Bad Apple HD - Atari 8-Bit Demo by JAC! of WUDSN (NTSC) (2018)

[@randomstranger_3]

I love how Bad Apple is used to demonstrate the capabilities and processing prowess of a device to many.

[@suspense_comix3237]

DOOM is much better, but yeah, this is still pretty funny

[@TDashLIVE]

To be fully honest, this is the best-looking Bad Apple I've seen yet. The 60FPS and lack of antialiasing makes it look like a 2000s 3D arcade game and I absolutely dig that style.

[@ridiculous_gaming]

One bit colour to finally use Atari's highest resolutions. My 600xl in 1983 came with a 1010 cassette. I would love a copy of this demo, what a fantastic job. Jay Miner is smiling from tech heaven. I have watched this demo running on many different retro/vintage platforms, and feel that this version is actually the best when considering the age of this 8 bit chipset to quality. It is simply so well done.

[@jacofwudsn]

Thanks for your kind words. You can find the download and details on how to run it on the real hardware on the video description. A new run of The!Cart will soon be available in the A.B.B.U.C. shop.

[@woop4628]

This is cool. Watching videos of Bad Apple on old computers and other machines is making me interested in this type of work

[@Miesiu]

Is this working on 16KB RAM ? Cannot believe...

[@jacofwudsn]

It is, the download contains Altirra preconfigured to 16k of RAM. But there is of course also "some" ROM. A lot of "some" ROM :-)

[@kangarht]

no it does not, a modern HW extansion banks in shitload of data

[@redleader7988]

@@kangarht True, the flexible design of the cartridge port brings the system into the modern era of storage devices. Even SD card interfaces exist.

[@kangarht]

@@redleader7988 SD card interface exists to every popular old computer system or console, that doesnt make your atari flexible.

[@chaosfaktor01]

Brilliant Peter! I wish we had had something like that 35 years ago, would have spared us a lot of discussions in the schoolyard ;)

[@davidcox1508]

Thing IS, 35 years ago, both RAM AND ROM were very expensive. If it wasn't, I'm almost certain that Atari and others would have done things similar to this project.

[@Clancydaenlightened]

@@davidcox1508 well there were hard drives, but they didn't have modern 64bit Linux and windows gui operating systems with an ide to develop either....

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

​@@Clancydaenlightened you have a common misconception on how commercial software was created back in the days. Even Atari had special modified systems for software development making the marketing department question their decisions to sell systems with reduced features.

[@KuraIthys]

On some level the tape drive audio method seems like a bit of a hack compared to other systems of the era... But on the other hand, it's a real (if rarely used) feature of the Atari... And when you think about it, it's very similar in nature to how computers and consoles with CD drives played audio in the early days...

[@nonetrix3066]

This has to be one of the most impressive demos I have seen

[@fedepede04]

i have to say this is crazy, super work that you could squeeze this out of such an old computer :)

[@mattb8075]

Wow this is so impressive. All the little details are preserved like clothing movements, particles, animation intricacies, transitions, and much more. Crazy this can be done on an 8 bit computer and look miles better than anything else in its league

[@magicstix0r]

I'm more impressed he found a cassette tape in the 21st century...

[@InvidiousIgnoramus]

What a strange thing to say. They're literally still being manufactured.

[@ChocolateSwitchYT]

@@InvidiousIgnoramus i think he may have been thinking about vhs tapes as they do look similar

[@InvidiousIgnoramus]

@@ChocolateSwitchYT Yeah, I believe production of VHS cassettes has ended. There's still new stock floating around if you need them though.

[@pokerfaceproductions1010]

@@InvidiousIgnoramus well yes but actually no as some companies still do special vhs shit like paramount

[@InvidiousIgnoramus]

@@pokerfaceproductions1010 Whether that's true or not (and I highly doubt it) such runs are far to small to necessitate production of new VHS cassettes, are almost certainly done with existing new old stock.

[@_zerofour]

that's why the atari 400 is still very good (in compared to c64, and the zx spectrum)

[@kangarht]

animation is done by a flash rom HW extender, it has not much to do with what the stock machine can do.

