That C64 version blows my mind. They managed to reproduce every one of the effects, granted at lower resolution and framerate, but on a machine that's probably less than one-fiftieth as powerful as the ones used for the original demo. Amazing.
In the early 90s during the era of game copiers, people made crack intros for Super Nintendo games and wrote SNES demos. I've been a fan of their music for years since zophar.net used to have an SPC collection (I can't find it on the zophar.net music page anymore, but you can find it from the archive.org version at https://web.archive.org/web/20070306011147/http://www.zophar... -- it's called "Public Domain SPC music"). An easier-to-access example is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMOaN9SrR0M . As a lot of the work was done by pseudonymous people and it involved underground scenes, it's hard to find reliable history about these groups. However, there's enough homebrew SNES music from that era that I wonder if someone wrote a tracker.
We already know how to stream raw 16-bit uncompressed samples at 32KHz [1]; so we have just shy of CD-quality audio already. There's really no way to make things sound better than we have now.
The remaining enhancements are to optimize things: produce better sound while using less ROM space, use less CPU power, and be able to still run as many simultaneous sound effects as possible.
It took a long time to perfect because it's nuanced, but it's not a very complex chip: it's around 20KB of C code to emulate its 32-stage state machine. The only part of the SNES DSP that we don't fully emulate right now is the slight decay rate (in the nanosecond range) involved when the MUTE flag is enabled on a channel. And that's mostly because it's an analog component and we don't have the right people to analyze that sort of thing properly.
I do like these demos for their music and their visual aesthetics, but I'm sorry to say, they aren't in any way technically impressive. The first one [1] is literally an FMV, it's all pre-rendered video. The second has one neat effect, the rotating scanline-aligned box that you've seen on other platforms, but all the hard part for other platforms, rasterizing it in realtime, is trivialized by the "mode 7" affine transformation video mode. Just need to calculate one 2D affine matrix per scanline, or load it from a lookup table, and the graphics hardware handles the rest. Plenty of commercial games had similar effects; it's just barely more impressive than seeing a rotating cube on a PlayStation. And even the (admittedly awesome) music isn't doing anything new, it's just using higher quality samples than most devs could afford to use in their games back in the day, synthesized on a PC with more powerful synthesizers.
I'm sorry, I know I sound like a total dick writing that. Again, I do enjoy the music and the visual aesthetics of this group's demos a lot more than a lot of other unarguably more technically impressive demos. Hell, I've watched Smash It about a dozen times now! I'm sure that we can expect really awesome stuff from them in the future as they get more experience. Just had to point out that "THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF WHAT WE CAN DO ON FUCKING SUPER NINTENDO" is an apt description of the tech on display, which is important, because the demoscene is about the intersection of style and technical achievement, not one or the other.
Far less than you might expect. Most aspects of these things were known by someone. The aspect that makes things special is not the pieces of knowledge individually but when several critical pieces arrive together in the right mind.
Much of what can be achieved now on vintage systems is due to the internet enabling the knowledge to distribute.
A little OT because it's not what they're doing in this case case, but...
The NES and SNES (and I'm guessing other cartridge-based consoles) supported having extra chips (often called "mappers") inside the cartridge that would add extra hardware capabilities beyond what the console could do by itself. Basic mappers could switch between different ROM banks, effectively allowing games to have larger ROMs than the console would normally allow. Later, some cartridges would have co-processors that did some of the computation inside the cartridge itself in order to enhance graphics capabilities. That's how the original StarFox was able to run on Super NES, despite the SNES not supporting 3D polygon rendering.
For a while[1], I've wondered what a NES would be capable of if you used a modern ARM SoC - say, a Raspberry Pi - as a mapper. For one, you could make a NES game with WiFi support (you wouldn't even need an ARM chip for that, just an ESP8266 should be able to do the basics). I'm not sure if this is possible, but in theory you could even do all rendering on the ARM chip and output the image directly to the video buffer, effectively allowing you to do just about any graphics the SoC can do. As for audio, on the Famicom (the Japanese NES), there were actually extra analog audio pins for cartridges that would allow a cartridge to output any audio it could generate. The NES doesn't have these pins, but I think you could still do higher-quality audio than the NES is normally capable of by rapidly changing the DMC channel.
I don't know much about NES programming nor really anything about its video hardware, but this is still an idea I've had in the back of my mind for a while.
I know some people might ask "What's the point? All you're doing is making it harder to use a Raspberry Pi!", but I think it would be pretty cool to say you did all that with something that's technically a valid NES cartridge running on an unmodified NES.
