
Plan B – Retro Demo - daledavies
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/demos/detail/plan-b-retro-demo
======
userbinator
_This is a pure HTML /CSS3 animation that is supposed to look (and sound!)
like one of those demos in the days of the C64 or the Amiga. There is no
JavaScript at all involved._

It's an interesting demo, but as someone who has used a real C64, and watched
the demos on them (this is better than C64 graphics, but definitely something
resembling the capability of mid-80s era hardware), there's something about
using several more orders of magnitude more resources to recreate the same
effects that just doesn't feel right...

~~~
cbd1984
What feels right to you would mean that nobody who didn't have physical access
to the original hardware would be able to experience any such thing as a demo
in the sense we mean.

The best way to preserve software is to emulate, emulate, emulate, and then
get those emulations out into the world. (INSERT JASON SCOTT HYPE HERE:
[https://github.com/jsmess/jsmess](https://github.com/jsmess/jsmess) )
Hardware dies and browsers are a platform now, so this is just the next
logical step.

Really, though: I'm sure the people who spent their time getting the
technology of the 1980s to do amazing things at the limits of their capacity
would be horrified to see a new generation getting a new platform to perform
at the limits of its capacity. Horrified, I tell you!

~~~
pjmlp
It doesn't feel right, because the experience had two levels.

How the demo looked like. Which this demo is wonderful made, not a single
complaint, specially because of the innovative step of using pure HTML/CSS.

How programming looked like, trying to squeeze everything into 64KB of memory,
while taking advantage of hardware tricks and invalid register modes in the
process. No one will experience this while playing this demo.

So it is great that new generations get to see how it looked like, but they
don't get to see how it felt to program them.

This is what the OP was complaining about, I assume.

~~~
cbd1984
At the programming level, we're trading constraints.

The original constraint was fitting machine code into RAM. The new constraint
is finding quirks of the standard and/or implementations which allow new and
interesting effects, possibly on more than one version of a given browser
and/or on more than one kind of browser.

The fact the original constraint doesn't exist here is secondary to the fact
there are some constraints in play. We can go back and forth on which
constraints are more limiting, and there _are_ competitions about who can do
the most in the least Javascript (for example), but as far as I'm concerned,
the essential spirit remains.

~~~
richardjdare
An important thing about the Amiga demo scene was that those constraints were
also the edge of what was possible in home computing. So they were approached
in a different spirit from say, someone writing a 64k demo on a pc with 8gigs
of ram, or running demo effects in the browser.

When I watched demos in the Amiga days it was because I wanted to see
something new that had never been done on a computer before. Seeing a great
demo effect was like discovering a new superpower in your computer; it opened
up new possibilities.

Being on the limit of what is believed to be possible is, I suppose, formally
the same as being within a constraint, but the spirit is completely different.
It was about pushing back boundaries.

Over the edge of that boundary, there was nothing, just mythical SGI
workstations somewhere in the far distance :)

