insane by 3sc (zx spectrum demo)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ม.ค. 2009
- Insane is a ZX Spectrum 48/128k demo. This project was our first well known production for the ZX spectrum. We planned to show it (and win of course:) on the legendary Slovakian demo party called Demobit in the 1997, but the party was canceled by the organizers. Then we released it on the IRC network "for free"
Credits: baze & hvge (ex-astex) - บันเทิง
I love the Atari ST style "buzzer bass" in some of these AY tracks - great demo! :)
Imagine seeing anything like this when the system was new, it would have literally blown the mind of people. That's why I love these tech demos of old consoles. What they *could* have done. There are a lot of games that really pushed the console to the limits but nothing really comes close to tech demos so many years later. It's truly amazing.
Yeah, having emulators for fast development/testing, and decades of experience of the Speccy has definitely helped :) I remember coding in ASM on my speccy, and any slight bug would require a reset and reload of my editor and code...
Totally agree!
@@Stabby666 Exactly :) Although this demo is from 1996 and some of its parts were created using good old tape recorder. One simple bug in the code and one had to go through the torture of reloading the assembler again along with all the data blocks. Even calculating lookup tables in BASIC was pain. @huldu Perhaps some games could have been better, on the other hand the tools were primitive. There was no internet to share information and the games had to do a lot of additional stuff like collision detection. In a demo like this you can optimize data structures and memory layout just for the sake of the effect. But a game has to be more conservative.
Love the comments, you can clearly see who has used a ZX in real life and who has only seen it in pictures. Impressive demo
Probably the best demo on speccy! Music is incredible
So, In our era we were almost first demo group who started with real trackmos (demos without user interaction) on ZX spectrum. Look back to years 1995-8 and you'll see some infinite and boring scrollers or stupid push-push routines painting some repetitive patterns. In that contrast I think we did a really good job :)
Anyway, my "game engine" was pretty close to real game, but I've just changed my personal priorities. Making ZX spectrum games in '98 was a really stupid idea.
ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!!! Especially the "voxel" part... WOW!!!
That landscape at 5:00 sure is impressive...
+SpiralPegasus ZX Spectrum should've crashed, :(
Many of these things were somewhat "new" in 1996 on Speccy. We did it for fun using tape recorder with almost non-existent tools. It wasn't meant to impress anyone in 2012. Since then we both spent almost a decade in game industry and yes, the effects are very basic in hindsight by today's standards but back then without Wikipedia it wasn't even obvious for a teenager how to rotate a vector :)
What a fantastic demo. Every section impressed me. The voxel landscape and side scroller would make for brilliant games. Amazing work!
Actually, you can interact with that voxel landscape and fly through. There are instructions at the beginning of the demo.
AY in its glory.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Instrument_AY-3-8910
Really great! The best I have seen and heard on the speccy so far - at once.
Thanks for the best demo of the late 90s without "chunks"! :-)
Having used a zx clone (Didaktik 80kB) as a kid... WOW. Prawa nazwa, prawa robota. Szacun!
First time I watch a Spectrum demo and I must say I am impressed!
Great to see the 8bit Scene is alive and well! :-D
MEGAMIGA Well, Insane is about 20 years old production, but thank you. You can definitely check something more fresh, like th-cam.com/video/RI-8YPfXAgA/w-d-xo.html :)
20 years! Impressive!
I will check your link, cheers!
well you should see the atari 2600 demos
Imaginative and interesting, a brilliant effort without even considering the platform on which it runs and the level of technical expertise demonstrated.
Nice job!
Yeah:) I was on three Demobits. First (from my perspective) was in Bratislava's PKO (huge action in huge conference hall), then was some in Petrzalka ghetto I think and last one was in Nitra's Old Theatre. The last one had the best atmosphere, not so huge like previous parties and placed in really nice city. But the whole scene just started to die in that moment :(
That is an amazing piece of work!
man i love them zx speccy demos .there so amazing
The best breakbeat on AY!!!
thank you! i'll tell mylos when I meet him next :)
Nope, it's done completely in assembly language :)
Tohle demo proste miluju! Totalni pecka!
No nazdar. Dik za komentar. Ono je to zial taky prirodzeny proces, ze casom to mladicke nadsenie vyprcha a takisto aj zaujmy sa s pribudajucim vekom zmenia:) Ale inak sme vsetci tri z 3sc neskor spolu cca 5 rokov patlali pocitacove hry...:)
Nutne dodat, ze toto demo je pro Spectrum 48kB, kdezto rusaci psali dema vyhradne pro 128icky. To s tim konkurovanim, mozna je to pravda, ale takovy Omega (OSG, SSC) nebo Dron (K3L) byli (jsou) take machri. Baze ma mimoradny cit pro design a je to na jeho demech videt, eskalace na PC byl pak prirozeny vyvoj. A jak se meni zajmy, no, konkretne u Speccy bych nebyl za jedno. Nove technologie prichazi, ale Speccy zustava stale nejlepsi :)
I think it's a one of the best demo on the speccy. And music is really cool!
