Yet another Hacker News

Classic PC demoscene productions running natively in the browser

54 points adunk 3 hours ago 30 comments

Retr0id 1 hour ago | parent

> The demo is run on an x86 emulator that records every block of code the CPU actually executes, over the whole demo.

> That recording is translated into C - the original instructions, one for one, with the exact cycle timing of the emulated machine.

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

> The result is checked against the emulator event for event: every interrupt, port access and frame at the same moment of emulated time.

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

vardump 37 minutes ago | parent

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 10-20x difference in performance.

rmnclmnt 20 minutes ago | parent

> 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

christophilus 18 minutes ago | parent

I didn’t notice it when using Codex. Recently switched to Claude to test Opus 5.5, and it is constantly adding useless commentary.

rmnclmnt 14 minutes ago | parent

I don’t think that’s specific to Claude though. I’ve seen people use GH Copilot harneds (don’t with which models) and it was even worst

dspillett 9 minutes ago | parent

> You have to constantly fight so hard to not get this.

By “fight so hard” you mean “do a bit of basic editing before publishing the text”?

You wouldn't have thrown a junior's text straight at end users without any review in the past (at least I hope not, though obviously some teams actually were and still are that lax), why do you expect to get away with skipping the review/edit step with your clockwork colleague?

Sharlin 5 minutes ago | parent

Because we expect a junior colleague to learn from feedback and not have to fix the same problems in their output year after year.

gritzko 59 minutes ago | parent

So much fun. I recently ported some old strategy games. Claude does it almost on its own http://replicated.live/blog/games

cyclopeanutopia 50 minutes ago | parent

So who or what ported them?

gritzko 22 minutes ago | parent

Opus 5.5.

dspillett 15 minutes ago | parent

It is true what people say wrt using agentic development being like being a manager: you take an idea from elsewhere (a lot of game porting is happening right now), describe it to someone else who will do the hard work while you relax, and then at the end you as the team lead/manager claim all the credit.

1313ed01 42 minutes ago | parent

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.

gritzko 20 minutes ago | parent

Ah, yes, sorry. At this point, XP and DOS are almost synonymous for me.

The entire point of the port was to add headless play for AI training. But porting the old interface and playing it in the browser was lots of fun. Can not upload that to GitHub, obviously.

chriswarbo 8 minutes ago | parent

> At this point, XP and DOS are almost synonymous for me.

IIRC Windows 9x & ME were based on (MS)DOS; but 2k and XP were based on NT, which was quite different.

(Note sure what those differences actually are, since I only started programming once I'd switched to Linux...)

vrganj 58 minutes ago | parent

This kind of made me sad.

The demoscene was all about human ingenuity getting the most out of the machine. It was about showing off how good your crew was at making things from nothing but their minds.

Now, it too, has been swallowed by the AI that is destroying this entire mode of being, the joy and creativity of writing code, of solving seemingly-impossible puzzles with ones mind.

My favorite creative and intellectual outlet is dying off and its killer is wearing its corpse as a costume.

plastic-enjoyer 57 minutes ago | parent

It's the eternal sloptember, but for humanity.

blackhaz 41 minutes ago | parent

Or an eternal heaven, our every wish coming true. The next iteration of homo sapiens will not be thinking how to do things, but what things to do. Is this the new creative space for us?

vrganj 36 minutes ago | parent

But the thinking is the valuable and meaningful part. I don't want it monopolized by a few megacorps, sterilized and devoid of human touch, only thinking of things that said corps find acceptable.

We'll get unlimited frozen pizzas, but we'll kill off chefs in the process.

It's not a trade I'm feeling good about.

mrweasel 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

pona-a 29 minutes ago | parent

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.

sgt 23 minutes ago | parent

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?

soltanov 46 minutes ago | parent

Tracing the execution path and baking cycle-exact hardware state directly into C/WASM is clever engineering; it bypasses runtime emulation overhead entirely.

Krisso 37 minutes ago | parent

I'm all for this future. Let's remove the tooling and let true creativity and diligence be what we appreciate and marvel at. If we can instruct AI well enough, it can eliminate the plumbing layer entirely, allowing us to focus on what truly matters.

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.

Sharlin 25 minutes ago | parent

Hilarious.

Krisso 20 minutes ago | parent

Haha.

treylorswift 16 minutes ago | parent

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

Sharlin 17 minutes ago | parent

If there’s no human effort behind this, what’s the point? You could just as well watch any of the zillions of video recordings of these demos. There’s no inherent value in "running natively in the browser". Never mind the vast irony in demoscene specifically being a celebration of human skill and creativity.

Retr0id 11 minutes ago | parent

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)

Martin_Silenus 7 minutes ago | parent

The days I gave up with demoscene. When PC killed Atari ST and Amiga scene (sorry to put you after amiguys, but life was always easier for you ;) ), all the magic of fixed hardware without tons of Mhz and RAM, when we were running after that cathode ray which wouldn't wait, exploiting hardware bugs to break those damn borders above, below and sideways, spending hours turning my head upside-down to read unreadable scrolltexts, looking at psychedelic plasma effects with bazillions colors...

Then I betrayed you all: I bought my first ugly machine because of Doom. I was so ashamed...

Now, only 4K demos can at least impress me a bit.

Feeling old.