Crystal Dream 2 by Triton (pc demo)
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- čas přidán 2. 07. 2011
- PC demo first presented at Computer Crossroads 1993, got 1st place in the competition.
Requires at least a fast 386 system, 486 with local bus graphics card for best experience.
HQ video at
retronn.de/ftp/videos/demos/do... - Věda a technologie
One of the best. Reimplemented almost every scenes in assembly and pascal back in the days. It was one of the largest influence and inspiration. And the music is still one of my all time favorites.
I prefer Second Reality by Future Crew (PC Demo).
@@OpenGL4ever i love both brothers !
As a coder in the demo scene (Amiga) I really miss those days. I'm from Sweden so "hackerence" was my scene. So thankful that we never went up against Triton as they were on PC and we on Amiga. No one could come close to them. Still following Starbreeze, hoping for the best.
Rooting for them, too. You remember the Into The Shadows character demo?
@@c7r8 that ITS demo got soooo spread on bbses due to the triton relationship.. I remember finding it even on random PD non scene boards
Future Crew were great too.
What group were you with, if any?
This Triton demo is awesome, but i wish they had timed music with the video as it would have been even better.
I remember, back in '94 when i bought my first PC and started to learn assembly, i was really curious how the hell they made these mega-demos from MOV AX,CX. Finally i gave up :)
Wow. Textured realtime 3D in 1993 on a home computer. Crazy!
Lizardking's music in this just top notch. Although nothing wrong with Vogue's parts. I'm just glad they to this day continue as musicians contributing to the gaming community their works in recent video games. In their respective companies.
Good times back in the 90's. I watched this demo many times and showed it to everyone back when 486 was king. Thanks for posting this.
I played this video on my XP build with a CRT monitor.
My parents didn't even met when this masterpiece arived , what a great experience.
the 3d is extremely impressive, as someone who's coding a 3d engine myself
In 1993 I still had an XT 8088 with a 32MB hard drive and 640kB RAM with a 4-colour CGA monitor later upgraded to a VGA. This stuff was so far ahead of me. I had to go watch it in a theatre.
That demo required really expensive HW on the CPU, graphics card and of course audio side. Ironically, a year later the ridiculously cheap Playstation 1 came on the market, which literally decimated that PC HW.
In the late 80's I had an Orchid graphics card then switched to ATI in the early 90's, it was mind blowing course not in today's standards. heh
Computer Crossroads 1993 - I was there! Gothenburg 1993. Amazing demo event!!! Atari, Amiga and PC. What an experience. Free entrence to Liseberg aswell. We went to the arcade!
I had a measly 20MB hard disk drive that was over 3 inches thick when I first ran/saw this demo. Crazy. Best demo in its time.
Seagate ST-225?
The visuals are definetely not badder than Second Reality. The Mandelbrot and the partitioned cube effects are very great. But music/ sounddesign in Second Reality is absolutely unbeatable.
ahhh.. 1993... back when I just get my first PC... sad to left my C64 behind.... after soo many years coding but time to learn x86, VGA, GUS, SoundBlaster... new list of registers, int... I/O... Yesterday, this was a future, today... it's blend with other stuff in my past. *sign...
Lucky we were... Nowadays it's hard to learn the "fun stuff" in programming. At that time we were like alchemist in our bedrooms ;).
Can recall this as if it was yesterday :) Used to watch demos on both the C-64 and Amiga to admire the design and fancy music that always was the greater lead in those demos. Then slowly the PC scene was getting there, when coders and musicians from the Commodore scene wanted to try their wings on the PC platform. Some did succeed, while some just went back to their kingdoms ;)
I was lucky to keep my C-64, VC-1541, thick old CRT and steady connection to the internet :P Best ever was when I came across the genius method to download the latest C-64 demos to the PC and unzip(4zip) them to real VC1541 via XM-1541 cable and StarCommand! :D Those were and still are the days... Stil have that ol shining C-64, Amiga and PC next to me
@@demoscenes best times in the world. I bought my first PC in 1992. It was the dawn of the new era, but still it was very fun to mess around MS-DOS. Todays computing environments are anything but fun...
