An amazing demo, especially given the hardware... It does show how very limited the Apple II really is. Most 'old' computer demos unlock abilities often their designers didn't know about, but in the Apple II Woz had already used every trick in the book just to get the system to run competitively - no custom hardware, not even the convenience of a CRTC. For all the coding excellence on show here this demo would have likely been impossible without a Mockingboard taking care of sound, timing, and interrupts. Well done Mr Demo Coder, and well done Woz. PS: For the slow of thinking I have a soft spot for the Apple II - for what little it is it does an amazingly good job. Also it's utter simplicity and expansion slots make upgrades easy.
there are a few tricks to unlock on Apple II. Biggest is "vapor-lock" to get vsync from the floating bus and then do mid-screen mode switching. However that's difficult to pull off and wouldn't have really added much to any of the effects in second reality a trick that would be useful is being able to play music while loading from disk. It's extremely difficult but at least two groups have done it before. It would be really handy for this demo but probably not worth the effort.
Thinking of how ridiculously complicated it is to just position and color pixels on an AppleII (tried that 34 years ago), anything fullscreen animated with > 1 fps is stunning! Very good job!
@@johnrcornell I rather meant programming them as animations. In Basic you do have commands for drawing lines that will do all the work for you. But once you need faster graphics, you will have to do it in 6502 assembly and then you discover stuff like that the video buffer isn't laid out linear from top to button but interlaced on 2 levels and much more! Of course with integer basic or even the other basic (I think it was from MS), you also could do animations, but at a very low framerate compared to assembly.
@@niner8275 Interlace was done that way (3 sections of 64 lines, each section interlaced 8:1 if i recall?) because it saved Steve Jobs one single TTL IC :D To do proper linear video, they would've needed an additional frame buffer IC, or much much faster main memory. There was a really simple routine somewhere in ROM that you could reference that mapped linear Y coordinate to scanline base memory address. It was only about 20 ops, if my memory serves. That can add up, though, if you're trying to do fast animation, so some people just sacrifice a little memory and use lookup tables.
I recently worked on a tile-based renderer using Ultima tiles to see just how fast it would be possible to spit out that Ultima screen. Turns out you can get around 15fps if you don't care about memory efficiency. That covers about half the entire screen (11x 11 tile grid, 16x16 pixels per tile). I have a video series on my channel about it, showing the (Approximate) original frame rate of the Ultima games and my version, which also included a more memory efficient, but slower, method. I totally used lookup tables for each graphics line/row
@@ffelix916 Give the insane non-linearity, and the address holes, I found text mode impossible to tolerate. I can't imagine dealing in bitmaps. DHR is even worse. But I would love to know the call for this routine to convert a caertesian coordinate to an actual pixel address. I know tables seem essential for all screen related things on the AppleII series.
This also shows very good, how essential the graphics chip was in the 80s. Because the CPU was (basically) the same on the C64 and also same speed... but the C64 version looks sooo much better and also faster. :) Still: my respect to the programmers here :)
From his website: Q. I think the whole thing looks ugly and lazy A. Maybe. Like a lot of my retro projects, this started as a joke that got out of hand. Then I ended up spending 2 months working on it, which is a lot considering I don't even like Second Reality that much. Then finally, in typical demoscene fashion, the deadline was a week away so I worked late hours slapping together whatever effects I could manage and just barely got something reasonable together minutes before the deadline. / I can relate. 😅
Pretty amazing for a machine with no custom chips, a hard to work with graphics display (saw a video about how hard it was to work with recently), a purposefully crippled CPU by apple (to not step on the toes of their more expensive machines of the time) and literally everything having to go through the CPU due to no offloading of any tasks to other chips
Apple didn't intentionally cripple the Apple II, it's just the victim of Woz's minimalist design that originally used only off-the-shelf parts. When it came out in 1977 they had no competing product lines (the Lisa shipped in 1983) and I imagine you're thinking of IBM who had an entire mainframe division.