[@Clancydaenlightened]

@@kangarht it's probably stored as frames in ROM, the cartridge is ~128MB, and the audio is played via cassette, so all the computer needs to do is draw the screen, instead of using a cartridge you could do this via a hard disk more than likely

[@redleader7988]

@@kangarht Bank switching is not new technology. It has been supported on the cartridge port from the beginning. The computer is stock, so the fact that modern storage media can be used is a testament to the flexibility of the cartridge port.

[@kangarht]

@@redleader7988 doesnt matter bank switching is new or old. 99% of the job is done by the modern storage media. and 1% on the old machine, displaying images by switching in banks. this was impossible with old hw.

[@geometrikselfelsefesi]

If this thing existed in 1978, everyone will shocked

[@mythosinfinite6736]

Absolutely stunning piece of work that deserves much more praise

[@MrPGT]

So is the audio on the tape and synched with the demo graphics like the "An Invitation To Programming" cassette?

[@jacofwudsn]

Yes, exactly. That's also why there are 3 sectors loaded first as synchronization mark. I will have to also measure the actual speed of the tape, but that will be done after the party.

[@Calisota]

@@jacofwudsn AHHHH - I was already confused like hecc, even the Atari 800 Cardridge had no synthvoice yet alone ZX Spectrum. So I initially thought it was faked/tricksed. But seperate Audio running along the Data makes sense even if hard to pull off :D

[@knghtbrd]

I have seen a couple dozen of these, but not this one. That's an impressive bit of hacking right there! Wild-ass guesswork without looking: Cartridge contains compressed picture data, cassette contains playback routines and audio, taking advantage of the Atari's natural playback feature for cassette data, hence the reason for the trailing squeal at the end? If that's not even approximately how you did it, I've gone from very impressed to absolutely floored. Hat's off to you regardless of how you did it.

[@jacofwudsn]

Yes, you got it right. You can find the complete technical details and source at www.wudsn.com/index.php/productions-atari800/demos/badapplehd

[@atariandre5014]

Love it ! Best looking version on any 8 bit platform. I love the idea to use the cassette for the audio as well. Although it feels a bit like cheating, the system DID provide this feature from the start (the only system I can think of that has it). It -would- have been nice to also have a chiptune version though..... just MHO.

[@redleader7988]

Chiptune version here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eJuxnmNqpKiXj8U

[@tomasmarlen6582]

"bit like cheating" I know what u mean but to me feels more like cheating having SD card sticked in cartridge :D

[@atariandre5014]

@@tomasmarlen6582 To me that isn't cheating at all. It's just another and bigger format of storage. Storage systems have always increased in capacity and speed and as long as it still interfaces to the computer without adding any hardware (capabilities) and ONLY provides data through a port that has always been there, it isn't cheating.

[@DaScritch]

AHAHAHA ! Even the final reference to "The State Of The Art" on Amiga

[@ICHa-be9wf]

no way! 8 bit???

[@stevewallis661]

Great job Peter! I love how people push these Old computers to there limits!

[@LostSoulSilver]

This is absolutely incredible! Loved the intro too hehe

[@OatmealGrillBlazer]

there's 2 kinds of people here people who like Atari 99% touhou 1%

[@azur_0851]

actually, touhou people here are like 40%

[@Infevlol]

recommended

[@douglasalves4892]

Incredible ! ♥♥♥

[@InvidiousIgnoramus]

Incredibly impressive work, sir!

[@axelstone2003]

Wow I can't believe this can be achieved in a Atari 8bit :-O

[@ThomasTalbotMD]

Cool - wasn't expecting B/W graphics mode 8. Usually demos try to do a lot with ANTIC/GTIA custom features. Thanks for sharing!

[@jacofwudsn]

The ANTIC provides the full-overscan playfield, and using its DLIs, a dynamic number of charsets per screen is used to compress the image data. Without this, the data would be serval time the size.

[@behindyou529]

the atari be like: *eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee* ERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR *eeeeeeeeeeeeeee*

[@jrherita]

Does it run twice as fast on Atari 800? j/k - this is amazing and awesome! All hardware available in 1979 except for the amount of storage on the cartridge... Great job!

[@RichardCyberPunk]

In 2024, still great. Have you played your Atari Today ?

[@pwuerges]

Hallo, super gute Arbeit, danke für die Demo;-) Grüße aus Aachen Pierre

[@MTIX_iy]

Ah, I see that Kraftwerk Computer World album in the background...