I am coming back the days of Atari 8-bit and early PC's..youtube is a great place to start.
Wow, this really is pushing the limits of what you could do on a PC without a 3D graphics card.
The music at 3:55 - I have loved this part since the first time I heard it.
I know exactly what you mean ...
It's the Fantasia sound from the Roland D-50 synth
True talent at its best. That is too say graphic, audio and programming skills are second to none. Thanks for taking me down memory lane.... :-)
wow, remember that, was a young boy at this time. Glad to find it here. Thx very much.
ahh mermories, was there when it was first presented at The Computer Crossroad -93 in Gothenburg. Great party!
Didn't sleep for 3 days. Except when I slumbered in front of my A500 and got half my floppies stolen.
Still, this demo made me believe it was time to move to PC instead of the Amiga.
@@DonPidgeon Hehe, sorry about your floppies man. I hope you got over it by now :)
Was there as well :-)
Gravis Ultrasound :) Best soundcard ever made :)
Marcel Schindler and sound blaster 16
I had the RAM upgrade. I felt like a legend!
I had its successor Ultrasound Plug N Play - fully backward compatible to original GUS
@Ess Whole Pfft ... piss poor Paula with it's lame 4 channels, being one of the bottle-necks of the amiga architecture compared to 32 independant channels :) GF1 is kinda relateable to the Ensoniq OTTO.
@Ess Whole I think something around 11KHz with all channels playing at the same time - also this limitation doesn't apply for the InterWave which was used on the GUS PnP cards.
I really liked the smoothness of their star fields
Impressive Demo at the time , im play it in my 486dx2 66mhz + Advanced Gravis Ultrasound
This and 2nd reality changed the world in 1993.
Nah. This one from Denmark did and won 1st place in Norway. Secondly. Mad Elks fro Poland...also 1993. Finnish people were great in 1993 if you never seen the real 1993 demoes.
czcams.com/video/jziQBWQxvok/video.html
@@V3ntilator Ok, it changed the world for me then, since I didn't own an Amiga - but thx for the link, awesome demo and soundtrack.
From real hardware of course.
Which is why the vector world works the way it does. On an emulator it somehow manages to show the antarctic, which in turn shows an ugly artefact.
Nice demo, the fractal bit makes me glad we have anti-aliasing filters now, so blinky.
The launch at 3:17 (sync graphics/music) is just...WOW!!!
The mandelbrot zoomer appears only with an FPU installed.
Interesting/strange. I was just running this on a 386dx (yeah, not the best machine, but I wanted to push it with some demanding demos) which iirc doesn't have an FPU (additional 80387) and I have seen the part. But I'll check again. Now on a 486DX it's by default there.
That section drops frames on a slower pc to match the zoom to the music. That has a better rhythm. On a more powerful cpu, it is too smooth.
@@Optimus6128 isn't DX the version with the FPU
@@XENON2028 only on 486 DX means FPU included. On 386 it means a totally different thing, DX on 386 is full 32bit CPU, while SX is 32bit CPU with 16bit bandwidth.
thanks for the outro!
Awesome
If you like the Desert Dawn tune, there is a good remake on SID in Booze Designs demo 1991.
watch?v=cxg6Jkgp2Fg
Starting at about 8:00
Kicks ass!
THANKSSSSSSSSSS
Good demo :)
Some technical notes and explanations about why this was so astonishingly impressive in 1993:
1) Shouldn't have to be said, but rather obviously it's all calculated in CPU. No hardware accelerated graphics back then. However, even knowing this, consider how immensely _slow_ CPUs were in 1993. We are talking about a few tens of megahertz, and very low instructions-per-clock numbers.
2) Rendering intersecting polygons was impressive back then because it wasn't at all trivial. Nowadays we are spoiled with hardware-accelerated GPUs that use Z-buffers for depth-checking and thus we consider correct rendering of intersecting polygons a given. Not so back then. The renderer in this demo doesn't use a Z-buffer at all (it would be too memory-consuming and too slow). It literally calculates the intersections of polygons, subdividing the polygons, and rendering only the visible parts of them. (This is how it manages to cut the cube with a box, showing the interior of the cube: It literally calculates the intersection of those polygons and renders just the visible parts.)
