Numen (demo) for the Atari 8-bit family

The most popular Atari 8-bit demo and also arguably the best one.
I actually wanted to show it to you back then when I was on the Atari 8-bit stuff that starts with "N", but eventually forgot about it...woops.
Oh well, now I finally show it to you. :)

[@martink4116]

This must be the best demo on Atari. Amazing stuff.

[@MrAsrgr]

Simply amazing for an Atari 8-bit. Makes me want to get my 800XL and 1050 drive out. I wonder if any of the original engineers of the 8-bit Ataris see these demos and witness what their hardware could really do.

[@jarosawwasenko1341]

This is the best music based on POKEY sound i have ever heard. My congratulations. And nevermind that there are double Pokey - ...important are idea of using suitalble sounds. Just congratulation for the composer.... and show is just amazing! What artist can compose track for 12 min... and suitable to the show !!!! Mind blowing... !!!!

[@moditrix]

Absolutely amazing job. The creators are gods! Love this demo!

[@tharkthax3960]

mind blowing demo for an 8 bit

[@AnttiVi]

This is simply super great. Getting this out of the 8-bit box is astounding and this still blows my mind.

[@kimgkomg]

When the polygon was textured I felt that

[@c64cosmin]

Thanks for posting!!!

[@wf7300]

I wish my computer could render that. Lucky.

[@andieevans2005]

amazing demo of what an 8 bit atari is capable of

[@jarekfranczyk880]

After listening to the music I do not think that Atari had worse sound than the C64 SID. Awesome!

[@Highretrogamelord]

It certainly hasn't. Look at the amazing music from the Polish Atari 8-bit game developers, like LK Avalon and Mirage. ;)

Atari 800 has a bit worse (or less) basic sound potentialities. What do you hear now is a matter of programming skills which can overcome this handicap. Some of the effects that you can hear are pretty handy to perform on A800.

[@dafimperator]

good tune indeed. However I'm not sure if it sounds better than SID. Check KZbin for : Dutch Breeze c64, Coma Light 13, Tower Power c64. Check also some game soundtracks : Golden Axe, Rolling Ronny, Hawkeye, Stormlord and of course Last Ninja.

[@WolfenSG]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y5m4gY13qdCse6M

[@cosmoscoronado8862]

Just like nearly every C64 demo vid is also running dual SID stereo mods. I get tired of this debate over which is "superior" because the SID is amazing, a unique virtuoso instrument for its time... but the Pokey just rocks. You might as well try to rate a Stradivarius vs a Stratocaster, neither can sound great the same way as the other.

[@FlopsPL]

Dobre demo!

[@xxxGreyFoxNinja11xxx]

this is really amazing. I had no idea the Atari was capable of 3- D polygon. Then again must be from a cartirdge.

[@gwenynorisu6883]

...you missed the bit where it asked the user to flip the disc, then? It's probably been upgraded to more than the usual 64kb maximum, given that it reads everything off the disc in one go instead of partloading and having you flip it halfway through the demo itself, mind. At least 192kb if not 256+

[@ecernosoft3096]

@@gwenynorisu6883 Maximum was 128K

[@PartyDude_19]

5:52 that kind of looks like the time portal from Chrono Trigger

[@amigaatai]

wow amazing

[@CocaLightMan]

That music!!

[@RetroGulasz]

Awesome...

[@Wok_Agenda]

I've watched the entire loading screen am i normal?

[@gwenynorisu6883]

It's part of the experience, the antici....

[@doctorx0079]

Would this work on the original Atari 800 or 400? Does the music play in real time on the same computer, while the graphics are going?

[@PG-gs5vb]

As far as I remember, the demo needs a 320 KB RAM expansion (because there is no additional disk loading during the show) so an XL/XE series Atari is required. Everything runs on the same computer at the same time. The individual effects would cope with just a standard 64KB machine (the binaries that prove this are available somewhere).

[@gwenynorisu6883]

Not possible to upgrade the original machines to 320kb with the right boards? Some kind of bank switching will be involved in any case, so it shouldn't be too impossible to make an extra-RAM board that bankswitches its way up to that amount.