[@keithb19681]

I see a Kraftwerk album beside the t.v., awsome taste.

[@Lahiss]

JESUS CHRIST THAT IS SMOOTH

[@FLCL75]

Waiting for the video explaining how this was done. I have been studying the Atari 8-bit a little and I am curious about the bank switched animation from cartridge method. Does the cart have a MMU? AFAIK no game cartridge made for A8 had more than 16 KB. I think adding memory to vintage system is totally legit, remember to be Turing complete the machine needs an infinitely long piece of tape. :-)

[@xys007]

Google for "60 fps video using SIDE 2" and all magic will disappear. ;p I think he used the same technique, but he used 1 color mode (mode 8 I think) for better resolution and to save data bandwidth for better audio quality or perhaps audio is passed through from the cassette {As far as I remember it could be done on Atari 8-bit). Any way, anyone thought of using color blending technique in monochrome mode to produce high resolution grayscale?

[@jacofwudsn]

The cartridge contains 16384 banks of 8k and has the ability to map two of them to $8000-$BFFF via bank switching registers at $d5xx. It is a standard technique originally designed and used by Atari to fit cartridges larger than 16k into the standard address space. In the 1980ies, the largest carts which used this were 64k. You can find the sources and more details at www.wudsn.com/index.php/productions-atari800/demos/badapplehd .

[@KuraIthys]

It's definitely a legitimate technique for any system that has cartridges. After all, it was widely used. Atari 2600 has 4kb ROM limit, yet Pitfall is 16 kilobytes. NES is the king of abusing this; The system, based on core specs alone is limited to 32K of CPU ROM and essentially 8k for the PPU. You need hardware expansion (extra PPU RAM primarily) to support bidirectional scrolling.... And every game after Super Mario Bros pretty much relies on a memory expander. The largest known NES game is 768k (Kirby from 1993) You can bet if the NES was still considered relevant by Nintendo there's a fair chance they would have pushed that to several megabytes... Ironically the 16 bit consoles never bothered with memory expanders - since the bus was up to 16 megabytes. Of course, the SNES was full of extra hardware of a different kind, like the SA-1 (10 mhz 65816 with multiply/divide and bitmap conversion logic) SuperFX (10 or 20 mhz Risc CPU with mostly single cycle instructions, dedicated high speed instruction cache and dedicated pixel plotting routines to get around the SNES's bitplane graphics system), and a bunch of others. The n64 also never required an expander, given that it topped out at 64 megabyte games around 2000, but had a bus design capable of handling 256 megabytes. That's to say nothing of the multi-megabyte games that exist on gameboy; A system which is otherwise limited to 32 kb ROM... To be blunt, using memory mappers in these systems is perfectly valid and consistent with how these systems were used in the real world - especially ones that were still in use into the 90's or later... And it's also perfectly reasonable, and likely even, that if these systems hadn't become officially obsolete, they'd be using pretty crazy stuff now just because it's kinda trivial. If you can afford a production run of mask ROM in 2020... You can afford to use several gigabytes of such ROM. While I doubt anyone working with an 8 or 16 bit system is likely to use more than a few megabytes (though I wouldn't put it past anyone working on a 16 bit system to use 8+ megabytes, which would have been nuts back in the 90's.), I would expect n64 games to all be 256+ megabytes by now. Because it's trivial to get that much ROM, costs very little if you have sufficient production scale... (and 256 doesn't even require bank switching on an n64 - even though nothing that large was ever used back in the day) It seems like cheating. And if you're making something to prove a point about what you can do with 64k and stock hardware, maybe. But if you treat it the same way companies themselves did? Expansions, especially ones that are completely invisible to the end user (such as anything in a cartridge), are totally fair game.

[@10p6]

I love Atari and this is awesome, but 62MB. The best versions are ZX81 as the underdog, and BBC teletext version which is only 400KB.

[@jacofwudsn]

Every Bad Apple conversion has a different aim. Mine was maximum quality on original hardware, no matter what it costs. I can reduce the resolution to the resolution of ZX81 and remove the sound, and it will be even smaller than the ZX81 one. So I'd love to see somebody showing something with 60 Hz and real audio on ZX81/BBC Micro. There are other Atari versions also, see www.wudsn.com/index.php/productions-atari800/demos/badapplehd.