[1] really, I first got this idea when I saw Google Maps' 2012 April Fools joke - I started thinking about how a NES-based Google Maps would technically be possible
Only two 8 bit sprites and smaller objects available per scan line. Sprite sorting and multiplexing gets done on the external CPU, along with feeding the right data at the right times allows one to maximize what the internal 1.x Mhz 6052 can do.
We don't. Well, people have had time to find or reverse engineer the specs for some of these weird chips. But also we have cheap, widely available electronics development hardware. An eeprom programmer can be had for under $100, or built with cheap parts. Programmers used to cost thousands of dollars, and might only support a few platforms.
I think after spending many many hours as a youth listening to music played on a synth with a particular character and range of timbres (while playing games) you become inured to it.
Music made using that synth just sounds particularly pleasing.
I didnt have a nintendo (so these demos dont really have that effect on me) but I did have a C64, so any music made with the sid chip seems to sound better to me than it ought perhaps.
Tangent: I was recently wondering the same about pipe organ music. Its music has a huge effect on me, wonderful sensations that sometimes cover all my body.
Never found anything to read about these sensations nor about the impact of exposure to a given kind of music at a young age on how deeply you get to like it.
As cool as the technology behind this is, I'm going to be that guy that is very glad the soundtracks from classic SNES games sound the way they do vs. how this demo sounded.
I guess the point of this is more about how to push the SNES hardware to its limits in ways never done -- and again, that's super cool. But give me the likes of Chrono Trigger, FFIV/VI, and Super Castlevania IV over this any day.
And I'm unimpressed by the technology but dig the music! It takes all kinds.
I like dubstep when people put some thought into it and aren't just lazily fiddling with an LFO, but to be fair, getting into breakcore as a teenager might have permanently ruined my taste.
Impressive audio. Back at the time, it struck me that the MegaDrive/Genesis had a real "harshness" to both its colour pallette and audio when compared to the SNES. Both had lots of great games of course.
I agree, I love FM and will always think good FM or "real chiptunes" are more impressive than good sample-based synthesis, because you can't just lean on your sample library. There are a few Genesis trackers out there, including Deflemask[1], vgmmaker (which sadly, the author took down because he got tired of dealing with unappreciative jerks, so you'll have to Google a bit to find a copy), and YMDj [2] (a "native tracker" that runs on the Genesis itself)
If you're into FM synthesis in general, the Android/iPhone app Caustic has a fantastic FM synth (there's free Windows and OS X versions of it as well).
The SNES was definitely more sophisticated than the Genesis in terms of video - total color palette is 32678 colors vs 512. Makes sense as it was released 2 years later.
It was released two years later, but all the upgrades were to more peripheral features like the palette and various special effects. They're both chewing through the same amount of memory each raster to draw the screen, which is the core of what each hardware system is designed around.
It's an interesting contrast with NEC's Supergrafx system, an obscure upgrade to their better-known Turbografx-16, which was released some months prior to the SNES and was a much greater advance in terms of raw power. It uses two separate graphics chips which simultaneously read graphics data from separate banks of RAM, which allows a lot more to be displayed. It has twice the sprites, twice the graphics RAM, and can use up to twice the resolution as the SNES. However, it's not as "well-rounded" a system as the SNES and is simpler in various ways. Unfortunately the 5 or so games that were released for it didn't push the hardware much, so you won't be able to see much evidence of its prodigious capabilities, but they're there.
Reading this led me to want to know if there are still people working on new games for the SNES (by hacking the system). Here's a 2014 article on this, in case anyone else is interested.
cTrix is one of the most accomplished Chiptune musicians. His recordings are great, but his live shows are where he really shines. This live set from Blip Festival a couple of years ago is exemplary of his best performances: https://m.soundcloud.com/ctrix/ctrix-live-blip-festival-nyc
It's pretty cool that cTrix has captured and uploaded these demos for the world to see. Here's his channel where some other elix demos can be seen. "Smash It" is pretty sweet! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgG3Nvp86j1WaHaLwjoVJZg
> elix is a two person combo comprised of cTrix, a chiptuner who hails from the land down under, and ferris, a Norwegian who creates EDM that spans multiple genres, including chiptunes.
Minor nitpick, but Ferris is an American who lives in Norway.
Here some samples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hugowO0sSrM (interceptor) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WJT0YJwx-k (terminator theme) or soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/daataa
His Interceptor, Snow Crash (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uaJapdiR8M), Nocturne (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giPm5SwlW0c), Remember When (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo4C9KpyCCo), Palmer's Arcade (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWWRged4EM0) and Ravaged Skies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Lc5NFDKPqQ) tracks are some of my favorites. Great focused coding music.