it's as if someone took the "everything you touch turns to gold" and replaced gold with sh*t and said "yeah this is a good power to have"

Cycle accurate emulation helps little with this era PC demos, because back in 1993 PC hardware performance variation was already massive. From 386SX-16 to Pentium 66 MHz, that's over 20x difference in performance.

> It's funny how LLMs leak their test procedure docs into user-facing output.

You have to constantly fight so hard to not get this. And for the past few months it seems most people do not even care to remove it and have proper user facing docs

Yes, cycle-accurate is very expensive because it prevents optimization. But as described they say they're doing an AOT version of cycle-accurate anyway?

In some ways this is similar to the concurrent-systems problems that memory barriers are a tool to address. Your emulator will come in two halves, a CPU side and a gfx/sfx side, as well as control inputs, and the "intermediate" approach is when you're just trying to preserve the sequence of load/stores between the two with an accuracy relative to frame timing. Maintaining ultra precise timing within a frame imposes more detailed coordination requirements on both sides of the emulation.

> What's the advantage of this approach vs cycle-accurate emulation? (I'd guess it can go faster, due to compiler optimization?)

I don't think anyone is doing it this way because they chose to do it this way. All the AI decomp/recomp projects I've seen recently have done it this way. It just seems an easy way to have an AI brute force "port" something.

Running Crystal Dream 2 on a 386 was just as impressive as running those border-removing, cycle-counting C64 demos. Hardware was not fixed on the PC, but upgrades were mostly about improving quality without losing any of the original charm (Gravis Ultrasound FTW!), like a 40MHz 386 was only marginally faster than a 33MHz, and that just allowed you a few more FPS in Doom.

The standard VGA resolution fit a full screen in a single 64KB segment nicely, you had many colors but not limitless, so I would argue that this was really the golden era of the demoscene. Partly because almost anyone could do some kind of a short demo that was still enjoyable to watch, and did not require the insane amount of cycle-counting and optimization and planning that the C64 does.

The Amiga scene is still popular, probably for the reason you said.

I gave up once full screen video playback was possible from CD-ROM. After that, doing (typically worse) non-interactive animations in real-time, seemed a bit pointless.

But watching Crystal Dreams II on my phone actually made me feel young again :)

Not going to say anything about AI translations. But the video recording don't do justice for many of demos.

The effects in some of the demos simply kill any video encoder, only way to properly experience them is by running or emulating locally. Not that crystal sharp upscaled square pixels on modern display or poor quality CRT filters are very representative either, but it's likely better than blurry mess you get when video encoder tries to deal with high frequency details or random noise from procedural effects.

Well, there is a little advantage. Most recordings are not at the native framerate, and have compression artefacts (which impacts some effects more than others)

For these four demos I don't know, but part of the challenge was certainly working within the constraints of the machines of the day. The Furture Crew demo I believe comes in at 2.5MB and ran on a 1993 PC, so probably 8MB of ram at the most. Running it in the browser is probably at least 20 times the memory.

It's really cool to be able to rewatch these demo, but the spirit in which they were created is somewhat lost.

The C64 scene is still surprisingly active, and they usually do the seemingly impossible on such a limited hardware, while remaining incredibly creative (in how many ways could you phase out the C64 BASIC screen and show your demo't title?...). After the PC golden era I've been interested in the C64 only for a very, very long time, and I have not regretted it.

I feel the same, it sucks. All you can do is carve out a space for yourself doing the things you enjoy, and don't let the AI grifters tell you that AI is the only way and everyone else is "cooked", no one will be writing things by hand, etc etc. God that rhetoric is depressing.

I write demos and games as a hobby predominantly for MS-DOS and machines ranging from the 386 up to the Pentium (soon to add 8088/286 to that list) as well as old consoles like the Sega Master System and other random platforms (like ARM-based kids toys like the Leapster Explorer).

Right now I'm working on an EGA production. I could just get an AI to generate a lot of the code for me or give me all the answers, but instead, I have my Programmer's Guide to the EGA/VGA/SVGA by Ferraro and another reference open on my desk trying to understand the CRTC so I can create a custom video mode. I live for this stuff and want to fully understand what's going on in the hardware. I like the creative aspects of making demos and games but I also like the technical aspects, and understanding the platform and the deep details.

When I spend too much time reading HN or X and see too much of the AI stuff, it really bums me out, so I have to detox by unfollowing/ignoring and getting back to my projects.

You just don't understand, it's the prompt and knowing which foreign work to endless rehash that's the new creativity now. There's taste in knowing what artist to steal from!

/s if that wasn't obv.

Who's going to show up to the next big demo party (like the ones they arrange in Europe), having e.g. hand coded 68k assembly or done some highly impressive 4k demo, having been intimate with every single instruction?

Maybe it will just pass? Eventually maybe people will get bored of this consumerist mode of creation, of projects born with no vision or craft, made with the tastefulness of a kid smashing together their favorite toys. And when the majority finally agrees these stunts are a corrosive influence on the community, we can just approach it as a moderation problem, figure out some system of vouches and reports, or downsize and our communities until trust again becomes tractable, maybe even coming to appreciate some tactical slop as a stepping stone or a proof of concept to be eventually reverse-engineered into a maintainable human project.

What makes you say this? Just because someone used AI to port some classic productions to the browser (which is actually pretty cool), doesn't mean that AI has taken over.

AI slop productions tend to be frowned upon, or even banned, writing code and using cool tricks to to what seems impossible is still a big part of the demoscene, in particular in the sizecoding, oldschool and wild categories. Clever use of AI is a debated topic, the demoscene is about pushing the limits of current technology, and AI is part of current technology. There is also the question of using AI for tooling (modelers, compressors, test harnesses, etc...), as in, will you stop using a particular IDE because it is written with the help of AI, even if it is good?

But still, most productions are hand made.

It's the eternal sloptember, but for humanity.

even with 256 bytes: https://dosasm.com

Lots of talk of DOS, but both games that are described (Panzer General II and Imperialism II) were only released for Windows?

If the games had been for DOS, it would probably have made more sense to just run the original binaries in DOSBox-X or some other emulator. I think there is already some debug API that can be enabled. Or adding MCP or something similar to DOSBox(-X) would probably be a lot less work than to reimplement the games.

So who or what ported them?

Hilarious.

>Those demos from the '90s remind me of the incredible creativity and ingenuity of the human mind. Thanks for bringing them back to life and making them so effortlessly accessible.

You don't need any AI for that. Just visit https://pouet.net

The demo scene is still very much happening.

You're welcome! These demos blew my mind in the early 90s and they still do today. Glad you enjoyed them!