C64 Demo : 3SIRA by Arise! 31 August 2024!

[@wacekofarise]

Thank you all for warm reactions and inquisitive questions which some I will try to answer the best I can ;)

[@dzltron]

How the fuck?

[@wacekofarise]

@@dzltron fantastic question. 30 years of doing this would be probably my first answer ;-)

[@dzltron]

@@wacekofarise That's fair, I have enjoyed demos for over 30 years. Thank you for your service.

[@hayrettinyildiz8018]

Thanks wacek, for the watching pleasure ♥️

[@wacekofarise]

@@hayrettinyildiz8018 you are most welcome! Enjoy and thank you! :)

[@wateryoutube-n9b]

Coming from the eighties c64 demo scene (rasterbars and scrollers ftw :-)) It is beyond amazing to see how the c64 demo scene has evolved!

[@meanmoegel]

I like how demos are incorporating more story-telling elements and leaning towards a more cinematic style - I think it gives demo groups more room to flex their coding skills and creative powers. Great work everyone!

[@wacekofarise]

Thanks! :)

[@newdlesmusic]

Yea 100% agree. This is what makes it a true mature artform now. In the early days it was showing off proficiency, bettering each other's innovative routines, but now that rich palette of C64 talent and technique come together to tell stories, humour, share and spread love. Communities that do and celebrate this are increasingly important in an AI obsessed clown world like ours 🤣

[@nickryan3417]

Wow. This would have blown so many minds if released when the C64 was current, or even close. I still look at each effect working out how I'd achieve it as so much of the art was working within the constraints of the system, but the way all this is done and in particular the overlaid and masked graphics, are just staggering. They've done such a good job that the main constraint seems to be loading data from disk.

[@MrWazhead]

They've done amazing things here. Next level stuff. You're breathing new life into this 'mature' machine. C64 forever!

[@JustWasted3HoursHere]

Really amazing that they're still finding new things to do with the VIC-II chip and SID even after more than 40 years.

[@BillAnt]

Wow the 3D and music is incredible on a 1MHz machine. This is beyond programming, it's an art.

[@Hawksendoom]

GOD BLESS THE SID CHIP! If the dude had 5 more months to work on it, it would have 3 times better! Could you imagine?

[@iamthetinkerman]

It's always been an art

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

It was always an art, and will always be art, for programming, in spite of what "Hacker" "News" *tards would have one believe, is not a trade but art.

[@pieterboots8566]

With far less than one instruction per clock tick. And without a decent multiplier and divider.

[@borealis8uno]

actually here the thing sounds bad... Did they used a "cheap" emulation setting?

[@gbkEmilgbk]

This demo shows, in some sense, the progress made over more than 40 years in (software) computer graphics and music, starting with the first C64 from 1982. Back in those days, we had 2D, not-so-good-looking games and intros, but today we see (I point out main effects): 0:38 3D realtime terrain animation 1:17 3D shape smooth animated , and 2D shadowed moving-skew text 1:52 3D smooth animated tetrahedron, cube and cube with eye animation 2:47 3D smooth animated wave floor 3:22 rotating 3D disc 3:55 realtime animated 3D Rubik’s cube on a moving background 4:33 Smoothly animated and soft shadowed twisted 3D cube on a generated, plasma-like moving background 5:40 Realtime animated dark wasp-like 3D shape in a moving 3D hex-space with color 7:11 smootch Robot movie (3D scene) 7:41 smootch 3D tunnel 8:01 smootch fullscreen animated 3D girl shape 10:06 smootch animated Matrix-style green rain in 3D The machine-the C64-is still the same, but the progress in this cyberpunk intro is evident.

[@xcoder1122]

After a long time again a demo that really impressed me. Many C64 demos look very good, but if they only show effects I've already seen in older demos, it's not that impressive. It may be a hard task to code certain effects on a C64, but it's an even harder task to come up with new effects that nobody has ever coded before. And in this demo there are a lot of things where I first thought "that's nice", but then they ramped up the ante and I thought "okay, now THAT'S impressive!"

[@dowcipas3801]

this demo is very nice and well designed but these new effects are mostly animations.