Impressed and saying hmmmm thats good but asking why at the same time. Astounding interpretation. I must admit I only remember the Apple 2 only having a beeper. This made me dig into the facts to find out it had sound cards. Learn something new every day.
Deater, as always: YOU MADMAN! :) Kudos, this is a fantastic demake. Also Zoom and Ma2e did amazing work with the soundtrack. Really captured a lot of the spirit of the original S3M soundtrack. Also, lots of respect that you kept "FC '93" on the buildings in the end and the original authors in the credits. All around, thank you and fantastic stuff. ][ Infinitum!
final version is still under construction. without a deadline it's low priority. I have much better scroll code ready to put into it and working on actual 3d, just haven't had the time
Apologies to Future Crew...! :-D It is possible that someone from Future Crew did have an European Apple II clone... The first crack screens appeared on Apple II's...
Apple II were sold in Europe, not clones specifically. That is the reason why some of the earliest crackers were French. Computer Club had Apple II in France, and imported games were very expensive.
Is the C64 version that you can find here on TH-cam fake? If not it looks like that the Apple2 was about ten times less capable than the C64, even if they're both based on the 6502.
the real life Mockingboard card has a lot of limitations that make it sound a bit different (usually described as "worse") than the perfect AY-3-8910 emulation found in emulators
How much faster would the graphics be without the music? I assume the music takes up a decent chunk of all CPU resources and I'm not talking about the creation of the output data (pitch shifting, channel mixing, etc.), I'm talking about playing that data. IIRC most Apple II games stopped all animation when playing full sound effects, as just playing them used so much CPU time, that no decent animation was possible at the same time. Or they just used some very short beeps, pops and crackling sounds, which were not played continuously and thus allowed to perform some animation in between; like in Prince of Persia, where the sound effects sounded like crackling noise from a broken speaker. So without the music, the graphics would be significant faster, wouldn't they?
the music is using a Mockingboard card. It's not bitbanging the speaker. It's playing a tracked PT3 file which takes about 10-20% overhead. Playing raw AY-3-8910 (ym5-style) music would have essentially 0 overhead, but in that case you need to write ~10 registers 50 times a second (so roughly 30k of data per minute) so you can see why that isn't the best idea
The Apple II is one of the earliest microcomputer systems, and while it supports color bitmap display in a few different modes(all are basically variants on "chunky" modes), it doesn't offer anything to accelerate that, so everything you're seeing in this version of Second Reality is what the 6502 itself can do to push pixels, plus the Mockingboard sound card. Doing any kind of animation or raster effects on it is relatively tedious and won't look smooth, so the demo is a good port, but also roughly what one would expect out of the machine.
@@JH-pe3ro Okay, thanks for the explanation! I searched some documentation about the machine, and yeah, the system is very limited. I really like to see and explore the limits of retro machines like the Commodore 64, thanks again for the explanation!
Whoa, impressive as hell. o.o I can't wrap my head around fact that you've coded this demo on computer with cpu used also in NES. BTW, would it be possible to make NES version? I don't know a thing about programing, especially on that kind of machines, but my wild guess - it would not work due to memory limitations, am I right?
Holy wow, deater! This is the most amazing thing ever! Kudos for getting this done! I can't imagine how much time you spent on this. Wish I could hear people at demosplash wowing at this
Демо - говно, как и сам Apple II. Единственно, что мне понравилось - саундтрек. Неудивительно, что Apple III. также был провальным проектом. Стремный вообще комп Apple. Как по мне ZX Spectrum то получше будет !!! Это просто похоже на порнографию мира компьютеров... Хуже Эппл только Sinclair QL
Wow, just wow! Greetings from GORE / Future Crew
High praise from one of the original maestros :)
I like the creativity in how some of the original effects are approximated or implied despite the Apple's hardware limitations.
Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to see a version of this on the Apple IIe! It's quite a nice surprise.
Next project make a Apple 2GS version, it might be fairly decent with that. Apple 2GS was sort of like an Amiga 500 I believe....
An amazing demo, especially given the hardware...
