C64 Demo:

[@johnadams3365]

Speechless as usual. Being born in 68 i grew up with a c64, and even was playing around in the dutch demoscene. Damn proud we were able to figure out raster-interupts for a simple scroll, bordershit and some music. But this is waaaaaaay out of my league...pheeew if only there where some tutorials to explain how they did it 🙂

[@AlenMarkov]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/f3Skh2VtqMmprs0

[@Riva1000]

Wait. I was born in 78 and C64 was part of MY childhood :) I guess technologies didn't age that fast in those days.

[@ragetist]

​@@Riva1000 -82 and part of mine too

[@RobertGabor]

I do not even know how to put a simple dot outside 40x25 screen. Long time trying to find way to went onto Assembler but finished at Basic with some cracking copycat programs from demos, speech simulators and fun.

[@nahkanukke]

69 almost had my demo ready for first Assembly meeting in Helsinki. I am so sad that the time did run out.

[@marquisor]

It's 2024 and the C64 scene is still alive and kickin'. Awesome! And.... MY DREAMS CAME TRUE!

[@AxelWerner]

32k BASIC Bytes free they said. 16 Colors they said. 3 synth voices they said. WHAT THE F_CK WAS WHAT ?!?!?!

[@juhajuntunen7866]

Enough.

[@Del-Canada]

I use the Commodore colors on my channel.

[@pragmax]

"WHAT THE F_CK WAS WHAT ?!?!?!" - that is the sound of your floppy drive wishing it was dead. I can't imagine the amount of juggling needed to keep RAM full of fresh data to serve to the screen, but I'm guessing the drive just never stops the whole time.

[@Elbas_Tardo]

38911 bytes free in Basic, no 32Kb.

[@carlopedersoli4844]

This is one of the best if not the best demo I have ever seen on a C64. No idea how u pulled this off but there are some serious magical skills involved to do this. Respect.

[@marcogiuranna116]

Agreed. I've seen so many C64 demos and for some reason this is absolutely one of the best! Not the most complex, not the one with the best music...but it has everything. Entertaining, with captivating atmosphere, great story, great effects, amazing skills. Overall, one of the best ever, no doubts.

[@curiousgeorge7515]

For those that keep asking, there's two ways to put graphics in the border: one byte that shows only black pixels, and sprites. With raster splits you can make limited patterns with the black byte. Easier to use expanded sprites. Removing the borders is about tricking the VIC by changing a counter dynamically, keeping it one step ahead so a certain function is never triggered.

[@FairLight1337]

All explained here by Trident himself: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jJ2wnoiYbLunrq8

[@fluffycritter]

I can't believe these folks are still active after 37 years and still putting out absolute bangers.

[@DadGamingLtd]

All the best cracks of my childhood where by Fairlight. And niw they also did my fav c64 demo. Kudos

[@WittichWolf]

A real masterpiece ❤️ Didn’t saw such an impressive demo on the C64 before - with a continuous story, such incredible effects and wonderful soundtrack. I enjoyed every bit, every pixel and every second of it! Thank you very much for this outstanding experience, didn’t know, that this is ever possible on my lovely bread bin 🤩

[@MrMaxeemum]

I've followed the demo scene for many years and remember when PCs got good mid Pentium life, I lost interest in demos because you could get them to do anything you wanted and became more of a film director instead of a tech demo. I still followed the demo scene but only the limited categories such as 64k 4k 1k and 128byte demos as that's where the skill was. I remember seeing a demo showing 99 shade bobs where they explained that they said 16 shade bobs was supposed to be the limit. Now we see a C64 carry out even better tasks, it's truly astounding. Farbrausch 008 is still a favourite of mine for 64k PC.

[@LBNODK]

agree, i thourght "speed ball" was maxing the c64 out.... realy need to get an c64 again, now one can do internet and SD card with iT.

[@franknurnberger1102]

Music, Graphic Novel Design, Effects and Storylining. This is love. THANK YOU!!

