Demoscene

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These two demos using the Atari 2600. I like the crunchy sound of this hardware, and how they made it work with (I think?) just two audio channels to pack all these sounds into.

This one is particularly impressive to me that it was done not even on Commodore 64, but on VIC-20, only on 16 KB disk.

This one still blows my mind. 4096 Bytes makes this.
Absolutely Tiny. see this image below for a scale of how small that is. this thread probably has more letters in it than this demo has bytes
1755927136413.webp


The demoscene even has created incredible "cracktros." There's even entire hours-long compilations of the many cracktros the demoscene has become synonymous with.
Here's a few you can take a look at

Here's a few for the Sega Genesis/MEGADrive.
This one below is an excellent hardware showcase, both in the graphics and music department.

TiTAN - Overdrive 2 (RGB 50fps) - SEGA Mega Drive - Revision 2017 (1st Place)

My second favorite has to be this one here, just for the fact on how fast the console is rendering 3D without any extensions.
MD-NICCC by Titan (2019) | Sega Mega Drive Demoscene

Lunatico by lft is still probably one of my favorite C64 demos out there:

I also enjoyed "3SIRA" which came out recently
 
Belisarius Cawl dijo:
Also how is that 4096 byte demo even possible? What platform was it on and did it include the music too?
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Git gud. These have been a norm for the scene for the past 15 years. Platform can be anything you want, music is what you hear and in just about every ruleset, it's part of the size restriction.
 
Here's one of my favorites from recent years, partially because of the music/audio. 64KB.

edit: and for anyone interested in these things and want to run them yourself, or spelunk through demoscene history, go to pouet.net or scene.org
Warning: Windows might huff and puff because it can't identify what these executables are, especially demos that are tiny in size. They're so compressed that Windows/Defender can't make heads or tails of what it will do until it's running. They're similar to sophisticated trojans/viruses in that way.
 
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Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 dijo:
Here's one of my favorites from recent years, partially because of the music/audio. 64KB.
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This is actually why I was vaguely disappointed to see Conspiracy do the 32nd anniversary 32-bit port of Second Reality at Asm a couple weeks ago.

Like, that's cool and an achievement, but I'd rather see another Conspiracy demo.
 
Belisarius Cawl dijo:
Also how is that 4096 byte demo even possible? What platform was it on and did it include the music too?
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I wish I could tell you. The video description does have a dead link that apparently explained the process. Searching around might give you answers.

I'm glad to see this thread is still seeing activity, if ever so slightly. For those who want demoscene sites where you could browse demos by what platform they were compatible on, there's pouet.net and demozoo.org.

Here are some more contemporary-looking demos.


One of my other favorites demos music wise are probably overdrive and overdrive 2 by TiTAN, plus a few by HBC.

When it comes to HBC, my favorite is either the road trip one or how to use blender.

I sometimes think about this demo, because of the music.


This one blows my mind in that it fits in 64k.

The previous demo is part of a whole trilogy and it's amazing. Gorgeous cinematography in such a small space. The tension these demos invoke is breathtaking, They're like entire short films.
 
Belisarius Cawl dijo:
Also how is that 4096 byte demo even possible? What platform was it on and did it include the music too?
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Sizecoding is magic. To start with you ARE cheating a little bit over oldskool because the OS can do a lot for you. Like, you're not (generally) writing drivers for the video card, you're asking DX or GL to do that for you. If you want to get super pedantic it's <size class> plus the OS install. Similarly if you see normal-looking 3D text they're pulling a system font and extruding it, or otherwise munging it.

But the secret is you have to procedurally generate fucking EVERYTHING. There is no space for even compressed assets. You'll see a lot of random noise-as-texture in sizecoded demos, or repeated texturing. Lots of fractal stuff. If you want a landscape, make an algo that generates it. Music? You're generating samples if you're going tracker-style, or some demos - generally more newbie ones - will just call the Windows software MIDI renderer. Fancy size demos will have a fair amount of precalc when you start them because of this, and competitions will generally put limits on how much of that you can do - along with defining just what CPU you'll be running on. And then you're super-compressing the code itself and unpacking it into main memory, which is a big reason why AV software freaks out. Small code unpacking itself and polymorphing into a larger executable is virus stuff.
 
Mikoyan dijo:
If you want to get super pedantic it's <size class> plus the OS install.
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A common complaint these days is that it's Shadertoy.com style demos
I disagree, and shadertoy doesn't have banging music packed in.

Speaking of precalc look up tables, I think it was The Silents during the Amige era that did a thing where they boasted there were no LUTs. I've forgotten all the math I've ever learned but I had an inkling of what they were doing, just couldn't track it and figure out the pattern.
 
The Grognard dijo:
Also relevant for improved coding performance as seen in this old home video one of the Future Crew guys took: Have some techno music on the background as you code and discuss on how the project has to go on in the crunch session.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=LIIBRr31DIU
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That's the spirit. I've decided to start actually using Spotify and I'm deliberately skewing the recommender system strongly towards "whatever comes to mind when you see the doom-outrun-electric theme in Emacs (code not mine to prevent doxing):
Screenshot 2025-09-08 15:47:26.webp
Listening to this now, quite a good recommendation:
Screenshot 2025-09-08 16:01:35.webp
 
Speaking of the creation, this one is pretty good

One of the legendary Amiga demos(along with State of the Art, same group):

The "making of" where you see that they're all high school students.

edit: I also really like that they're using the sky on an overcast day as a chroma key/green screen
 
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Van Darkholme dijo:
Some of the people behind it would eventually start Funcom and reuse the dancing woman for the SNES game Winter Gold's intro and main menu (which also really demo-like):
https://youtube.com/watch?v=4IMCpUCby2Uhttps://youtube.com/watch?v=7fNEwG3rfzk
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I was going to include the obvious technical similarities in my post up above but decided not to because it was speculative on my side.

I don't think members of Spaceballs started Funcom though but it would be great if they did.
 
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