[@wacekofarise]

@@dowcipas3801 sure, no discussion there, but a) there are simple and complex routines - one can only depack anim frames, others can use them as starting point for more complex stuff. But also b) think about this: in Amiga and PC demos raytracings used to be animations, until the machines got so much power into CPU and GPU they are now capable of doing the raytracing realtime. The good old C64 (in demoscene context) does not have any upgrades available. Software can become better and it does, but it's limited. Either we adapt new techniques of doing things, or demos would stagnate at the point of rasterbars and scrolls. There is a price to pay for progressing forward. Atari demos nowadays are using at least 1MB of expaned memory as standard, which is not a stock config - we in the C64 scene stick to what we had in 1982 + the floppy drive of ~170kB per disk side.

[@dowcipas3801]

​@@wacekofarise Thanks Wacek for your explantation. I also read your csdb trivia :) I like much your demo because this is not a typically C64 loooong and boooring demo with many scrolls and images AND I dont know before that these anims are very complex as you explained. See you in the next prod.👍

[@wacekofarise]

@@dowcipas3801 you are welcome, and of course there will be more! 🙂

[@MMSZoli]

@@wacekofarise Please do mention the new ATARI GFX and sound hardwares :-) I saw them is real life in Krakow. It was really impressive, but a completely other world.

[@robertopaolo4625]

Incredible sound and graphics.. Great! Thank you so much

[@ditlew]

This is insane! Wow! Incredible mix of design, tech and music. Hats off to the Arise! crew!

[@DasHemdchen]

I would argue this couldn’t possibly a C64. But the music convinced me, that it‘s real. Wow, unbelievable, I‘m humbled.

[@letMeSayThatInIrish]

Best c64 demo I've seen. What a crime to cut the music at the end.

[@tommysund4704]

This makes me breathless, I am a graphic designer and even the typography is flawless!

[@wacekofarise]

Thank you for that! I am a huge font nerd myself, that might be one of the reasons ;-)

[@imqqmi]

Excellent demo! Love the design, the music, the timing, the effects very well done!

[@ProBloggerWorld]

Great aesthetics, really something unique and innovative. On the technical side, finally someone managed to copy the advanced effects from the Amiga 1200 with turbo cards (68030/60). A demo to remember and to be remembered.

[@Hawksendoom]

You called it! I miss my video toaster lol

[@soulkobk]

props to arise... that was fkcn great, i really enjoyed that demo.

[@Farbe08]

Really one of the best C64 Demos. I really like the BlueReu kidding.

[@DocTraubo]

Now this is impressive!

[@PixelSpirit1975]

Masterpiece !

[@dougjohnson4266]

Fantastic! This has it all, tech, art, and sound.

[@jesperjohnsen5336]

this is really an insanely great demo…just wow❤❤❤💪

[@sys7em.]

Wow. Just, wow…

[@runestone1337]

AAA-grade guys. Well done! 👾💯

[@PenguinEye]

Beautiful.

[@simewn]

Ubelievable.

[@lauriliinat7262]

Superb!

[@Hawksendoom]

Fucking how? lol! You guys are awesome! I love the "IKARI" metlt! Glorious! kick ass! 10/10

[@C64EVO]

Holy Shit…this is insanely cool..

[@betterbeavailable]

Wow. Impressive. This is art.

[@ralfjagetsberger276]

This is crazy🙏👍

[@falkaseltza]

Groundbreaking new effects.

[@xr4ffi]

Holly smoke, this one is insane 😮

[@mrfoobarf5670]

Incredible!

[@kke]

Stylish as heck. Jammer's jamming is top notch.

[@lavinagotu5934]

Respect

[@DanielWesleyKCK]

Beautiful

[@jammerc64]

If it's recorded from GTK Vice 3.8, setting 8580 bias permanently to -2mV should make filter sound closer to the original chip in 8580 captures. Here it sounds like default settings so cutoff is a little too thin ;)

[@KWezyk]

super 👍💪👍

[@bortsimons7457]

This is some awesome shit

Sick 😮

[@SirLucas81]

Amazing!!

[@PaoloPalmieri70]

Impressive!