It does show how very limited the Apple II really is. Most 'old' computer demos unlock abilities often their designers didn't know about, but in the Apple II Woz had already used every trick in the book just to get the system to run competitively - no custom hardware, not even the convenience of a CRTC. For all the coding excellence on show here this demo would have likely been impossible without a Mockingboard taking care of sound, timing, and interrupts. Well done Mr Demo Coder, and well done Woz.
PS: For the slow of thinking I have a soft spot for the Apple II - for what little it is it does an amazingly good job. Also it's utter simplicity and expansion slots make upgrades easy.
And this demo *pays the price.*
there are a few tricks to unlock on Apple II. Biggest is "vapor-lock" to get vsync from the floating bus and then do mid-screen mode switching. However that's difficult to pull off and wouldn't have really added much to any of the effects in second reality
a trick that would be useful is being able to play music while loading from disk. It's extremely difficult but at least two groups have done it before. It would be really handy for this demo but probably not worth the effort.
this is awesome... I'm saying "get down" and "10 seconds to transmission" right on cue years later
"I am not an atomic playboy!"
Who doesn't :-)
Thinking of how ridiculously complicated it is to just position and color pixels on an AppleII (tried that 34 years ago), anything fullscreen animated with > 1 fps is stunning! Very good job!
@@johnrcornell I rather meant programming them as animations. In Basic you do have commands for drawing lines that will do all the work for you. But once you need faster graphics, you will have to do it in 6502 assembly and then you discover stuff like that the video buffer isn't laid out linear from top to button but interlaced on 2 levels and much more! Of course with integer basic or even the other basic (I think it was from MS), you also could do animations, but at a very low framerate compared to assembly.
@@niner8275 Interlace was done that way (3 sections of 64 lines, each section interlaced 8:1 if i recall?) because it saved Steve Jobs one single TTL IC :D To do proper linear video, they would've needed an additional frame buffer IC, or much much faster main memory. There was a really simple routine somewhere in ROM that you could reference that mapped linear Y coordinate to scanline base memory address. It was only about 20 ops, if my memory serves. That can add up, though, if you're trying to do fast animation, so some people just sacrifice a little memory and use lookup tables.
@@ffelix916 *Steve Wozniak ;)
I recently worked on a tile-based renderer using Ultima tiles to see just how fast it would be possible to spit out that Ultima screen. Turns out you can get around 15fps if you don't care about memory efficiency. That covers about half the entire screen (11x 11 tile grid, 16x16 pixels per tile). I have a video series on my channel about it, showing the (Approximate) original frame rate of the Ultima games and my version, which also included a more memory efficient, but slower, method. I totally used lookup tables for each graphics line/row
@@ffelix916 Give the insane non-linearity, and the address holes, I found text mode impossible to tolerate. I can't imagine dealing in bitmaps. DHR is even worse. But I would love to know the call for this routine to convert a caertesian coordinate to an actual pixel address. I know tables seem essential for all screen related things on the AppleII series.
Now we need a version for the Atari 2600.
This also shows very good, how essential the graphics chip was in the 80s. Because the CPU was (basically) the same on the C64 and also same speed... but the C64 version looks sooo much better and also faster. :)
Still: my respect to the programmers here :)
Impressive demo for this machine!
Very impressive!!❤ Trug/Future Crew
Fantastic job! Certainly brings back memories of both the Apple ][ and Second Reality.
From his website:
Q. I think the whole thing looks ugly and lazy
A. Maybe. Like a lot of my retro projects, this started as a joke that got out of hand. Then I ended up spending 2 months working on it, which is a lot considering I don't even like Second Reality that much. Then finally, in typical demoscene fashion, the deadline was a week away so I worked late hours slapping together whatever effects I could manage and just barely got something reasonable together minutes before the deadline.
/
I can relate. 😅
Ugly is not what I'd describe it. A technical marvel is a more fitting description.
Absolutely amazing.
