Fascinating article, thank you for writing it up. It was a very impressive part of a very impressive demo, and really interesting to see how it was put together.

Your comment about looking back 10 years from now really rings true with me. I look back at some of the 68000 code I used to write on the Amiga back in the 90s and it feels very distant these days, I've no idea if I could still code that stuff!

I do very much miss the days of stretching the hardware just that little bit further, squeezing out just a little more than should ever have been possible, and hiding all the complexity so that it just looks easy. Happy memories!! 😁

Hah, yeah... I was a teenager when I first got into the demoscene. Back then, we'd "just" have a C64, a 1541 disk drive and an Expert Cartridge to code with... no assembler to speak of, we'd just write machine code directly into memory. I can't remember how I managed a lot of it tbh.. if you didn't save everything to disk before running, you could get a bad crash, maybe corrupt memory, etc.. and then have to do it again? There were some effects that I made that would use 32k of code - and I'd have to code a little "code-generator" to create all of that, which was also 6510, running on the C64, and generating the code at the start of the demo part. Looking back at all this, I'm amazed that teenage me could cope. I'd hate to be doing it all that way nowadays ;-)