Basically it's an entire 90 kilobyte program that draws the animation! Edit: 90 Megabyte!
Something like this could have been possible back in the day, given a DMA capable i/o transfer device.
LDA #PIXELS
STA #SCREEN
. . .
The result is pretty great. I will enjoy the details.
Mechner pioneered doing that from VHS when doing his game Prince of Persia.
Something like Bad Apple would be a heavy lift.
Still, while technically possible to do this sort of video compression in 1981, it would have involved extremely specialized hardware to scan the film in the first place, and a good amount of compute time on a real big machine like the Cray-1 to do the compression. (And Rick Astley wasn't a star yet, so what would have been the point?)
Fun fact though: just two years later, Cyndi Lauper's iconic music video was edited in digital form, including the insertion of computer-processed video effects: https://youtu.be/PIb6AZdTr-A?t=90 While such things as picture-in-picture are so common today we don't even notice it unless pointed out, that was mind-blowing at the time. But it took hardware worth a million dollars due to the megabytes of RAM required to fit the 10 second clips they worked with.
Amazing though.
Though probably a shorter version would be nicer
[edit] Forget that, from the Reddit link: “We end up reading data at about 533KB/sec, and are I/O bound.”
Dealing with sync issues would be top of the list.
Maybe stagger them, so they can be stopped every so often. Reach key data, kill motor, wait, start motor?
Or maybe just toggle the motor line quick? Just enough to slow it a little!
All kinds of insanity possible.
Stereo tapes could possibly deliver 2400 baud x 2.
Eight 4,800 baud tapes * 2 minutes 'ish
I am coming up with 0.5 to 1MB range numbers :(
But I really like this craziness!
https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n8/36_The_Sider_1...
> Five years ago I drooled over the new 5Mb Winchester hard disk drives being introduced to the Apple II market. Although I knew how useful a hard disk could be, I also knew that I would never be able to justify the purchase of a $3000 mass storage device for a $2000 computer. I also knew that I would never be able to fill 5Mb of disk space.
> How times have changed. Today, a full fledged Apple IIc or IIe costs a little over $1000. And a 10Mb hard disk drive costs only $695. That's right. First Class Peripherals offers the Sider, a hard disk drive with 10Mb partitionable among four operating systems for $695.