[@ktnlepside1665]

Watching this Demo on Twitch during the competitions, I was simply speechless. Fairlight, you are a phenomenally talented group of people! I am sure that this Demo will go down in the history of the C64 Demo Stage as an amazing event that provides amazing audio visual experiences. Hearty congratulations to coders, graphic designers and musicians!

[@MrYazbo]

The most amazing part is this time the whole demo is only coded by one coder - Trident.

[@ktnlepside1665]

@@MrYazbo Yes, that's right, Trident did it all, great respect from me!

[@Umtree]

Love this demo scene so much. Born in 79. C64 was my first and favorite computer. Love the music, love the programming, love the art. Respect to the effort put into these demos. I tried, but never be this great. Love it. Thank you

[@Wadyface]

Bloody nora that was some demo. The C64 has a special place in my heart. Banging tune. Unbelievable graphics. Fairlight still one of the best demo makers. Well done. :)

[@thomaskarlsen1389]

Probably the best thing I have ever seen on this machine. True art! Love!

[@marhete5]

I'm speechless, the demo was like a movie. C64 has surprised again and again!

[@MrMaxeemum]

I remember back in 87 leaving my C64 behind as I grew up and entered the work force and started to carve out a career for myself but the SID music always stayed with me listening to the music on cassette tapes and then CD and then MP3 all in my car. And as PCs were introduced into our day to day running of our business I remember downloading demos over modem from BBS sites and our 1993 high range 486 DX2 66 struggled to display demos this good and now the humble C64 blows it away and even some Pentium demos from a little later. If this was released back then the demo writers would definitely had been burned for witch craft. Amazing work. Even today I'm still surprised, Full screen graphics? WTF!!!! That's impossible but I'm seeing it, I don't believe my eyes. To the youth of today this means nothing, but for us old gits it's highly impressive. I'm expecting Crysis to be running on C64 in the next few weeks now.

[@magicmulder]

Apart from the technical brilliance this is also stunningly designed artwork. Extra applause for the graphics artist!

[@cheddarfish225]

Just amazing. No other words for it.

[@kumanderlinux]

Hands down the BEST C64 demo I ever saw!! Technically and emotionally. Especially "To us, it... is... love." I really started leaking at that point. :') Thank you so much!

[@SpazioAlpha]

Simply Art, Love and Genius❤

[@Erlandsson1964]

Absolutely mesmerizing and fantastic. I love the punchline. Great work.

[@matthiasmarx7334]

AMAZING! Best C64 performance ever seen!! Even my kids LOVE IT!

[@deifury5768]

What a master piece ! Incredible ! I loved so much the music. Less is more. Incredible !

[@middle-agedclimber]

Better thqn 99% of cinematography created after 2005.😮😮😮😮

[@Pootie_Tang]

Commenting as I've seen 4:39 of this demo: this is, probably, one of the most expressive demos I've ever seen. Kudos! Masterpiece indeed

[@TH-td7il]

Mathematics is the language of Gods, and Fairlight speaks their language fluently pixel-perfect. ❤🙏❤️

[@0rigpumu]

Epic! And that's coming from an Amiga devotee who never owned a C64.

[@mariol.6714]

Hey, I was a co-founder of the C64 group CRAZY, and in the beginning times of CENSOR-DESIGN, I helped it to race the charts to the very top back then, as my main work was the import-export things by modem to & from the U.S. So I wasn't a coder back then, and I am not a coder today... BUT MY GOOD GOD!! I CAN TELL YOU GUYS, THIS IS A DEMO OF QUALITY AND ONE TO REMEMBER. 🤜🏿PEACE💋RESPECT🤛🏻 DEREK.B/C64.

[@SeverityOne]

Initially: 'A cat! How cute!' Then: 'They made a meow sound on a C64.'

