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Comment by tonysavon | Hacker News Reader

This is on stock C64 too :-). I guess the achievement here is using compression at such a high frequency. Once you get down to lower frequency, you can implement fancier compression schemes and add more stuff on display. The same author has compressed video plus compressed digi streaming from floppy disk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIRww2a59lE But of course, that's not 48Khz and it sounds like that :-)

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Even more impressive are IMO the current songs people compose on the SID. This guy is an artist in the true sense:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELpnGDHo0Bg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI5d6Y0Fzl4

Yes that is 100% original C64, no extensions, no cartridges. The first time I heard these, I was absolutely blown away.

Not really. Stock C64 plus 1mb cartridge.

The big innovation was Pex's discovery of a way to output 8 bit samples by a single register write on the SID chip. The chip was never designed for outputing digital samples, and the approach leverages basically a bug in the chip design to achieve this.

The only innovative bit in this new demo (besides presuming to use a cartridge for storage) is the vector quantized compression technique.

This is running on an Ocean type cartridge as a storage, which is considered stock Hardware in the demo community, as stated in the article. If no additional device can be "accepted", then all of the demos mentioned in this thread should be disqualified too, because they use a disk drive.:-) In general, the technology showcased in this demo of course would work also playing the song from RAM, it would just be a bit too short :-)

I don't disagree that commercially available REUs were fair game, but a vanishingly small number of C64 owners had them, while a very large number of C64 owners had either datasettes or 1541s.

This doesn't take away from the demo, but if say, EA, Epyx, or Activision were going to ship a game that played music like this, they would have had to fix it in 64k. So it's even more impressive when I see stuff that a typical home computer could have seen in 1983.

I remember the first few times I heard digi-mods on the C64, like Rob Hubbard's Skate or Die game intro (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqRXxPl6bXA) and it absolutely blew me away. Full screen video + audio like that Onslaught Demo would have given me a heart attack.

We are not talking about REUs here, as clearly stated in the article. We are talking about Ocean Type Cartridges, which were available in the 80s. And yes, they where ROM, not RAM, and yes, they came in those sizes. 16Mb ram expansions did not exist, 1Mb ROMs did exist

> I don't disagree that commercially available REUs were fair game

This doesn't use REU. This uses a simple banked (EEP)ROM cartridge.

I think anything is fair game that was reasonably doable back in 1983.

Cartridges have been used from the beginning, at first they were just 16 kB. Games have been released in cartridge format from 8 to 512 kB.

It's really impressive to be able to include any type of decompression when total budget per sample is just 21 clock cycles on a system where one instruction takes 2 to 8 clocks.

So I think you're underrating the achievement here.

I don’t think 1mb expansions were available until the late 80s though.

Expansion would have been unrealistic, you're right. But this doesn't need a RAM expansion at all.

See these 512 kbit 1983 vintage EPROM chips:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/INTEL-D27512-27512-IC-28Pin-DIP-EPR...

16 of these 512 kbit chips, some address decoding and banking logic. 1 MB cart.

Very much doable with off-the-shelf parts even way back then.

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