Pretty amazing for a machine with no custom chips, a hard to work with graphics display (saw a video about how hard it was to work with recently), a purposefully crippled CPU by apple (to not step on the toes of their more expensive machines of the time) and literally everything having to go through the CPU due to no offloading of any tasks to other chips
The next level would only be a Micro Controller like in LFT's "craft" demo where literally everything is running on bare metal
Apple didn't intentionally cripple the Apple II, it's just the victim of Woz's minimalist design that originally used only off-the-shelf parts. When it came out in 1977 they had no competing product lines (the Lisa shipped in 1983) and I imagine you're thinking of IBM who had an entire mainframe division.
Blown away. Well done!
Impressed and saying hmmmm thats good but asking why at the same time. Astounding interpretation. I must admit I only remember the Apple 2 only having a beeper. This made me dig into the facts to find out it had sound cards. Learn something new every day.
Son, I am Impress. This is a fantastic accomplishment.
Deater, as always: YOU MADMAN! :) Kudos, this is a fantastic demake. Also Zoom and Ma2e did amazing work with the soundtrack. Really captured a lot of the spirit of the original S3M soundtrack. Also, lots of respect that you kept "FC '93" on the buildings in the end and the original authors in the credits. All around, thank you and fantastic stuff.
][ Infinitum!
I like the music. Trying to do this particular demo on Apple II was probably a little too ambitious though.
I need this demo to become the next Bad Apple!
fantastic !! :) brings back memories... great achievement well done and funny details "apologies to: Future Crew" hahaha :->
This Apple is burning to do this
Just amazing! 🤯
I'm impressed, clever code is supported well by the graphics and music. Love the chunky 3D city and the familiar blue ray-tracing part. Top work.
Don't know whether to consider it blasphemous or amazing
Why not both?
Blasphemazing!
It was a statement of it`s time and the technology frauding advertisements of cooperations.!
Mind blowing so good sound from Apple II
I checked the "final" version and the *only* difference was the end where the flying thing approached the "Future Crew" text
final version is still under construction. without a deadline it's low priority. I have much better scroll code ready to put into it and working on actual 3d, just haven't had the time
Apologies to Future Crew...! :-D It is possible that someone from Future Crew did have an European Apple II clone... The first crack screens appeared on Apple II's...
Apple II were sold in Europe, not clones specifically. That is the reason why some of the earliest crackers were French. Computer Club had Apple II in France, and imported games were very expensive.
Incredible!
Sounds like a ZX spectrum demo (both the mockingboard and the 128k spectrum has the same sound chip)
I pressed ESC while it was running and it skipped a part
amazing
wow, just wow
Very impressive! Btw at 10:35 there's credits for a part that's not in the demo, or did I miss something?
awesome!
Is the C64 version that you can find here on TH-cam fake? If not it looks like that the Apple2 was about ten times less capable than the C64, even if they're both based on the 6502.
Not fake. Commodore 64 is much improved machine with special chips, like sid. Processor is almost the same yes, but nothing else.
Impressive 🙂👍
Incredible! I'm so glad people are remastering one of my favorite demos for other platforms. It gets more and more impressive every time.
_"remastering"_ ...?? How do you logically justify a word like that?
@@herrbonk3635I'm not sure I understand your question.
@@AiOinc1 Listen to the word! It says something along the lines of "making a master again". What is that supposed to mean in this context?
What a way to overcome the limitations of that machine.
What's going on at 6:00 ? What mode is that?
Deater said somewhere else it's HGR mode but updating only half the lines for twice the speed
Omg Apple II rotozoomer!!!!
I was thinking, is this on a hard drive image? And then it prompts to insert disk side 2!
But will it run Crysis?
CRYSIS TEST
Perhaps not on ultra
Is there an audience reaction from the Demosplash 2023?
The sound of the video seems different compared to an emulation. how to reproduce this effect?
the real life Mockingboard card has a lot of limitations that make it sound a bit different (usually described as "worse") than the perfect AY-3-8910 emulation found in emulators
@@deater78 I don't know why, but the real life mockingbird sounds better 👌
Kudos !