[@casteoj]

The next video is going to be the trainer where it is all fixed by the run/stop key. It’s funny to explain that you had to connect to a bbs via modem and wait for hours to download if you didn’t get a busy signal. Then many times the crack intros were better than the actual program . This demo is just fantastic!

[@b.e.e.k.e.r9812]

how....how......HOOOOOOOWWW?!?! I created some Intros/Demos myself back then - I always imagine: WHAT would the creators of the C64 have said to something like this back in the time ☺🤯😇 Just so f-awesome geniusanity!!! 👌✌

[@KrautRockt]

my 83`C64 plays this demo!...crazy! 🙂thanks for upload...! to all fans, I wish a nice summer`24 ...your #RoboTronic64

[@patrickhausser]

"To us, it is love" 😍

[@paulz4632]

Hi its Colwyn of the old group The Force here wow this is one of my all time favorite demos i especially liked the no borders and the demo just showed off a mix of everything that max's out the c64's capabilities with a interesting script to follow. Imagine if we could go back in time 40 years ago and release this demo back then in 84 or in fact most of the demos being done now. Back in 80's theres no internet minimal modems so each creator has to learn from scratch late 80s early 90's modems meant we code coloborate more and copy partys talk about routines and codes together.

[@vapourmile]

"that max's out the c64's capabilities" I have never seen any demo which achieves that. The reason being demo writers are obsessed with doing only things which can be done at 50fps or thereabouts so you haven't maxxed-out anything. A

[@paulz4632]

@@vapourmile Ill rephrase what i meant to say, max's out the diversity of the type of demos noramlly done, some focus on borders some music. Didnt specify that it actually maxed out litteraly .

[@MrYazbo]

@@vapourmile That's complete rubbish - the amount of complex self-changing code and literally requiring accuracy to ONE CPU CYCLE (e.g. to do all the side border opening which is all over the demo), never mind using hidden (i.e. not published in any c64 manual) opcodes some of the time for additional speed, which is required for most or even close to all of the effects in this demo. The whole point of demo coding is optimisation and having things run in realtime not doin some shitty ray tracing which runs at 2fps and can't run natively on a c64. For most of the complex effects if you open a disassembler and look at the code it won't make sense at all as it's in massive self-changing lists for speed. The fact that you think its 'fairly elementary' to me shows you know precisely ZERO about demo coding - feel free to post some of your own coding examples if you l ike though.

[@vapourmile]

@@MrYazbo You are funnier than you can imagine. The code required for cycle-accurate timing is very, very simple. Self-modifying code is very easy to write. The quasi-opcodes are all very well known and easily understood by anybody already familiar with assembly language. A ray tracer which takes even an hour to render to basic scene uses more complex programming and substantially more complex knowledge than anything you have listed.

[@MrYazbo]

@@vapourmile I never said writing a ray tracing algo was simple however saying the effects in here are 'easy' or 'elementary' is comical. If all this stuff is so easy why don't we see tens or hundreds of demos doing these same effects like the side border tricks and ghost bytes in this demo used all over? Feel free to also link some of your demos as well if this stuff is so simple (I do actually know both 6502 and 68000 as I was a scene coder and musician in the Amiga scene in the early 90s and there's even some of my intros kicking around on YT if you scout around)

[@WoodmanFFM]

Holy crap, what a ride. Took me straight back to childhood, sitting in my room late in the evening watching the latest demos or, more likely, playing the latest games...

[@bojcio]

Imagine seeing this in 1990.

[@MarBL23563]

hell, 1982-3?!

[@andreasmartin7942]

'Ah, another Amiga demo'

[@jenniferpsaki6176]

There are too many incredible and unimaginable effects in every unit of time ! Too much)) An aesthetic orgasm!..

[@WayBester]

Beautiful and crazy story. Thanks a lot for your ART!

[@acidzebra]

Several moments where I went "wait what", amazing stuff, pushing the 6510 hard. Fun silly story and having the great music and story "interact" was very cool - the whole thing really kept my attention until the end.

