C64 Demos made in the good old days.

This was the very first demo I made in Assembler code, a simple raster and some text in a new char set and of cause some music. I never knew anyone that could do graphics, so all graphics was made by myself. The sound/music was always a rip from a game or another demo.

“The First”

For every demo I made I added the new stuff I learned, in the beginning it wasn’t much but later it evolved into one or two decent demos.
In this demo i used 3 sprites 3 time to make it look like I had more than the 8 sprites available on the C64. All you had to do was set a position for the sprites, wait until you were sure the sprites were drawn, and then change the position of the sprites again, and you had all the sprites you would like. just as long as you had no more than 8 sprites on the same line.

“The Second”

The Third is a combination of The First and The Second with the addition of animated chars. BTW “Danish Olympia” was just me and a friend from school.
The raster effect is a simple change of the background and/or border color for every screen line.

“The Third”

The Forth was kind of half a step back and one forward, just a simple text screen with color cycling.

“The Forth”

The Fifthwas the first demo with two parts, it wasn’t packed in two separate parts only one collected part but with two screens. Later I found out how to run one packed part after another, or in other words I got the utility that made it possible.
There was nothing new besides the two part thing.

“The Fifth – Part 1”

“The Fifth – Part 2”

This was a new way to send mail/greetings. Instead of the normal “hardcopy” now I could make a small program and send the disk to them and they could read it on there computers. Not that I wrote a lot of letters to anyone back then. I guess it was a very simple version of electronic snail mail.
I don’t know if this was the first demo I made with a scroll text as the old disks do not hold information about the files creation times so all demos from now on is not in order of creation. I will try to the best of my knowledge to keep them in chronological order.

“Old Friend”

And then I learned to convert Corel Draw drawings into charset graphics so now sprites wasn’t the only graphics available for me.

“Fun Demo”

More of the same.

“Brev”

And again, but this time with a rol scroll. A rol scroll is a rotate left scroll made by scrolling bits from one sprite to another and by placing den sprites beside each other you would get a scrolling effect.

“From Me To You”

Wave effect on the text, made by changing the text position every line. Same change as when you made a scroll text.

“Funny Demo”

 

Trying out sprite collision and joystick control, so to get to the next part you had to hit the cowboy 200 times. For every hit the cowboy sprite lifted his hat.

“New Contact Part 1”

 

“New Contact Part 2”

Nothing new just some graphics hacked from the “Ghostbusters” Game.

“That’s G..”

Absolute nothing new, scroll which hasn’t started yet and a moving logo and some color, that’s it.

“Back”

Looks very simple, and it kind of was. The problem here is that the timing of the raster changes when you have a sprite in the same scan line as the raster.
This is the simple version where the sprites do not change y-position so the timing is the same all of the time, just different than if there were no sprites.

“How Lame”

I will never forget this demo, i used SO much time trying to find out what I did wrong. I never did find out so the demo ended up a bit short of what I had in mind.
It’s a lot of raster movements and a sprite text bouncing up and down.

“Raster Kill”

Yet another letter like demo.

“To Panther”

And then I learned 2×2 scroll texts. I never did draw my own fonts, but I used a few.

“Small join”

A graphics ripoff from the game “Test Drive”.  A changing text box, a scroll text and some home made graphics – it shows, right? 🙂

“Mixed Shit”

Moving logo more than 8 pixels.

“Fire JMP”

This was my fist and only try with FLD (don’t know what it stands for).  As someone wrote somewhere “You just keep steeint up $D011 (every scan line) so that the VIC keeps thinking that the next scan line is the one where it is supposed to do the refresh of screen memory. When you stop doing this, it starts drawing the screen where it left off.”
So I could push the starting point of the raster and scroll text down as long as I wanted.

 “First Test Part 1”

Borrowed some graphics and packed two separate parts. I can see that the charset is from “Yie ar Kung Fu” – Great game by the way.

 “First Test Part 2”

This is one of my all time favorite demo parts. I think I got a good balance in the colors between the colors in the big scroll text and the ripped graphics from “Ghostbusters II”.
I made the simple cylinder sprites myself, which works as VU-meters.

“Step By Step”

Big animated char scroll, besides that, all same, all same.

“No Name”

Char animate dots, bouncing raster bars and char animated sin bars or whatever I should call it?

“Olympia”

Open side-boarder, 2×2 char scroll and raster bars.

“Op Si 2”

I know there were something called the zeropage, but I can’t remember what is was. I Guess I used it in this demo.
Picture from last ninja.

“Burning Zeropage”

Raster bars, logo, scroll text, sound, border sprites. I had a lot of problems with the raster bars timing, it shows in the bottom left corner, where you can see that the color changes within the border.

“raloscsobosp”

Finally the last demo.. This was the first part which should have been a part of a megademo. It was for the group Inferno which I joined early on, they thought me 99% of all I got to know about programming the C64.
Logo that extended into the side boarder (Sprites), up scrolling text, animated chars and two sprite logos (Inferno and TGJ).

“Meltdown Part 1”

Here it looks like I’m moving sprites up and down in the side boarder, which would be a timing nightmare. What is really happening is 2 sprites on top of each other and only moving left and right, so the timing is always the same. All is left is to animate a ball moving up and down across the two sprites.

“Meltdown Part 2”

Well that was all. It’s about 20 years ago I made the last demo, and I really miss the good old – simpler – times. I hope that in time I will be able to make something like the old demos on the PC.

– Henning