[@KuraIthys]

You can't upgrade the older machines because nearly all memory expansions for the ataris (and certainly the ones with actual software support) are built around the 130XE's bank switching logic. The mechanism for switching memory banks is to use Port B, which is unused in XL and later machines. Unfortunately, Port B is a controller port - each controller port controls two joystick ports and associated functionality. Because the XL and later machines have only 2 controller ports, Port B is unused, hence why the XE machine design could re-use it for bank switching. (6502 can only address 64 kilobytes, so you need a bank switching mechanism to have more than 64 kb of RAM) But on the 400 and 800, Port B controls joystick ports 3 and 4... And that means it couldn't be used to control bank switching. The XL machines don't have any stock designs with bank switching, but they're still compatible with the XE switching technique due to the their design. So, no. Those first gen systems are limited to 64kb, unfortunately...

[@ColdBits]

this 3D doesn't look like polygon It remembers me to Binary space partition

[@gomini3707]

Had I seen this demo on my atari in the late 80s... I probably would have fainted lol

[@jaekoff5050]

Does this play the music on real hardware?

[@atariandre5014]

Jaekoff Yes.....but its's stereo POKEY, so there's One extra POKEY installed

[@gwenynorisu6883]

Damn, and there I thought it was just X-Ray being his usual amazing self...

[@doomelek22]

Kurwa , zajebiste ...

[@rexsexson5349]

Hello Numen!

[@TYNEPUNK]

so which atari would it be ? 5200?

[@20windfisch11]

Technically yes but actually no. This was made for the Atari 8-bit line, IIRC with RAM expansion. The 5200 was nearly identical to the 400/800 so with enough memory this might run on there.

[@gwenynorisu6883]

"Msx: X-Ray" - is that the same X-Ray who did the soundtrack to Joomp!, amongst other things? I'm afraid I dare not try to type out his $REALNAME without googling it because I know I'll get it wrong.

[@dava_arvarabi]

Yes. Same X-Ray you mentioned. His real name is Łukasz Sychowicz.

[@OriginalSebie]

Is this on stock Atari 8bit or is it on one of those modded Ataris with 512+kB RAM, HDD and turbo card with 30MHz CPU??

[@Thatnorwegiandude]

No this is not Stock Atari.

[@AllGamingStarred]

can you give me the source used for the demo?

[@KuraIthys]

It's got a memory expansion, but not any of the other stuff. - though if you run the demo with a Rapidus module installed (20 mhz 65816) and enabled, it'll run at somewhere near 60 fps, unlike the really slow pace seen in the video.

[@chrischiesa3253]

As someone else said, the only use made of expanded RAM in this demo is to load everything at once, "up front," rather than having to constantly read "the next part" in from disk, as was more typically the case. That said, it should be possible to run any of the individual parts on a stock XL or XE; the only reason I hesitate to say you could run it on an 800 is because I don't know whether any 800s ever came out with the GTIA, rather than CTIA, video chip; if not, they lack a couple of the graphics modes that I see used in this demo. Other than that, though -- no problem! Oh, and the music runs in realtime while the graphics are going, exactly as shown here.

[@tharkthax3960]

imagine how long your beard would be by the time it loads from tape!

[@gwenynorisu6883]

Two sides of an A8 floppy is something like 180kb IIRC, so that's a little short of 1.5 megabits... with a 6000 baud fastloader, that's just over four minutes. Their SIO disc drives were barely any faster than the C64's, unless you used special driver code. Of course, if you were still using a rudimentary 300 baud tape loader, that's closer to 50 minutes :o ... and you'd probably have to use both sides of a C60 tape (so you couldn't even go away for an hour and do something else, but have to come back halfway) unless you were willing to risk the dropouts threatened by a C120.

[@KuraIthys]

Atari 1050 disks are 130 kilobyte per side, and without a speedload modification load at about 20,000 baud (which is roughly 2.5 kilobytes per second) Trust me even an unmodified Atari disk drive is way faster than the standard C64 one, Granted I use a disk drive emulator that runs about 6 times faster than that most of the time (which is also what modded drives are like) Quite amusing seeing a 64 kilobyte game load in all of about 5 seconds. (with it set to normal speed it takes about 20 seconds) The atari drive loads about 2.5 kilobytes a second unmodified, vs about 600 bytes a second for the c64, so it's about 5 times faster... Of course, the tape drive is another matter. Atari tape drives load at 850 baud at best, probably only 650 baud in most cases. And it's nearly impossible to make a speedloader for it too, unlike for just about any other 8 bit micro. Given the data structure on tapes uses 10 bits per byte (for error correction) plus the headers and stuff... Tape loading speed is below 80 bytes a second. So... if we assume this demo is about 260 kilobytes (2 sides of a standard DD atari floppy), it'd take about 104 seconds to load from disk on an unmodified drive; 50 seconds per side, but about 25 seconds each time it loads, since memory is 64 kilobytes. Load it from tape though... And you're looking at about 3,330 seconds, or about 56 minutes.

