This reminds me of a quote by a master magician, which I unfortunately can't locate right now. The gist was that one way that magic tricks work is that the audience would never believe the sheer amount of work that goes into developing the skill to pull of the trick.
The C64 demoscene is at this point a pure case of magicians developing tricks for other magicians. Compare to 20 years ago, when the tricks were made to wow users familiar with the platform and its limitations.
Now someone without intimate knowledge of the C64 would not understand what is the hard part of this demo part. Letters scroll up and sometimes expand or shrink a bit. We've seen lots of different scroll text parts. Is this hard?
Consider the brute force approach. The text scroll area is 192 pixels by 200 pixels. If this was just a bitmap, that is 4800 bytes to update. Pure unrolled code to move bytes would do
LDA src,x
STA dest,x
for a minimum of 8 cycles per byte (extra if 256-byte page boundaries are crossed, and to update the x index, and do the logic to pick out which letter to draw) or 38,400 cycles to update that bitmap. But there are just 19,656 cycles free per frame! The best a brute force approach would get then is one update per 3 frames, or 17fps.
So all the cleverness is getting the machine to do something at 50fps that naively it could do at best at 17fps. This is by racing the display raster and playing tricks with the hardware bugs in the cpu/video chip interface.
Magic tricks and con artists employ many of the same tricks. A convincing con is one so elaborate it looks like it'd be too expensive to perform, would require way too much rehearsal if it was really a con, so people are lulled into complacency.
Maybe it's that one form is being deceptive to entertain, the other to steal, but they have a lot of commonality.
Comments
This reminds me of a quote by a master magician, which I unfortunately can't locate right now. The gist was that one way that magic tricks work is that the audience would never believe the sheer amount of work that goes into developing the skill to pull of the trick.
The C64 demoscene is at this point a pure case of magicians developing tricks for other magicians. Compare to 20 years ago, when the tricks were made to wow users familiar with the platform and its limitations.
Now someone without intimate knowledge of the C64 would not understand what is the hard part of this demo part. Letters scroll up and sometimes expand or shrink a bit. We've seen lots of different scroll text parts. Is this hard?
Consider the brute force approach. The text scroll area is 192 pixels by 200 pixels. If this was just a bitmap, that is 4800 bytes to update. Pure unrolled code to move bytes would do
for a minimum of 8 cycles per byte (extra if 256-byte page boundaries are crossed, and to update the x index, and do the logic to pick out which letter to draw) or 38,400 cycles to update that bitmap. But there are just 19,656 cycles free per frame! The best a brute force approach would get then is one update per 3 frames, or 17fps.So all the cleverness is getting the machine to do something at 50fps that naively it could do at best at 17fps. This is by racing the display raster and playing tricks with the hardware bugs in the cpu/video chip interface.
I wonder if you're thinking of this interview by Teller : http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-hi...
"Make the trick more trouble than it's worth."
I have read that article many times, it's a wonderfully illuminating piece of writing.
Magic tricks and con artists employ many of the same tricks. A convincing con is one so elaborate it looks like it'd be too expensive to perform, would require way too much rehearsal if it was really a con, so people are lulled into complacency.
Maybe it's that one form is being deceptive to entertain, the other to steal, but they have a lot of commonality.
Yes! That is the quote I was looking for.