1993's 'Second Reality' Demo Recreated for the Apple II (deater.net) 34
Long-time Slashdot reader deater writes: The Second Reality demoscene demo from 1993 is one of the most well known demos of all time, pushing a 486 running DOS to its limits. There have been remakes for other architectures over the years, including Atari ST, Gameboy color, and Commodore 64. At this past Demosplash 2023 demoparty a version for the Apple II was released (and won 1st place), which was quite a challenge as the Apple II graphics have essentially none of the hardware acceleration available on the other platforms.
I am not... (Score:2)
I am not an atomic playboy!
2nd Reality always impressed me. So much in such little code, running on hardware that could barely support it.
Get down (Score:4, Interesting)
My friend had is 486 rigged to a surround receiver and, confirming the logo that shows up in the intro, 2nd Reality is actually recorded in Dolby Surround Sound. As there was no encoder, that means the sound effects were pre-encoded in surround sound, then assembled to reproduce those effects.
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Commercially-made PCs of the 90s were usually kneecapped with too little RAM. Was really annoying. People shopped for PCs by looking at the number of megahertz on the CPU, so everything else was trimmed back to max the MHz for your money.
Re: CRAPPLE! (Score:2)
This has not changed. An old standing habit of mine has always been recommending people to trim the CPU budget and spend it on extra RAM when asking advice for buying a computer
Always served me well. The machine under my desk is an 10 year old second hand Xeon but it has 128 GB on board. It still kicks butt as a workstation and VM host.
My older Laptop has 32GB. I have a rather useful i7 3770K that I put 32G in back in 2009 when 8G was upper class and 4G the common choice. Works great till this day
More RAM
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This is great advice for anyone not gaming. I have to question the value of 128gb for most normal work, it gets unused for anything but disk cache when you have that much though.
I remember working on some 286 machines when 486s were popular and was surprised how they handled everything just fine as long as you had the common 4mb of ram. This was when computers were ass fuck expensive so I wonder how many people spent like 5000 on a 286 and then went on to blow another $2500 on a 32 bit machine and then ag
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He said he used it to host VMs. That would make sense. I can see that.
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Dolby Surround isn't anything magical, actually. It's only a little bit more than a Halfler Circuit [wikipedia.org].
Matrix encoding and decoding of surround sound is well understood at this time- and a super cheap method was to use th
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Exactly . The core libraries on compute-sensitive tasks, even today, usually are quite optimized. But today, YOU don't have to write them. Someone else did. Your code can be inefficient, and it doesn't matter, because it's not your code that's doing all the hard work.
Like, I do a lot of AI tasks (these days, mainly training and inference of LLMs). But I don't have to write Flash Attention. I don't have to write CUDA drivers. I just make a bunch of PyTorch calls, or write a Python program that makes API
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A lot of code today is really inefficient because there's no reason to optimize it. But not game engines. That's one place where people still care about performance. A lot of work goes into squeezing out every last fps.
I think a bigger difference is that there's a lot less cheating today. Old school demos are all about cheating. You try to do simple things that look like you're doing something complicated. Like pseudo 3D, or warping images in simple ways, or modifying a color lookup table to animate t
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There were IMHO more impressive other demos, but it definitely was still impressive and iconic for its era. Good music too (BTW, there's some good covers out there [youtube.com])
One thing I think people tend to forget about the demoscene of that era is that they weren't just hampered by hardware, not even the lack of libraries, but even file formats. This was an era where sound tended to be stored in WAV files. When graphics were stored in formats like PCX or even BMP. Like, JPEG had just been invented 6 months before S
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This no way this demo was played on a legacy Apple II. The sound at least seems to be handled by one of C64's Audio controller.
The Apple II only had a CPU driven flip-flop, at best you could do square wave and if you were clever you'd be able to run two counters and produce duo tones like with the Electric Duet sequencer.
In 1986 I was able to code a proof of concept text scrolling in a sine form. A lot of it was flattened pre-mapped STA ADDR.x with a specially designed font to be always aligned on a 7 pixel
Re: I am not... (Score:2)
I think itâ(TM)s a IIgs. Still technically a II but yeah, not what I think of when I read Apple II either.
I grew up on a ][+ and still have a ][e kicking around somewhere!
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I think itâ(TM)s a IIgs. Still technically a II but yeah, not what I think of when I read Apple II either.
I grew up on a ][+ and still have a ][e kicking around somewhere!
No. Not a IIgs.
If it was, it would have been about 4 times faster, and not needed that Mockingboard interface for sound.
That was a bog-standard ][ or ][+. Not even a //e.
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This no way this demo was played on a legacy Apple II. The sound at least seems to be handled by one of C64's Audio controller.
The Apple II only had a CPU driven flip-flop, at best you could do square wave and if you were clever you'd be able to run two counters and produce duo tones like with the Electric Duet sequencer.
In 1986 I was able to code a proof of concept text scrolling in a sine form. A lot of it was flattened pre-mapped STA ADDR.x with a specially designed font to be always aligned on a 7 pixels boundary. The text scrolled on a VSYNC 7 pixels at a time (a whole octet in the graphic memory 8192 area). So it was very smooth, but required at least a IIe as the plain II or II+ did not have this VBL mapped at a memory address.
The credits credit a Mockingboard running off a 6522 VIA for the sound.
The startup also states a 65C02; but who knows? It looked like they started up a plain, ordinary Apple ][ or ][+.
If they had used an Apple IIgs, they could have smoked that Mockingboard with the Ensoniq "Q-Chip", plus taken advantage of the 65816's 2 MHz Clock, and 16 bit operations. That last enhancement would have sped the graphics up immensely!
God Tier stuff (Score:2)
I bow before these geniuses
Link to original from 93 (Score:5, Informative)
This is the dos one they made back then not the Apple one referenced in the article.
https://demozoo.org/production... [demozoo.org]
That's their site. It starts off black for the first several seconds, your viewer is not broken.
ok... (Score:2)
While it's a little interesting to see how they re-interpreted it on the less powerful hardware (as someone who remembers the original demo well), for the most part the results aren't that great. A lot of the cool-looking effects have been replaced with much less impressive interpretations, and some of the sequences are so messy and low-framerate that if you don't know what it's supposed to look like already, you probably wouldn't be able to figure it out.
I don't know what kind of competition this was again
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some of the sequences are so messy and low-framerate that if you don't know what it's supposed to look like already, you probably wouldn't be able to figure it out.
If you weren't exactly rockin' the best rig when Second Reality originally came out, it had bad frame rates on a PC too.
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Second realty was a radical shift for the demo scene. Previously the competition was all about getting the most out of a fixed hardware platform. A stock C64 or Amiga. Code was mostly assembly, memory was tight. Graphics and sound were limited and needed a lot of technical skill, as well as artistic.
With Second Reality the focus shifted to algorithms. There was no reference hardware, graphics limitations were removed, as many 16 bit PCM should channels as you like...
Personally I didn't like it very much, bu
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It's pretty.
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Yeah, I was able to run this demo on my TRS-80 and it ran way better than it did on the Apple ][.
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Re: Holy War (Score:2)
Or, for that matter, cram more than 8 bits into a register
Gore from FC commented on the video (Score:3)
One of the original coders from Future Crew, Samuli Syvähuoko aka Gore, commented on the video. Positive praise from an OG!
long time reader (Score:1)
Don't have much to add, but yes I am a long-time reader. I started when this was still the "News" section on cmdrtaco's personal website "Chips and Dips". I found it after buying a Linux shirt from him due to a usenet posting on comp.os.linux.announce. I could have probably had a 4-digit account number but I thought it was annoying when logins were added and refused to sign up until much later.