The 3d vista stuff was good.
Props on that.
Very cool! Didn't think they had much sound!
Marvellous.
Love molecules at 1:08 =)
Ta cast s tym 3D ostrovom (okolo 4 min.) bola moja najoblubenejsia. :)
The best breakbeat on AY!!!!!!
Yep, it's 50fps. Another nice effect is in credits part. The last full screen scroller with greetings also runs at 50fps and moves pretty large portion of the screen in several moments.
Zarjazz! Inspired me to get back into programming - thanks.
you're welcome :)
All I want to know is where the hell was you when the spectrum was at the hight its game, as this is f**cking unbelievable.
I made a few games for this platform and bought my first motorbike from the sales(1985)
But I was nowhere near this in my coding, I will take a guess you were born a little later than when the spectrum was launched but take it from me you really know your code and thank you for sharing this video.
PS this video and its contents really stress to me at least, that today's Supermarket game producers are a F*CKING wast of space!!
Hi Karl! Oh yes, In 1985, I was 7 years old, so I'm a bit younger :) I met my first computer a couple of years later. It was PMD-85 - a crappy 8080 based computer, which suppose to drive the falling communist economy of my country. Then I bought my first speecy-clone due to an insurance money. I was injured by my friend, a fellow hockey-ball player. What I'm saying is that my career as a programmer started as a series of unexpected events. Like my older sister's future husband was a big computer enthusiast. He told me that Speccy has a great CPU and gave me some industrial grade reference book for Z-80 chipset family. Basically, I knew how to program Z-80 DMA controller before I had a real computer :D Then I was quite sad that Speccy has no such chips available...
May I ask you what games you made? I would not be surprised that I played some as a kid :)
love me some chip-chop
Superbe programmation !
It's one of the best demos for ZX Spectrum with 48K of RAM, although Higher State by the same demogroup is better.
thank you! We have developed Higher State especially for 48k by purpose. I personally had a 48k machine only in that time and was pissed about fact that I was unable to run our demos on my machine properly :D But the decision was set by Baze's effects requirements (he had a 128k+2A). At the end, we were able to make the demo also for 48k. If you look at his effects in HS (first part), those really doesn't need a 2nd VRAM bank to run properly. I was quite proud, because pure 48k demos were rare at that time...
Ah fuck this youtube... I see that your comment is 2 years old :D sorry about my late reply :)
We were working in one office and you never mentioned that! OMG ;) I even once was at Demobit (but I was representing dying Amiga scene that time)...
great demo!
thanx dude :)
You made my day. I just thought you're a troll :) Sorry for that but it was impossible to understand such metaphysical poetry in one comment :) The fun is that most of my inspiration had source in my depression. Only few of my good friends knows that I suffered from a cancerophobia in that times. The good part is that it pushed me forward a lot. Especially in some aspects of my life. Glad to see that it still inspires some people.
Hope that you'll success in your life changes. Good luck.
damN! this rocks!
That 3d voxel landscape is pretty damn impressive, not going to lie.
Especially if I take my glasses off, haha. But still, damn cool.
The scrolling at the end is neat too, with how smooth everything looks and how little attribute clash there is.
probably the only REALLY silly thing has to be the scaling planet, would have been much more impressive with a different graphic
Nice demo overall. Coooool music.
here I am, giving CC for a demo that's about 18 years old, haha
null1023 Hi, thank you for your comment. About that silly scaling planet... Probably only few people knows secret fact, that originally, we wanted to put a Beetle's planetary system there (check Higher State demo) but he was not able to finish his part in time. You can see, that his part also ends in pink flat screen :) So, I've decided to make some replacement, just to be sure that our demo will be ready for Demobit party. That's why it looks crappy and boring :)
Tim Follin + Microsoft Flight Simulator lol
Wow, nice work sir. Never seen an asm demo on the speccy before! Well done for not letting the school system rollerfuck the ingenuity out of you. There was just something about the feel of spectrum graphics that appealed to me.
божественно
Крутой музон
unvelibable!
It is possible to play these demos in our old Spectrums? I got the impression that these animations are played on an enhanced Spectrum machine or on an emulator.
nice
Nice use of voxels!
That is amazing. How do they do that 3d !
@LukeElsdonVideos Hello, I had Didaktik M, slovakian clone of 48k and Baze still have ZX Spectrum 128k+2A but everything runs on 48k as well. Sorry, but I don't understand your other questions :) What part of demo do you mean? There are several loading times between the parts but one part usually took from hundreds up to thousands lines of code in assembly language.
