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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> They can cram 30minutes of an entire 3d shooter into 64kb because they understand and know so much more about their data.

Erm, not really. Most of the time it's because they spend like 3 minutes of loading time generating textures and all in memory before displaying anything on screen. And they rely on the giganormous graphic libraries of Windows (for Windows demos) + the huge driver stack that would never fit in 64kb in the first place.

I am much more impressed by demos built to run on "the hardware" back in C64 and Amiga days.

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About the driver stack that would never fit:

When you have a single hardware (C64, Amiga...), it is not more complex to address than addressing drivers. Peeking/poking ports and directly addressing video memory is not much costly in bytes.

I think, though, that this is why, back in the '90s, there was so much hand-wringing about recent developments (at the time) in computing leading to the spiritual death of the demoscene. All that hardware heterogeneity meant that democoders end up far removed from the machines they work on.

It's turned out to be at least somewhat true, insofar as oldschool demos still carry a lot of cachet despite the hardware not being anywhere near as capable. I don't know which one took more effort or skill to build, but, on a gut level, 8088MPH just feels cooler than kkrieger.

Maybe that's just me showing my age, though.

Considering they had to write custom tools for pretty much everything, including a visual language and editor to design all art assets almost two decades before that became a thing in AAA games and create custom compression schemes down even -IIRC- custom floating point representation that would compress better, i'd say that .kkrieger was the one that took more effort and skill.

(though a lot of that work was largely based on their initial work for .the .product).

8088MPH is certainly very cool, but a large reason is that nobody had bothered with the original IBM PC much before.

> they spend like 3 minutes of loading time generating textures

this implies that they do 'know so much more about their data' than a simple bitmap

Would you rather have to know about your data in such detail that you can define a general function for generating it... or just define it?

let me show you my one byte compressor, it only relies on a 1TB data set

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