3) The real-time Mandelbrot zoomer seemed a physical impossibility back in those days. As mentioned above, CPUs were very slow, and rendering even _one_ of those Mandelbrot images took at a very minimum seconds. The fact that it's zooming into a Mandelbrot set in real-time, using a regular CPU available at the time, was mind-boggling and seemed absolutely impossible. (I won't spoil the trick here. Perhaps in a reply, if you can't figure it out yourself.)
4) The Descent-like portion (the ship flying through the corridors) also doesn't use any kind of Z-buffer, and still manages to do proper hidden surface removal, in real-time. It uses special techniques to render only the visible parts of the walls. However, those techniques do not help with the ships themselves. If you pay close attention you'll notice that the ship never goes partially behind anything (eg. partially behind a corner). At no point does any wall cover it. This is intentional because the engine that was programmed for this didn't support that, and they got around it by cleverly arranging the camera and ship movements such that at no point would it go behind anything. This is so inconspicuous that you don't even notice, unless pointed out.
5) Same is true for the chessboard: No Z-buffer, just proper ordering of the polygons to be rendered, in real-time.
For the Mandelbrot zoom (a technique that's in fact used even today for creating those videos of super-deep zooms, so that it doesn't take ages to calculate): The demo only calculates like half a dozen Mandelbrot images at different zoom levels, and zooms these images while smoothly interpolating from one image to the next. (So, in essence, it's not _actually_ a real-time Mandelbrot zoomer: It's an image zoomer + image interpolation. It just looks like it's calculating the Mandelbrot set in real-time.)
I watched "War Games" the other day... I guess it put me in the right mood. I was into all that home computing thing in the 80s and had all the computers at the time but ended up with a PC, of course. I always used computers to make music, too, aside from gaming. I remember Atari very fondly, but also PC. Now I'm making music on Linux. :)
Classic! 💗
whoever thumbs this down has PC speaker only, not even AdLib
what's the music track called starting at @10:40?
I cannot beleive I'm listening to CD][ on youtube, whilie I have many computer ready to play it realtime !
lol when clipping was an EFFECT! gawd i miss this stuff 😂
It's probably short samples to save space but later emulated with rhythmic gates in modern music.
the best of doskpop.
Aaa, very good times...
Brutal el ajedrez.
When the Borg connects?
Those bass.
nostalgia. good docu here, not featured in it though...
Crystal Dream 2 by Triton (pc demo)
That type of link is old as hell... I'm surprised that one like this still exists.
I have a little curiosity: Creators of Second Reality (Future Crew) are same programmers that some years after make the game Max Payne 🙂
PS: I remember a demo coder friend (amateur at the time) who wanted to reproduce the part of the cubes that is broken with a square of another color, he couldn't do it and he searched for the mathematical form for a whole day or two.
Was anyone able to read the text starting from 0:39? What did it say?
3:55 - EPIC 🤩
Companies like Futuremark (3DMark), Remedy (Death Rally, Max Payne, Alan Wake), Bugbear Entertainment (FlatOut, Glimmerati, Rally Trophy), Bitboys (a graphics hardware company) and Recoil Games (Rochard) were all started in whole or in part by members of Future Crew.
before somebody says the graphics are blocky think about this in the time the amiga or even the c16 ,64 that was eye opening for us it was the best you good get and the graphics are awesome but if youre from later then 90`s you probaly wont understand because everything is 1080p 4k today but this is porn of the best
i am from 2005 and i prefer such classics over the uhd 4k 60fps etc shit
Links to other good demos?
Denmark made the best demo ever. 1st place in Norway at Gathering 1993.
czcams.com/video/jziQBWQxvok/video.html
What's the name of the track that starts at 8:40?
I think you mean this one: czcams.com/video/BF2iMT1Ozrs/video.html
Music from Vogue and Lizardking is EPIC!