Didn’t know the speech could do 4:26
Just perfect AY music, I alwas wonder what you used for tracker and what strange sound envelopes you used.....
It's classic Sound Tracker (by Bzyk). I just wrote a super fast playback routine. Due to an optimizations, it had some minor differences in the playback, but Baze's music was completely playable in the editor. He just needed to be careful to not use some rare sound tracker features :)
Oh and in the first part, we just played a first tick and then stopped the playback during the intro :)
As Hvge says, we used "regular" Sound Tracker with optimized player. There's a couple of factors why it sounds the way it does. First, Sound Tracker is down-tuned quite a bit but I didn't realize it at the time. Second, I never particularly liked the sound of the plain square wave so I avoided the mid range. It was mostly bass and treble where it doesn't sound so harsh. Third, making complex harmonies with 3 channels is hard so it made more sense to write rhythmic tracks instead of harmonic music. I used a lot of "power chords" in which the regular square tone is modulated by AY's hardware envelope (mostly /\/\/\ and |\|\|\). It's a two-tone "chord" similar to the ones used in rock music. The advantage was that it only required a single channel. And finally, in order to add a bit of higher harmonics I used a lot of high-pitch noise and also |\|\|\ envelopes with maximum possible frequency. All of this contributed to the sound. But if you looked at the instruments or arpeggios that I've used, it was all pretty basic. We had to take into account the fact that the player must run fast. It would be also tiresome to develop our own tracker and we were in a rush to finish the demo in time for Demobit 97 (which never happened though).
You talk about how a 20 second segment of the demo would take several minutes to load from tape. Did you use tape or were you planning on the organisers having a Specturm +3 (which would have required an incresaingly rare 3" disk) or put it on more common 3.5" disk to play on the (even rarer) SAM Coupe?
The music in this demo is something else, though, I would have thought this beyond the levels of the Speccy (especially I was keeping up with the Commodore in the olden days!) then I saw Atari 2600 demos, which thosw even being a thing blew my mind... then I saw a few...
+GeoNeilUK Thank you for your comment. Well yes, Baze did develop that part on his +2A with using a tape :) In that time, I was already using a "Didaktik D40", the floppy disk system massively available and supported in Slovakia. I honestly don't know if our demos works on SAM, but the fact is, that we were using loaders written in pure BASIC. It was quite easy to port our demos to another disk systems or any IO platform. The BASIC loaders were de-facto standard on the scene and demo party organizers always required that for the submission.
Btw that fractal part has an insider reference in our next demo. You can see a note at the beginning of Higher State, saying that "No fucking move is precalculated!" :) That's because several friends on IRC network did make a jokes about that fractal, mostly because it's just a pre-calculated movie clip. Well, then we kicked their asses with HS where everything is calculated on the fly :)
@dusanmsk Heh, tak to nastve. My sme vtedy uz vsetci studovali na VS, takze z IRC sme o tom zruseni vedeli dopredu. Inak, povodne sme mali mat este jedno demo na Demobit'96, ale to sa nepodarilo skopirovat z pasky. Nakoniec sme reusli niektore kody z neho v Insane. Zial, tato, dnes uz skutocna raritka, sa zial nikde nedochovala (mam to uz iba na 5.25 diskete, ale to uz asi nepojde precitat:)
@hvgeeee No tak to ja som bol este na strednej a v tej dobe uplne offline :). Nevadi, pobehal som blavu, zanadaval si pred SLSP na Hodzovom, klasika ... :)
simply glorious. how did you manage this?
well... too much alcohol, less distraction from girls :D
I kinda cracked when I saw the ugly blocky pixels landscape and the annotation came saying "Look at that beautiful mountain" :)
But respect, doing voxel landscape in 8bit is not easy.
That supposed to be funny director's commentary. You have to half close your eyes to achieve a high definition experience :)
@michauxv Svojho času sme si tiež hovorili, že by z toho bola pekná hra, ale nikdy nebola reálna vôľa to spraviť :) To čo tomu v deme dáva na reálnej mašine šmrnc je plynulý 50 Hz refresh - to mal byť hlavný "wow efekt". S tými pár sprajtami to bolo možné, ale reálna hra by musela mať toho viac, plus nejakú logiku, detekciu kolízií, zvuk a podobne. Nakoniec by sa narazilo na podobné obmedzenia, s ktorými sa musel vysporiadať napr. autor geniálneho Zynapsu a už by to asi nemalo to čaro.
quite impressive but where's the parallax stars like r-type and zynaps @ 6:46 ?
also why did nobody experiment with graphics in the borders ? Check my mates game Starfarce from 1988 he put graphics in the border on the title screen
Hi Martin, thank you for your comment. Border effects were already boring in '96. Moreover, our demogroup possessed only a limited number of spectrum versions, so it was impossible to tune-up CPU timing without a real hardware. For example "Open Your Eyes", our first demo ever published has text written in border, but works only on +2A and Didaktik M (i think) :) We quickly realized that this is not the way...
