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I feel this was an example of the crazy things you can do with PAL C64 hardware and not necessarily what can be done with a 6502. I feel Apple // demos are more representative of what a 6502 can do (without hardware assisted sprites, character generators, ADSR waveform generators, etc.)

Not nowadays, back in the day as well. People should spend some time on Hugi and Poet archives.

It's kinda amazing that the people who wrote this probably know every single byte of code that's running on that computer, rom included. Without such deep knowledge you can't get this kind of performance.

With a modern computer that is simply unthinkable.

C64 demo coders don't generally care about ROM contents, there's nothing useful in there. ROMs are usually switched off. Although there might be a few exceptions.