How much faster would the graphics be without the music? I assume the music takes up a decent chunk of all CPU resources and I'm not talking about the creation of the output data (pitch shifting, channel mixing, etc.), I'm talking about playing that data. IIRC most Apple II games stopped all animation when playing full sound effects, as just playing them used so much CPU time, that no decent animation was possible at the same time. Or they just used some very short beeps, pops and crackling sounds, which were not played continuously and thus allowed to perform some animation in between; like in Prince of Persia, where the sound effects sounded like crackling noise from a broken speaker. So without the music, the graphics would be significant faster, wouldn't they?
the music is using a Mockingboard card. It's not bitbanging the speaker. It's playing a tracked PT3 file which takes about 10-20% overhead. Playing raw AY-3-8910 (ym5-style) music would have essentially 0 overhead, but in that case you need to write ~10 registers 50 times a second (so roughly 30k of data per minute) so you can see why that isn't the best idea
Atomic playboys
I don't have any knowledge of the Apple II performances. Can someone tell me how powerful is this demo? I'm still amazed :D
The Apple II is one of the earliest microcomputer systems, and while it supports color bitmap display in a few different modes(all are basically variants on "chunky" modes), it doesn't offer anything to accelerate that, so everything you're seeing in this version of Second Reality is what the 6502 itself can do to push pixels, plus the Mockingboard sound card. Doing any kind of animation or raster effects on it is relatively tedious and won't look smooth, so the demo is a good port, but also roughly what one would expect out of the machine.
@@JH-pe3ro Okay, thanks for the explanation! I searched some documentation about the machine, and yeah, the system is very limited. I really like to see and explore the limits of retro machines like the Commodore 64, thanks again for the explanation!
Fucking incredible!
Quite Unreal. 2. ^_^
Can someone please upscale this video?
How did you think the "original" Second Reality had been produced?
HOLY FUCK!
Next try Casio calculator
wow
Whoa, impressive as hell. o.o I can't wrap my head around fact that you've coded this demo on computer with cpu used also in NES. BTW, would it be possible to make NES version? I don't know a thing about programing, especially on that kind of machines, but my wild guess - it would not work due to memory limitations, am I right?
Let's not rule anything out just yet. It was quite common to include extra stuff in the cartridges, after all.
The c64 version is also very impressive. Almost the same as the original on PC
@@ZamuelAtari Agreed, c64 version is great indeed. So i'm waiting for NES version. 🤷
I watched Second Reality C64 before this. *Oh no.*
😯❤
My mind was blown by the original 1993 version. Then again by the Commodore 64 version in 1997. Now you blew it even further. Please stop.
hahaha brilliant :)
Like a bumble bee, it shouldnt be possible to do this on an A2, but Deater does it anyway ;-)
Holy wow, deater! This is the most amazing thing ever! Kudos for getting this done! I can't imagine how much time you spent on this. Wish I could hear people at demosplash wowing at this
So we manipulate dots CS102
The c64 version is also very impressive. Almost the same as the original on PC
The version for C64 is way better
C64 have better possibilities, apple 2 is first computer with colour screen.
You should check out the MS-DOS version, that’s even betterer…
@@PeranMethe DOS version is the original one
@@tcscomment Yes. It is.
Who cares? It's not a competition. It's 2023, why are you still starting these Apple II versus C64 debates? Stupid.
Apple ii's graphic ability was really horrible even at the time.
I'm curious which machine from 1977 you think had better graphics
lol
get it down
Демо - говно, как и сам Apple II. Единственно, что мне понравилось - саундтрек. Неудивительно, что Apple III. также был провальным проектом. Стремный вообще комп Apple. Как по мне ZX Spectrum то получше будет !!! Это просто похоже на порнографию мира компьютеров... Хуже Эппл только Sinclair QL
Commodore was vastly superior to Apple....and yet Apple is still in business. For shame.
We actually don't care.
@@julienbraudel7109 why are you gay?
Commodore lost their market share to the PC and console market, not Apple
Apple lost almost. Commodore destroyed by its marketing peoples :(
lol wut
technically impressive ugliness 🙂
Lol epic! 😀