> 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
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.
Tracing the execution path and baking cycle-exact hardware state directly into C/WASM is clever engineering; it bypasses runtime emulation overhead entirely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
I didn’t notice it when using Codex. Recently switched to Claude to test Opus 5.5, and it is constantly adding useless commentary.
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.
Tracing the execution path and baking cycle-exact hardware state directly into C/WASM is clever engineering; it bypasses runtime emulation overhead entirely.
So much fun. I recently ported some old strategy games. Claude does it almost on its own http://replicated.live/blog/games
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.
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.
So who or what ported them?
Opus 5.5.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It's the eternal sloptember, but for humanity.
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?
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.
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.
Hilarious.
Haha.