[@chrism72727]

My jaw hit the floor at around the 8 minute mark... full screen graphics. HOW????

[@ZeroStatic]

My guess is a lot of precompute and clock accurate manipulation of the vic chip registers, this was too difficult before the existence of good emulation of the vic chip. Keeping the screen running smoothly while changing the registers during the scan of the display requires a lot of CPU cycle accurate code. Music is handled during the blanking period and the CPU is 100% cycle accurate during the display period, keeping the VIC chip registers changed at the precise timing to generate the display. In short, a lot of work. ❤

[@GordonBraicks]

You really had me with those raster splits 👏

[@StianSreng]

Blimey. A lot of these effects I couldn't even do on an Amiga.

[@JH-lo9ut]

This is a piece of art.

[@ericus666]

Beyond Amazing ! Kudos !!! 🙂

[@ernestogarbarino5759]

This demo marked the day when the C64 was declared superior to the Amiga 500. Utter black magic. And Danko's tune to top it up! OMG

[@simonebernacchia5724]

For storytelling definitely!

[@Elbas_Tardo]

Superior al Amiga no, pero esta muy bien para un C64.

[@ernestogarbarino5759]

I guess to clarify, an A500 demo has to be 8x better to justify the hardware upgrade, in the same way that a modern PC demo running on GFX card has to be 10000x better. The impression that a demo causes is always relative to the limitations of the hardware at hand, plus the creative genius of operating within such constraint environment.

[@Elbas_Tardo]

@@ernestogarbarino5759 Y asi es, el Amiga es mucho mejor, asi que decir que es superior, pues no tiene sentido. Nadie cuestiona que sea una buena demo para C64, ese es otro tema. Me gustan ambos sistemas pero es una afirmacion falsa.

[@makidoko]

Yay, Rasterlines are love. No more war, no more hunger nor global warming ; rasterize one another, like he has rasterized us.

[@gnu-lynx2501]

terrific! great show, the c64 saves the world

[@FPAMulleDE]

Another masterpiece and art. Just wow!

[@cybear1977]

mindblowing on SO many levels. love it

[@ragetist]

Thanks for the feels guys, for a moment I was a kid again and loading Turrican.

[@MartinGalway]

Wow... amazing. I can only imagine what running this in 1987 at the Ocean offices would have done to the programmers. (Well... everybody actually 🤣)

[@PontusBerg]

Martin - Hero! I guess you might also be interested in the background of this demo. kzbin.info/www/bejne/eprCgWmDfMt6bJYsi=0D-iI0Uas_G2eEj- There is also a video with the more artistic aspects.

[@moregamemusic]

Great demo, I was just waiting for the WARGAMES quote "Shall we play a game?" in the end.

[@simonebernacchia5724]

I was waiting to see all the generals dance around the table in the style of the MUSE song

[@gamingyourway]

That was jaw dropping, wow!

[@MMSZoli]

That speedup at the end... LOL

[@georgesfocant778]

What a beautiful demo!

[@PekkaHH]

Awesome! Best I seen since.. dunno.. but a *very* long time.

[@giuseppegiuseppe901]

Fantastic demo! Music graphics atmosfire

[@LilMissMurder3409]

Masterful! BRAVO!

[@VepsianGameDesigner]

This is damn cool work!

[@pazsion]

i didnt thibk c64 could do transparency or more than 3-4 layers over others... 😳 then a 3d perspective... crazy good stuff

[@yotraxx]

This is a crazy f* Demo for an 8 bits machine !!!

[@dougjohnson4266]

Nice homage to that 60's movie with the really long title. (Aka, Dr. Strangelove) These programmers know the C64 for sure.

[@JoachimLjunggren]

Thanks. Yes that was exactly my goal with the art! But with my own twist.

[@cmachador]

Wow!!!! It has left me speechless!

[@agpxnet]

FLESCOS? New graphic mode? Outstanding!

