *remodelled
2
Replies
32
Views
8K
AlNom
A
Back
Top