[@KlajniKleiner]

wow!

[@MatIndustries]

Just say... "State of the Art" 🙂 Nice job

[@moagnor]

Wow! Just wow! ❤

[@BackToNostalgia]

That was very impressive!

[@src3453]

Amazing. Demoscenes of arise are now reached arts!

[@marcintechniczny177]

Eyes and ears burn off :-]

[@MMSZoli]

Really nice demo. Though I am a little suprised, Jammer made his music in Celtic Design style. I always thought I could always recognise at once a CD music, and now I was a little confused (till the end).

[@Ghost_Swe]

This is awesome!

[@jacobnoergaard]

Insane quality right here😮

[@AmigaBill]

WTF???? This is insane! Amazing work!

[@0kti]

Amazing

[@ivannasha5556]

Approved oZe TPF

[@jel9987]

Is this coded by gods ? Incredible !!

[@datashat]

Abolutely insane o_o

[@rolfedrengen]

The music is made with 3 channels of audio, meaning only 3 sounds can be played at once at any moment. Furthermore the 3 voices are primitive synthesizers. That means that while the CPU is occupied doing crazy stuff on the screen (like a 3D rubiks-like rotating bouncing multicolor cube), they also managed to do crazy things with the SID-chip, which is responsible for the sound on C64!

[@wacekofarise]

Jammer is a goddamn genius, that's how :)

[@rolfedrengen]

@@wacekofarise Amen to that!

[@AndyAmmann]

Genius. I am an old c64 friend (1984). I program in basic and a little in assembler. This video is beautiful. Like a movie. When comes a 1 hour movie made with a c64 or c128. I like the comics style. Nice, the new c64 demoscene-stuff. I dreamed in 1984 of a harddisk-movierecording. Is it possible live from floppy to read and send the data in real-time to screen? But how?

[@monoamiga]

Well, now I'm officially mindfucked. These incredible things are just impossible on a C64, yet somehow... GENIUSES!

[@coo1er_155]

Cool!😀

[@patton72010]

Amazing. 6:34 would scare me if seen in dark on big screen at party.

[@wacekofarise]

Actually, few people at the party told me they got scared with the robot :)

[@mariopasozyt857]

Doskonala muzyka, demko i grafika

[@Ignatowskic64]

This almost feels like an A500 demo or even early PC demoscene era.

[@wacekofarise]

I am heavily inspired by amiga demos when working on the design of our demos. As much as possible we are trying to maintain a continuous flow and fast pace of the whole thing. Thanks for noticing ;-)

[@blaah4490]

Many of the effects seem to be animations, but it is still a very stylized demo, and the music is really cool.

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

To me they look like they are rendered on the machine while we see the loading screen. Otherwise the disk needed to be flipped earlier.

[@blaah4490]

@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt The loading screen might indicate decompression. It’s quite difficult to tell whether that’s true or not without analyzing the demo on a deeper level. The robot animation is clearly rendered on external hardware. The demo uses three discs. Some of the other effects are quite short looping animations with large black lines, which should compress fairly well. There have been some previous C64 demos with a similar style that relied heavily on pre-rendered animations.

[@wacekofarise]

@@blaah4490 there are different techniques to achieve different effects, some of them use frames, some precalculated coordinates, some calculate things on the fly. There are also hardware tricks, which can move things around on the screen, shrink them etc. The large black lines are there for different purpose. There are color limitations for each 8x8 pixel square, so those large "lines" allow not to have so called "color clashes" where there should be more than allowed colors in such square, so the proper color have to be replaced by a different one. The ZX Spectrum demoscene are masters of this :)

[@jakubkrcma]

❤

[@robogod3000]

C=64 F O R E V E R ♥️🤖👍

[@wacekofarise]

Indeed! 🙂

[@discobedient]

This done on an actual C64?! Amazing. I've seen demos like this before but on 8086 processors and mostly in machine language or assembly for speed. I wonder how the rendering was done here and how long that took.

[@miggy4eva980]

This was most likely written in BASIC as the C64 had an inbuilt basic interpreter

[@discobedient]

@@miggy4eva980 I programmed them in Basic with a graphics plug in dongle thing and you can't get rendering this fast. This is Assembler I reckon, no interpreter needed.