[@teh_supar_hackr]

I remember one video showing this demo took around 8 minutes to load.

[@tharkthax3960]

56 minutes ain't bad! 😁😁

[@yujinson40]

Theme is 3D

[@wichtelchen]

Raycasting with texturized ceiling and floor on the atari.... wtf?!?! That was still a slow thing on much more powerfull IBM 286 using the text mode screen wth or without the CGA 160x100-hack! Wolfenstein didn't have a texturized floor and was still running choppy on 386.....

[@wichtelchen]

@FuckYouGoogle I didn't expect anything else. But even with these optimisation, that's not easy! Even on the more mature C64, it's still hard. Your final boss level: Do that for the Atari 2600 video game console that uses the 6507. Its "GPU" is a chip that provides no more than a few registers you have to drive in-sync while a frame is send to the TV. And you have to squeeze your code into the overscan area of that frame or you have to say good-bye to full-screen graphics. If you take too long to render, the TV will turn b/w and roll the image (like if it's mistuned) :))))) The best I've seen on that console is the ataventure demo.

[@chrischiesa3253]

As an Atari programmer from way back, my guess is that a lot of that isn't actually being generated in realtime -- it may have been generated more slowly, "offline," then packaged for frame-by-frame page-flipping animation. I have a half-completed demo of my own that works that way. In the demo here, it's certainly the case for the raytraced stuff, i.e. the "flashlight" shining on the height-mapped surfaces with bas-relief high-quality letterforms/text. The question then becomes, were those individual raytrace frames generated on the Atari, or on a more powerful machine? I have to think that at least SOME of it -- the height map itself, possibly the individual, Atari-compatible image frames themselves -- at the very least, the letterforms / font used in them -- almost certainly had to originate on a later, "next-generation," machine. (In more recent times, I've used an image-dithering app on my Android phone as part of the toolchain to convert photos for display on the Atari. I didn't HAVE to, but interpreting e.g. a JPEG image file on the Atari would be a lot of work. Not impossible, but impractical, and DEAD SLOW. So I dither the original JPEG down to an Atari-compatible number of colors and pixels right there on my phone, send the resulting file to my Windows PC, convert it to a raw format that the Atari doesn't have to kill itself to decode, and ingest THAT data into the (emulated, in my case) Atari. (Ultimately, I turned it all into DATA statements in an Atari BASIC program that just pumps the data values to screen memory where they become graphics that recreate the original photo.) But I digress.) In this demo I also see a few software-based "graphics modes" that were invented by clever programmers in the 90s and were popularized on Usenet. The one with the blue spirally thing behind the photo-quality white-and-purple flower, specifically, quite clearly uses those techniques. For a really astonishing demo, see the free-form pixelated-text scroller in the Cool Emotions demo. That one is almost certainly being generated on-the-fly, and the math requirements alone are mindblowing.

[@David-Cope]

And this is nothing.. Need to find the one I was looking for.. Got thousands to check out.. Bear with me...

[@David-Cope]

DLI and raytracing .. Can't think of the name tho.. Can't do these unless precise timing on DLI and this demo blew that concept apart.. AMAZING to see.. Runs on emulator..Just need to find it!! lol Hope you like Numen below.. Got ALL off them so you can understand why it may take some time...

[@Marek_Bogdanowicz]

Made in Poland :)

[@monetize_this8330]

Seems to me like half this stuff would not be possible without external development platform (PC + Emulator) and modern hardware (video & motion capture) Definitely not achievable with standard i/o or factory-spec stock hardware. If it had been possible, the existence of Commodore Amiga very unlikely.

[@izools]

Only mod to original hardware required was a RAM expansion

[@monetize_this8330]

@@izools And the storage device used to load the RAM was via SIO?

[@dendritedigital2430]

the Atari GTIA chip had a 4 by 1 pixel graphics mode that had 9 colors anywhere on the screen. Just add some 6502 assembly and Walhalla!

[@chrischiesa3253]

Trust me, you can raytrace on the Atari if you're very, very clever and very, very patient. 🙂