My Favorite C64 Demos
The C64 was my first real computer. One favourite pastime besides playing games was to watch
and write small demo programs that would show off the special abilities of the machine. This
pages features some of my personal favourites. They're probably not the latest and greatest by
current standards, but they present a selection of the stuff I liked when I was in that scene.
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- Star Frontiers "Pacer"
This is a small but amazing demo by Quark. A version
without the SF logo won the first prize in a graphics demo competition run by the German
"64er" magazine in 1986.
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- Star Frontiers Intro for their crack of "Uridium"
A neat little intro that features a space pirate craft shooting a lock off a giant floppy disk. This demo was later redone on the Amiga.
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- Star Frontiers Intro for their crack of "V"
Nothing too spectacular, but I wanted to have this online for completeness.
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- Ratt and Ben's "Trap" demo for CNET
This is marvellous: It features a very long tune from Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds" and some fancy animation.
(Link: Interview with Ben Daglish)
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- Tim & Stoat's "Thrust Concert"
This demo shows an animated band playing Rob Hubbard's title tune for the popular
game by Firebird.
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- Jabba's "Comet Disco"
And here we have another Rob Hubbard tune - this time it's Jabba who wraps a little
application around it. While the screen text is in german, the idea is simple enough -
you're in control of the Comet Disco. Hit the F-keys to toggle the various color cycles and
the number keys for sounds effects - and rock the beat!
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- Metal Bar II
This is another simple demo - just a pic (Mat must've been an Iron Maiden fan at the time
he drew that :-)), a scroller and some music. However, this tune by Demon absolutely rocks!
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- Ming's "Wassermühle"
While Quark was handling most of the coding in the early Star Frontiers days, Ming
was doing most of the graphics. This demo is basically an animated rendering of a popular
M.C. Escher motif. While it does not present an outrageous coding effort, it sure is one
graphics-wise: it was painted by hand, since scanners were extremely uncommon at that
time.
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- Quark's "Balldemo"
"Boing!", the Amiga Bouncing Ball demo, inspired many people to do their
own variations on the theme1 - witness "Sproing!", "YABoing!" and all
the other offspring (much of which was collected in Fred Fish's AmigaLibDisk collection).
Well, this demo here is Quark's port of the original "Boing" to the C64.
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- UCA's Rosarian
This demo features one of my favourite C64 tunes - a military march done by
Rob Hubbard. As far as I know, the tune was never used in a commercial game.
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Links
Footnotes
- One of the first Amiga games published in Germany by Rainbow Arts falls in that
cathegory, too: "Rocket Attack" by James C. Rogers (aka Chris Münch) began its life
as a simple hack of the "YABoing" sources. And later on, parts of that code became the
code base for "Dr. Fruit" - Chris' and my collaboration on the popular Mr. Do Theme.
(back)
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