[@aaronmicalowe]

BBC version was at a much lower resolution.

[@shadesoftime]

I'll be inpressed if my laptop will be able to play bad apple like this.

[@KuraIthys]

I guess if you had a time machine and could cram the animation down to fit in 64k, but kept the tape audio... That would certainly have turned heads back in the day. XD

[@xys007]

Who said 1 color is not enough? ;p

[@magnusphilosophus506]

Actually it's not enough, there are two colors

[@kelli217]

I suppose this trick could also be done with a Tandy/TRS-80 Color Computer. You'd probably want to use a CoCo3 for it. It has the ability to play audio from the cassette drive too.

[@boostermcblast2197]

But can it do overscan also?

[@kelli217]

Yes, with a bit of careful timing. Look for a file called Lomont_CoCoHardware.pdf and check page 64.

[@boostermcblast2197]

@@kelli217 Thx!

[@SodaWithoutSparkles]

Wherever there is a colour difference, there is bad apple

[@alexanderk23]

Almost killed by SOTA reference at the end :) Awesome work! > everybody used modern storage devices Nah, we didn't... unless a 5.25" FDD is still considered a modern storage device ;)

[@jacofwudsn]

I'm very happy some people realized the reference and why it's there :-)

[@Cmoky]

huge respect!

[@RichardiOS275]

ayo it's so smooth

[@dominodoge]

The animation is butter

[@WizardClipAudio]

Dude?!!!! That's amazing!!! I wish I knew how to make my Atari 400 do that!

[@GibsonChaos]

really amazing for a atari!

[@madmax2069]

This is retro black magic

[@thearrivalcyberseignister8898]

This is becoming the new doom challenge

[@8bitwidgets]

how does the 400 do the audio? i wouldn't think the chip of the original era could process.. the lady talking at the beginning as well.. and the storage of all the data? some kind of pi powered accelerator or some other assistance? a cassette couldn't load that much data for example. amazing demo though! just trying to understand the size of the demo would surely be more than what could fit on a tape let alone load times / ram to store / access.

[@jacofwudsn]

The Atari datasette has the unique feature of using the right channel for serial I/O of data and the left channel for real audio. It was used for example in educational software like language trainings. All sound is coming from the tape, all video is coming from the cartridge and is streamed by the CPU to the ANTIC. No need for PIs or an accelerator - remeber it's "Power without the Price" :-) You can find a more detailed description in links above.

[@8bitwidgets]

@@jacofwudsn ah ok that's awesome about the audio. makes a ton of sense. so how big is the demo itself. it can all fit in ram? incredible to think the demo is so tiny, but i guess if you take audio out of it.. still that much visual information i'd think would be sizeable for that machine right?

[@jacofwudsn]

@@8bitwidgets The original AVI is 177 MB of raw data in the Atari. It's compressed to 40 MB to using CPU & ANTIC. The demo code is in the 16K RAM, the 40 MB are bankswitched from the ROM in 2*8k blocks. See www.wudsn.com/index.php/productions-atari800/demos/badapplehd for details.

[@8bitwidgets]

@@jacofwudsn wow that's cool. i'm impressed it can bank switch fast enough to keep the data flow so fluid.. very impressive.. so could this mean a FMV could play through this or is this really only possible because it's a monochrome animation? color its would add too much data to each frame to be this fluid?

[@jacofwudsn]

@@8bitwidgets The maxium amount of data ANTIC can read & display is the same in all cases. In monochrome, 1 bit is 1 pixel. In 4 color mode 2 bits are 1 double-wide pixel in 16 color mode 4 bits are 1 quadruple-wide pixel and in 256 color mode you combine two of those. Means the resolution is reduced when the about of colors is increased. 320x200 b/w= 80x100 256 colors. There are FMV players which use 256 colors, modern SD cards/HDD controllers/microcontrollerrs to stream data directly. But my aim was to create something that runs with pure ROM so it could have been done in 1977.

[@trof4904]

Definitely some black magic going on here xD Impressive af, you blew my mind to atoms xDDD

[@NargaCat]

A tiny bit of desync, but it's nice to see old hardware's got this sort of capability even decades later.