[@wacekofarise]

@@discobedient almost all demos are done in machine language, using assemblers like Kick Assembler.

[@MotoLarmo]

cool and awesome

[@pappeterjozsef]

SID-Step

[@friedpicklezzz]

Wow!!! All that on a puny C64 😅

[@colinthomson7518]

nice

[@lookanio]

Wow! How the f.. is that possible?

[@Hawksendoom]

Dude imagine showing this shit to someone back in 86'! Their brains would have exploded!

[@mitchmccracken3050]

Render the 3d graphics elsewhere on a modern machine and then convert that to 2D sprites to display and move around on the c64

[@mitchmccracken3050]

A lot of it is thus smoke and mirrors but I’m not complaining and still enjoy it!

[@cptnqusr]

the only explanation for how this music was made is that jammer is a wizard

[@wacekofarise]

Amen, brother.

[@upthebuffer1921]

Just amazing. I got to wondering lately does the source code for these modern demos get released? Would be really interesting.

[@wacekofarise]

Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but the good thing is there is an excellent code repository for the C64 if you want to start coding on it, called codebase64.

[@dojcubic]

I love the reference to kzbin.info/www/bejne/rXbMc6t-hKyMptU starting at 5:40

[@willemvdk4886]

How is the audio filtering done? Seems like magic to me.

[@BartSliggers]

Towards the end there is clearly some Infected Mushroom influence. Maybe it’s because of their signature gating use ?

[@wacekofarise]

C64's SID chip has low pass, high pass and band pass filtering in the chip design. On the newer chip (8580) the filters are much stronger than on the "old" 6581 chip.

[@damarino1]

Wow

[@lgau31]

Is this on stock C64? 1MHz speed?

[@jesperjohnsen5336]

Yup….

[@wacekofarise]

Yes, no expansions :)

[@Arcadier]

I remember the patterns of the movement and I swear I know where the code is from 🙂

[@middle-agedclimber]

How on Earth???

[@iamthetinkerman]

How does one start to learn to code these types of demos?

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

6502 assembler and polygon rasteriser. Note how there are black borders between the hires polygons to avoid color clash .

[@wacekofarise]

To start coding demos, you need to learn 6502 assembler. Fortunately, there is a great repository of that knowledge called codebase64. It explains the intricacies of the CPU, gfx and sound chips and also has a lot of example code to test and learn. And it's all for free :)

[@Lion_McLionhead]

Guess it depends on the emulator. They all get stuck on Vice 2.1.

[@wacekofarise]

2.1 is far too old. Try at last 2.4 or higher :)

[@SchweinchenHorst]

3D? How?

[@EvexiansVideoworks]

How. Is. That. Running. On. A. C64.

[@vintagewatches-pk]

❤🧡💛💚💖 _LOVE_ 💖💙💜🤎🖤 ░█████╗░░█████╗░░░██╗██╗ ██╔══██╗██╔═══╝░░██╔╝██║ ██║░░╚═╝██████╗░██╔╝░██║ ██║░░██╗██╔══██╗███████║ ╚█████╔╝╚█████╔╝╚════██║ ░╚════╝░░╚════╝░░░░░░╚═╝ *Very Nice Demo..!* 💥💯👌✌👍😎

[@DanielIvanovDecsev]

wow quite advanced demo ... but the music ... i had to turn off :(

[@wacekofarise]

I am sorry you enjoy more the pokey sound, but turn it on at least for the beginning of side 2 where Jammer is emulating some pokey sounds :)

[@DanielIvanovDecsev]

@@wacekofarise to be fair im actualy a die hard SID fan, im just like the atari logo, and sorry for being rude about the music ....well thats my opinion.... btw the whole demo is a masterpiece !

[@wacekofarise]

@@DanielIvanovDecsev that logo was deceiving! ;) but seriously I can understand that, people like different things and it's OK :)

[@curbcobain]

I think this is some of the best sid music i've ever heard in a demo!

[@sma7530]

Wow !

[@JustinValer]

wow