Warriors of the Wasteland - Fyck the Scene - C64 Demo

[inphanta]

Someone needs to upload an HD version of this video.

[summer20105707]

Is this demo in NTSC or pal?

[summer20105707]

I love this man Its beautiful. It reminds me of my Amiga mod days. Astounding sound. Absolutely gorgeous.

[shairaptor]

Music is from Basebead "Sokoban Main", one of the first s3m I've ever listened to. Didn't know they made a C64 version of it, great!

[sys64738anotherone]

Holy Fyck!

[Koffe74]

Youtube and the emulators seems to mess it up, it would be nice to see it on a real 64.

Extremly nice flipdisk pic at 4:51

[vapourmile]

@Koffe74 Yep, don't know who that girl is but she's incredibly hot.

[Wisswass]

Incredible!!! My first thougt was: "This have to be a modified C64"....... My C64 is still sleeping.... I'll have to awake it someday!!

[pastorrtom]

Can someone explain the meaning behind "fuck the scene"? :P I find it abit strange

[Gerardus1970]

Will the C64 ever give up all it's secrets?

I hope not!

[3yE]

@nicholasthetaylor Ehr, wtf would THAT mean?

[nicholasthetaylor]

@3yE It read as if I was in a right flap, didn't it, but it was written as a joke at the time. so I have deleted the comment. Doh!

[zomgtehrei]

youtube makes it look weird

[Elebreed]

This seriously has to be the best song I've ever heard on a C64 demo. Wonderfully done.

[CUR50R]

This machine really is a bottomless pit!

Anything goes.. btw. nice FLD in here!

[plume909]

i'ts ultimately fake! well done to whoever took the time time to fake it though!

[enneff]

Not fake. You can download it and run it on your own C64.

[plume909]

Could you provide a link? It seems an image does not exist anywhere. Cheers :)

[Octamed]

it's not fake. I was there :) It did flicker a lot more on a real monitor.

[niobyte]

Excellent routines by: ALiH.

The demo is quite long, although worth it. Very interesting screen mode used. Lots of nice colour faking going on :) If there was more direction in the design, it would be a masterpiece. Still a great demo.

[Dieselolds]

This is amazing

[zombiemod]

How the hell did they do that at 4:50???

That's some serious hires going on!!!

[olynxmano]

Interlace is the trick.

It let's the viewer see more than the machine does for real. It also has to do less work to do. And a de-interlacer and the low res video does the rest of the fakery.

[blakegriplingph]

Agreed. Besides the fact that video compression and the way the capture device records things blurs out the dither, making it seem like the 64 is displaying true colour.

[jci10]

Its still extremely impressive. It looks like my nvidia card with 1981 technology.

[Tuxie]

Imagine bringing this back to 1985 or so, and running it on some guy's C64 back then... :)

[HobbyistX]

Better still, bringing it to some demoparty in Finland attended by a thousand rabid coders!

[pastorrtom]

@Tuxie Aye.. They would be like "WHAT DID YOU DO WITH MY COMMODORE? Are you from the FUTURE?!"

[pastorrtom]

@Tuxie ooor.. ooor.. they would just like "ah, thats nice, I did 4 of those last week, but I dont own a BBS modem, so nobody saw them :("

[vapourmile]

@Tuxie Pretty good. I was a fan of the 64 back then and the demo that would have most impressed me most is Edge of Disgrace by Booze Design. I am a pretty experienced Commodore 64 assembler coder and I still bow to HCL's superior technical skills.

[rdv27]

the image is real. C64 can do special hi-res modes.

[MN12BIRD]

The C64 really was the ultimate machine for its time.  These demos are mind blowing!

[Schnitz1]

It's the ultimate machine of ANY time when it comes to efficiency. In modern you get about nothing per Mhz.

[qwertypolis]

Patent nonsense. You get much more work done per MHz on more modern machines with pipelines and superscalar technology. The C64 was far from optimally designed anyway. Too low memory bandwidth caused VIC-II to starve the CPU (eg "Bad Line"). Big fat border around the screen that required various jump-through-hoops to get rid of etc. No doubt people have done amazing work on the C64 but I think it requires a masochistic mind to be still coding on it ;)

[erischaot]

but a little bit of masochism is ok, don't you think? Esp. if it's for a few more minutes of life one could enjoy in front of a c64 rather than your all-day work peecee :-P

[harleykman]

Dear Quertypolis:

You make some good points. Today's CPUs can do about 3 MIPS per megahertz, whereas the 6502 could only do 1/4 MIPS per megahertz.

However you're wrong about the border being a waste. Those early computers (Ataris, Apples, Amigas) were designed for display on television, and if they had used the full 720x486 space, the text would have run off the screen (due to TV overscan).