[@Knuckx117]

Honestly the desync is bothering me far less than it probably should, as it's still somehow on beat.

[@aaronmicalowe]

The difficulty to sync is no matter what playback speed you choose, it will always desync because of ambient changes in the environment, like temperature. The only way to fix this is to measure the speed of the tape in real time and adjust the playback accordingly. This can be done by placing a timing signal on the tape.

[@davidcox1508]

So, what's on board the CARTRIDGE?? My guess is there's a RAM chipset aboard with an OS kernel that simply allows 'streaming' from the 410. Am I in the right direction here?

[@jacofwudsn]

There is just ROM on the cartridge. You can follow the links in the video description and watch this kzbin.info/www/bejne/nILRpIxvr5ydh5Y

[@davidcox1508]

@@jacofwudsn That is simply cool! Thank you for that! My Atari 800xl was my first computer, and I still own it.

[@nagisashiota8964]

If it has a screen, bad apple will be played on it.

[@jaimdiojtar]

isnt the audio a bit DEEPER than original version or other conversions? any idea why this was the case that the pitch is lower?

[@jacofwudsn]

It is a direct conversion of the original video/audio, and I can't hear a difference in the pitch. Of course, a 1979 tape drive and CRT speaker sound different than a youtube HD video :-)

[@zaphodb777]

Brilliant! Should I be expecting something like 6502 MPH next? Just kidding. :)

[@selami32]

384x232 meant full HD that time

[@НатальяШах-и8ю]

Hi! How was the program execution synchronized??

[@jacofwudsn]

The program starts the tape recorder and loads 2 blocks via serial IO. When the last block is loaded, the program starts the tape motor again and the video. Overall, the speed of the video was slightly adapted using FFMPEG to fit the video runtime on real hardware (which uses a not-really standard 49. .xx Hz).

[@Eratosthenes0815]

Being an 8-Bit native computer nerd I really like to see such as Bad Apple on a device such as the Atari 8-bit. BUT: having seen the demo on other devices I miss the demo playing also the audio. (On 16-bit(+) devices, such as the Amiga ( kzbin.info/www/bejne/jZWxf5yapbJrpJY ) this is what the demo is about.) But also much weaker 8-bit computers like the ZX Spectrum can play the sound/musik. Do you have such a demo?

[@jacofwudsn]

Of course, there exist other versions that do not have the full audio but cover music: demozoo.org/productions/169651/ by Playsoft and demozoo.org/productions/172694/ by R0ger for example.

[@machupichugamer7634]

woah bro

[@joshbryant1133]

So I was reading on your website and I had a question. Do you have to use a "The!Cart" flash cartridge or will any kind work such as an AtariMax Maxflash?

[@jacofwudsn]

The largest AtariMax "only" supports 1 megabyte. There is a very nice Bad Apple version with a lower framerate and POKEY sound by r0ger. My version of Bad Apple aimed at maximum framerate and resolution. That is only possible with The!Cart which offers 128 megabytes. The!Cart is available for purchase in the ABBUC Shop abbuc.de/members/shop/.

[@joshbryant1133]

@@jacofwudsn Thanks so much!

[@tysondennis1016]

Great!

[@arv1jch]

bad apple everywhere

[@Cavi587]

That's great

[@nymyx186]

Hi ! what is that song ?

[@jacofwudsn]

Bad Apple!! (feat. nomico) by Alstroemeria Records

[@nymyx186]

@@jacofwudsn fenkszujii

[@sdgx0]

the link does not work its down

[@jacofwudsn]

Hi, which links do you mean? Both work for me.

[@PeterBudai]

Nice, but all animation is stored on additional 128MB ROM module, computer just swich banks of video memory

[@jacofwudsn]

No. The demo has 40 MB, the animation has 200 MB and would no even fit on the module. One screen is 1,7 times the size of a bank and the CPU processes 3 parallel compressed data streams (charmap, charset, screen) and unpacks them synced with the video beam.

[@Paste-Bean]

Oh god the desync, why is it always the desync...

[@swirlingabyss]

Hot damn.

[@selami32]

next step run Cyberpunk 2077 on Atari 400

[@Clancydaenlightened]

All the c64 fanboys are mad

[@Clancydaenlightened]

Gotta remember where Dat gpu originally came from....