But if this is your cup of tea, look for 2nd part of Shock Megademo, it will blow your mind - th-cam.com/video/w0rFw88ex4c/w-d-xo.html :) Well, the whole Shock is legendary masterpiece :)
@MirecU Tak dik. Dufam ze si si tam aj patricne zalietal. Ked stlacis "0", tak tam mozes potom volne lietat :) Keby som si pamatal vhodny "poke", tak sa tam da prepnut mod a potom to niekde do pamate zapise trajektoriu (tusim od adresy 25000:) Demo je v podstate potom len replay tej trajektorie.
Does this demo work on classic 48KB ?
Yes. Only a few effects suffers with flickering due to missing 2nd video bank (like the rotating text on the beginning of demo) and you'll need AY module for sound, but in general, it works very well on 48k.
I didn’t know the XX could do 4:28
"48/128k"? So it works on a 48k as well? Can it tell? So does it have 1 bit DMA sound as well as AY sound.
Nope, it works correctly on 48k but for sound, you have to add an additional AY module. It was a pretty common setup in my country (search for Didaktik Melodik for example)
Juraj Ďurech oh, ok, like a sound card for a spectrum?
@hvgeeee Tam sa dalo volne lietat?! :D Ako o tom som vobec nevedel. :/ Ale si spominam, ze obcas som si tak pri tom povedal, ze kiez by sa tu dalo trochu volne pobehat po tom ostrove. :D Nie su niekde na stiahnutie ROMky toho dema, ze by som si to vyskusal v emulatore?
@MirecU Na zaciatku insane je v tom uvode, kde hra iba hudba, navod na ovladanie.
@michauxv ano dalo by sa to. Ale zrejme uz nemam zdrojove kody (leda ak na nejakej starej diskete, co sa uz nebude dat precitat) a samozrejme chyba motivacia. Kludne mozem na foreveri niekedy odprezentovat algoritmy akymi su tam veci riesene, ale do Z80 kodu ma uz nikto nedostane :)
zdravim.ta eric satie, specnext.com? dalo.by sa.niekedy stretnut a porozpravat?
You can ask your questions in english.
aces!!!
I simply don't get it why you didn't just add controllers for the 6th part (cosmic baze) at 6:35 to render it playable?!?
now that would be awesome slovak chronos/r-type clone!!! :)
ale ak sa nemylim, dalo by sa to kedykolvek, aj dnes napravit... ci? ;)
aj motivacia by sa nasla: na odprezentovanie v trencine na Forever8bit party alebo pre stale aktivnu a masivnu spektracku komunitu na WoS-e...
Demoscene make with assembler. Puré scientific. First computers spectrum 128k and 48k, and dragon 64k. Use 9 Unix, for example freeBSD 12.1, Debian with C/C+×, 16 computers in House. For example mac pro, Imac. Will buy server sparc and computer cuantic of 15 millons dolars. Talk from Barcelona, of spain.
Character based demos are the dog's bollocks, just turn the lights off, the sound up and stand back as far as possible.
Nice.
You guys would've won.
5:25 it still is -> specnext
Oh specnext... I'm still waiting for mine :(
This looks like an amiga...
Impressive graphics. Though the music is not to my taste.
drugs.
I cannot explain how you did most of it. Of course I could do it with a much faster computer.
I don't know. Because I was able to do it. Yes. It's up to you but you probably have to check your deteleportation device. I'm saying that I was very clever young boy and I did it because I wanted to keep that information on youtube. The importance is not important.
What kind of ganja you had? I wanna try too...
фигуры - вряд-ли это вычисления. это фазовые спрайты конечно
how is this even possible????
I unknow assh so write book in latin, how Roman soldier.
Sorry Ivan, but I don't understand you :/
@MirecU baze.au.com
This was a bit underwhelming. So you developed some 3d abstract data types. Made some models. Wrote some display routines (optimised in machine code if you're good,) What's new?
The r-type routine at at he end was disingenuous. No enemy ai logic running, No collision detection as far as I could see.
C'mon.
my thoughts too , i mean Zynaps had AI logic running , colision detection ,player input and a parallax starfield backdrop admitedly not at 50fps but pretty close.
R-type was a top piece of programming too, to recreate that game sooooo well on the Speccy was impressive , always been one of my faves !
Maybe you're not aware of how shitty the Spectrum hardware was. I was rather flabbergasted by the scrolling shooter. The Speccy was not supposed to be able to do that sort of thing.