So it was necessary to confine themselves to the 640x400 space (or some variant thereof).

[qwertypolis]

Nope, sorry, obviously you didn't have a C64 in the 1980s. TVs this side of WW I does not have that much overscan! Did you think the C64 border opening was a recent idea?

[waskoma]

Qwertypolis, all machines are far from optimal. optimal machines would get 0.0001% market share coz they'd be fucking expensive. The (affordable!) rams of the time could serve only that speed, the (affordable!) 6510 offered that speed, and the VICII offered better gfx than anything on the market on its debut (including the PC). c64 was the best compromise overall and the best value for you money of its time.

[qwertypolis]

We were talking about bandwidth, not speed. And someone claimed the C64 was the "ultimate machine of all time". There have been more efficiently designed machines. In fact I've been toying with the idea of making a better designed 8-bit computer myself (under the constraints of 1980s tech of course)

[waskoma]

a) memory speed or memory bandwidth, doesnt matter. its the same thing. fact is they used slower memory because it was cheaper. The machine was made for a market aswell, there were other aspects of the design than to be technically optimal. for example it was designed in 9 months. Thats another aspect beside the market & technicals.

more efficiently designed machines?c64 had the slowest cpu and the best games & sound & price :)

[qwertypolis]

You know, you're not making a very good argument for the C64 being the ultimate machine here :)

And no, speed and bandwith are not the same thing.

[waskoma]

I'm not here to claim that the c64 is the ultimate machine.

your 2nd statement doesnt makes sense either. I said memory speed & memory bandwidth is the same concept.

[qwertypolis]

Well, they are not. Bandwidth can be increased without requiring faster memory chips.

[waskoma]

basically you are contradicting yourself all the way along :)

here is your original claim: "Too low memory bandwidth caused VIC-II to starve the CPU (eg "Bad Line")"

a wider bus wont help, here as only one of them can acces the memory at one time. so what you meant could only be speed, that could help.

also bandwidth means data troughput. kbit/s or smth. so it can mean both a wider bus or a faster throughput rate in my words a faster memory.

[qwertypolis]

Dude, you're calling me confused but I'd say it's the otherway around :)

Let me try to explain. Let's start with the original 8-bit data bus, and let's imagine that both the VIC-II and the 6510 needs access every cycle (in reality this is not true of course). Let's say that access is fairly arbitrated so that VIC-II gets one cycle and the 6510 the next and so on.

(cont.)

[qwertypolis]

You claim that increasing the bus width won't have any effect, but anyone can see that if the VIC-II databus were increased to, let's say 16-bits, it could now transfer the same amount of data in one cycle, and it can let the CPU access memory 50% more often.

In actuality neither the 6510 nor the VIC-II needs access every cycle, so with a wide enough bus, the memory accesses could be interleaved and allow the graphics chip and the CPU to run without cycle stealing.

[waskoma]

2x faster memory has the same effect as a 16 bit bus: both doubles bandwidth. so, your statement that you were talking about bandwidth and not speed was just stupid.

on the 2nd point, both a faster memory or wider bus would make the design impossible. the 6510 is 8 bit, the VICII is 8 bit AND can not be clocked at twice the speed (ever seen its garbled output in 2mhz mode on a c128?). The c64 was efficient enough as it was, it had the best games of all 8 bitters, that's enough proof I'd say.

[qwertypolis]

Why is that stupid? They do not have the same effect: increasing the memory speed might well be impossible, not to mention expensive. Doubling the bus width can easily be done by adding wires.

What's your point anyway? I've pointed out deficiencies: too low bandwidth causing the CPU to stall. You're trying to justify this deficiency as being impossible to overcome. But other designs have better bandwidth, even as the CPU/memory speed gap have dramatically widened.

[waskoma]

"too low bandwidth causing the CPU to stall. You're trying to justify this deficiency as being impossible to overcome. ."

its stupid 30 years later complain about the design when it was the best machine when it came out, better than the PC or Apple shit costing half of them.

And as already said, you can not just double the bandwidth or the Mhz. If it was so fuckin easy as you dream it up, they would have done it, and with double bandwidth give you 640x200...

[qwertypolis]

Who's complaining? Do you think I'm upset my C64 collecting dust on my shelf wasn't technologically perfect?

[mast3rbug]

You must understand how a CPU work to know that is impossible to do. A CPU is a state machine that latch one data at time from RAM to do something with it. Doubling the Bus=Doubling the Memory to 16 bit instead of 8. Did you know that the RAM was the MOST expensive CHIP of all at this time? It's also for this reason that CISC was more popular than RISC. CISC= fraction of instruction per cycle, less RAM, RISC= more instructions per cycle, more RAM (Faster for the same Clock Speed).