[@Clancydaenlightened]

Imagine showing this to Nolan bushnell or Jay miner in 1979

[@Marcos_Elev]

2:23

[@wence25games89]

Nah man I don’t believe that is running on a bloody Atari

[@MrNonesuch]

Sorry, i refuse to believe you got that running on an Atari 400 like that.

[@jacofwudsn]

The story and technical details are available at: www.wudsn.com/index.php/productions-atari800/demos/badapplehd There's also the download and the description how you can run it yourself.

[@LazyPirate8]

Dude....this is impossible

[@honor_gamer]

999 likes bruh. who first 1.000?

[@misterkuda704]

What

[@Allen-R]

well shit

[@CuddleMcSillyPants]

It is out of sync with music

[@CuddleMcSillyPants]

Runs great but there is always a flaw here and there!

[@HeadpriestPEPSI]

the fU-

[@AmstradExin]

Special ROM cartridge? Make it happen on a floppy disk + standard Atari and then we're talking. :P

[@jacofwudsn]

Well, for me there is nothing more standard than an unmodified Atari 400 plus a 410 and a ROM cartridge.

[@kangarht]

@@jacofwudsn banked in animation from cart ROM certainly was the standard in the 80s. next time use VBXE too to show how good atari is for the speccy and c64 bastards :D

[@KuraIthys]

VBXE is kinda overkill though. That's like writing an Amiga demo that requires a Vampire accelerator and using it to 'prove' how much better it is than the ST. XD Rapidus and VBXE are so far off the deep end it's hard to argue that's still the same system. ... Even though if such upgrades had been available in the 80's or early 90's I'm sure people would have jumped on them... I don't know if something like VBXE would have been reasonably possible back then. (I mean, not in low volume - FPGA's were rare and extremely expensive. But I mean in general complexity level I'm not sure what it compares to.) Rapidus of course is another matter. 65816 was available from the mid 80's onwards, so it's really only the way the glue logic (more FPGA's) is implemented and the fact it has 35 megabytes of RAM that makes it unreasonable for the late 80's...

[@robertmiles9942]

@@kangarht No VBXE. If you allowed C64 and Spectrum to also stack video cards onto their hardware too, then it's not really a classic computer fight anymore. Even this is already some cheating as it can only work with the!cart, which wouldn't have been feasible in 1979..

[@kangarht]

@@robertmiles9942 c64 can display 320x200x16 color 25 fps animation if you allow extra HW like this one uses

[@chinesepopsongs00]

It is a bit of cheating when you state demo on old hardware when you use lot's of modern storage. And just stream in frames from that storage. The sound is a neat trick that i am not aware of any other machines of the time can do. But also it is a bit of a trick so don't think this machine is better then the C64 for example. For that machine a bad apple version was made that truly runs on native hardware of the 80's (single side floppy drive 160kb) so no shitload of rom space that was not remotely possible back then. The biggest board of that era i have seen filled with roms (for a C64) was big as the mother board of a c64 filled with rom chips and that even could not hold like 5% of this demo. And that was not a consumer board it was way to expensive for that.

[@jacofwudsn]

Of course it's a bit of cheating - demos are about cheating *nicely*. And using ROMs is not actually "modern storage". It not's an SD with microcontrollers or FPGA like AVG or Ultimate 1541. In fact your comment made me think about starting a kickstarter - to fund me the missing 5000 27C64 chips, just to prove your wrong, :-) And I know Algorithm and his C64 version very well. And how he does his "everything on on side" demos. It's a different approach with a different aim (size instead of accurracy). He's using brute forcing and randomized algorithms for error reduction. For doing what he does you would have required most of the available computing power in the world in 1982, so that's also cheating nicely :-)

[@ralfjung4156]

Erst einmal GROßARTIG! Was ist die Magie dahinter ? Wie ist es möglich so etwas mit dem Atari 400 zu machen ? *BITTE* klär mich auf, danke sehr!

[@jacofwudsn]

Hallo Ralf, hier findest Du die Details und den Quellcode. www.wudsn.com/index.php/productions-atari800/demos/badapplehd

[@ralfjung4156]

@@jacofwudsn Vielen Dank, ich werde mich dem mal annehmen. Wußte nicht, daß es das für fast jeden Retro Computer oder Console gibt, sehr interessant.