[@PeranMe]

That was quite a käftsmäll! Well done! ❤

[@CarstenMeyer]

Oh my gosh! This demo has it all! What a gem! What a masterpiece! So many (impossible) effects ... unlimited :-) colors, a story ... music! Thank you commodore, thank you Fairlight! This is 1337! This is love! How long has this been in development ... just curious?

[@JoachimLjunggren]

Thanks! :) Rougly two months with mostly three dedicated people.

[@netlooker5841]

@@JoachimLjunggren Kudos !

[@IXSVideo]

There is one thing about the C64 that I'm jealous of. It's the people who create those Demos around the given hardware. The ideas and how they were put into the demo and to tell a story . Congratulations. Now I'm not sure which demo impresses me more "Edge of Disgrace" or this one.

[@aspide3000]

Really Awesome! Respect.

[@JoshWhelchel]

This was amazing! I loved the message

[@djmkrr]

I don't think I could ever write software as glorious as this

[@jmalmsten]

Well. Darn. Yes. This is one of the best demos I've seen on any platform. Hats off from a total coding novice bystander. :)

[@cooee_fancy]

Amazing demo! 💎🥰⭐

[@dejanm75]

That was fcking impressive!

[@KlaraKopf]

i am stunned by this!

[@trailmonkeyg]

Can't stop watching this demo! 64k RAM unleashed! 🙌❤️64

[@kevincolyer]

I'm gobsmacked. Art, wit, code!

[@ScandalUK]

Yeah Fairlight never fail to impress me

[@OLIV3R_YT]

Absolutely awesome!

[@iseptimus]

Fairlight. That’s a group that always knocked it out of the park.

[@FairLight1337]

Thanks :-)

[@ivanskido]

amazing! love it!

[@captstulle]

Boah! Wow! blowing away!!

[@betterbeavailable]

Extremely creative. Well done.

[@flottenheimer]

Masterpiece.

[@FairLight1337]

If you are in it for the music, the main demo music is by Fegolhuzz

[@DeadDroids64]

😢It`s awesome. That You can do those things. I really miss my old c64. Would have been nice to run this demo natively. Really good work.

[@ingolf17]

Just awesome!! Great work!

[@SamGalabb]

Masterpiece!

[@Del-Canada]

Dang. Fairlight. Now there is a name I haven't heard for some time. I have an Eaglesoft Incorporated cracktro on my channel. I was a member on their BBS and had my own group releasing 0day stuff. My BBS was calling Spitting Image and I first put it online in 1987.

[@funkymedlol]

amazing production

[@sniglom]

Amazing.

[@PoPanzPoPanz]

Top !! So is the music !!

[@dolf111]

outstanding show...

[@RobertGabor]

I remember last thing I made on commodore. It was circa 2005. I made guitar tabulature reader in basic. Just put data with numbers. In polish book about commodore there was equation for POKE values of bits all tones from all octaves. And I can put Stairway to Heaven tab into computer... Wow.

[@acied6200]

Great demo,, live even better. Keep it up !

[@marcoschincaglia]

The world was saved by the rastersplits

[@waltimo]

I don't have words

[@andreasmartin7942]

When coding was art (and not just trying to depict reality). I remember that I often loaded a prg just to watch the intro made by the guys who cracked it

[@dreiariola4761]

Wow, awesome!

[@CrazyBite2007]

This.... shows.... how.... lazy... modern computer developers are. This can be played by original C64 hardware. Impressive. Stunning. Amazing.

[@BADC0FFEE]

Lol you know nothing about modern computer developers

[@betterbeavailable]

It's just that we/customers don't care anymore about the amount of RAM and CPU power as long as it works. I'd love to have been in business during commodore times when every byte and clock tick counted.

[@MrGuru666999]

Nobody is going to mention the dog and Mickey sitting in the war room??

[@cornjulio4033]

Nice ! I feel like this was done "for the honor" !

[@PlayBASIC-Developer]

Brilliant !