[qwertypolis]

I don't understand what you think is impossible, especially since the CPU will still access 8-bit data, everything it sees is the same, with the exception an unhogged bus. There is nothign impossible about tying together several memories to form a memory with a wider data bus, even evident in the design of the C64 which in fact used eight DRAMs each of 1Kbit to form its 64Kbyte main memory...

[mast3rbug]

Mainly the price of a such design, because the ram was pricey at this time. This was done later with the Amiga, with slow/fast memory chips, to access two memory at the same time.

[qwertypolis]

The point was that the amount of RAM would be the same precisely so that the price wouldn't have to go up. Only the organization of the RAM would be different (16x32KBit instead of 8x64Kbit for example.) Of course some extra glue logic would be needed, but looking at the already quoted production price vs. sales price, that shouldn't be a problem...

[qwertypolis]

In fact, it's funny that the price is brought up as a factor so many times. As I already wrote, the C64 was one of the cheapest computers around with a much lower production price than retail. Commodore could have added A LOT(*) of stuff and yet kept the price the same. Instead they apparently charged the customer through the nose, and still had problems making a profit...

(*) For example, imagine a "C64" with two 6510 CPUs and 2x 64KiB (=128KiB) memory!

[StoneOakvalley]

4:50! I really have to see this demo on a real C64. Can't belive this pic!

[FWAWrestling]

If this is legit, I am fucking amazed as all hell!!

[waskoma]

"Doubling the bus width can easily be done by adding wires."

??!!?? LOL. that would need to redesign and change the 6510 and the VICII chip for 16 bit bus. You can not do it by adding wires, idiot.

[qwertypolis]

Keep the insults to yourself if you please. Nothing would need to be redesigned if it was designed properly at first you know...

[waskoma]

designed properly?so they should have used a 16 bit architecture right? at that price nobody would have bought it! Why didnt they use a 68020, silly designers!! :D You dont care what the technology/market/timeframe allowed, and so it gets really stupid. Especially since the c64 was the best game machine for its time, and it costed less than almost anything else. (spare the crappy spectrum for now) Why dont you say the XboX is designed inproperly? hence supercomputers can do so much better! :D

[qwertypolis]

No, it needn't have been a 16-bit architecture. Having the GPU fetch 16-bits o'data would have been enough. Why are you arguing anyway? The C64 could have avoided the cycle stealing by having a larger bandwidth, and you're just making excuses and saying it was the best for its time anyway. Perhaps it even was that, but please remember that the post the spawned my original comment claimed the C64 was the ultimately designed machine of all time...

[qwertypolis]

In fact, the GPU itself wouldn't need a 16-bit databus: just put a 16-bit buffer in between it and the memory, from which the GPU could fetch two 8-bit words from, and it would still fix the bandwidth shortage.

[waskoma]

amiga had cycle stealing too, came 3 years later, best computer of its time aswell.

The GPU already reads 12 bits,so now it would need to be 20 bits, only to eliminate 1% of cycles lost !sprites steal cycles too, so you would need even wider bus/faster mem to fix all that. Your design would result in an expensive machine nobody would have bought.

the 16 bit buffer wont work, since in every 2nd clock cycle the CPU gets the bus, thus you cant double the speed, unless you modify the CPU aswell.

[qwertypolis]

Your numbers are wrong. The VIC steals 40 cycles (56 cycles with sprites) out of 64 cycles on every 8th scanline. That's much more than 1%, but for FLI this happens one every line!

Of course, only consequentive memory fetches would benefit from the buffer, but that's precisely the memory fetches the VIC uses (also for sprites!)

And the buffer would work perfectly well with the CPU, even though it wouldn't give any direct benefit. But all that matters is to avoid stalls, whcih the scheme does!

[qwertypolis]

Also, interesting that you bring in the Amiga, since that is in fact much worse. Turn on 6 bitplanes and watch Denise eat all your cycles, grinding the CPU to a complete halt.

But this could have been an acceptable trade-off: after all engineering is compromise.

If the trapdoor expansion mem had been fastmem, just wow, what a computer! But instead they mapped it as braindead and nearly useless slowmem instead!! What a waste...I'm sure they saved a whopping $1 on that...Just too sad...

[qwertypolis]

And speaking of dollars, since you repeatedly talked about prohibitive cost: the C64 was one of the cheapest machine by far. It retailed for $595 but the production cost was only $135!! The Apple II cost $1200! [All per Wikipedia] You'd think Commodore could afford to throw in a few more transistors with that kind of position...

[waskoma]

"but please remember that the post the spawned my original comment claimed the C64 was the ultimately designed machine of all time..."

oh well, right, in this sense you are right :)