Sounds like Level42 and Mark King on the bass ;-)
All of this was contained in an efficient 2MB
It’s a great demo. I love the music but I always think its sounds a little glitchy though, even on todays PC’s so must be a limitation in the code.
It's tracked. The samples are all clipped short by their very nature and to save disc space.
@@mightymax9948 that might be it, but it’s more the timing. Doesn’t hold a constant speed. I hear it as a musician. Sounds like PC is on the edge of coping with it, which to be fair it might be because I’m not sure what it’s running on.
@@MarcusTDM It's probably because it is run in an Emulator like DOSBox on modern hardware and recorded there.
Better run it on real hardware from the time, when the DEMO was released. This should result in much better timing.
@@OpenGL4ever could be right, but I used to run it on a 486DX2-66 and it was the same. I sound like I think it’s rubbish, absolutely not, it’s one of my fave demos of the time!
0:31 DANGER DO NOT TRY TO READ THIS TEXT
Greetings to Cyscyor Fotoys Cyeg XoGyyphy
-
I probably butchered it oh well. Who reads warning labels anyway ^:)
The text in that scroll is greetings to a few demo groups. I know that the second group they greet is Future Crew. The others I don't remember.
Triton claimed that everything in this demo is real-time calculated. I find really hard to belive that a mandelbrot fractal could be calculated on the fly on a i386 machine.
My understanding of how they did it is that they stored a single square of data per frame (as in, two columns, two rows). It's possible to generate the inside of the square by using the future frames, and scaling them down, and to generate the outside of the square using past frames, scaling them up. I think that makes sense given that the effect area is a square. Though, maybe they could realistically generate a single square of the mandelbrot data per frame (vs storing them in the demo data) and just buffer the rest, to do it in realtime. It's been a while since I wrapped my head around how slow those processors were though, so maybe I'm off. :)
The key observation is the blocky-ness/low resolution of the image on the screen edges during the zoom (this is difficult to see here due to CZcams video encoding, but I remember watching this demo when I was a teenager and observing this on screen directly with actual hardware). The clever bit here is this is not something a viewer would immediately notice, as they would be more inclined to focus their gaze on the centre of the screen at the point where the zoom is happening.
I always thought this was a high resolution/static image stored in the binary, where the finer detail/higher resolution rendering is only stored around the point where the zoom is going into. Such an image would also be highly compressible (lossless compression, like PNG).
However, per your claim that everything in this demo was calculated real-time, I suspect as others have said, that they generated this in the background, committing the render to memory, and then performed the zoom. Again, per what I said previously, they only need to store the finer detail at the point they are zooming into (progressively storing more and more precise data points for rendering the on screen pixels allowing for fluid zooming). Given this, I can now see how it would be feasibly possible to render this quite quickly on the hardware at the time, either just before the start of the scene or gradually from the start of the demo up to that point.
I have seen this fractal zoom effect in few other PC demos even in Amiga and C64. The usual trick is to crosszoom between precalculated (or maybe calculated during the effect) frames in between. So, they only calculate frame 0, 50, 100, 150 and crosszoom between two frames (something like the zoomquilt.org does). My only curiosity if at least that one frame in a second is calculated realtime, or it's image is preloaded from the disk before, because even generating a mandelbrot could take more than a second (at least for someone writing a run of the mill code to do it, without thinking of tricks to optimize), so it still seems like a hard task (but I might try at some point on my 386). I guess the fractal zoom I have seen on C64 would definitely have the images prestored, there is no way they can have even 1 image per second, although the resolution is smaller.
@@Optimus6128 Another method would be that since there is no rotation we can replace the scaling as a series of blits that would cause grid like gaps in the image and then compute the fractal for those blank spaces, that would be a small fraction of pixels per frame compared to a full screen. For a slow zoom in this would need a dozen or so full rows and columns to be computed each frame.
@@SerBallister Interesting idea
I always love this demo, but the biggest mistake they did is that they didn't time the music vs video like others did in Future Crew "Second Reality", Kefrens Dreams - Desert Dreams (Amiga) Mad Elks - Technological Death (Amiga).
GUS RuLeZ !!!
Very 90s
Gravis Ultrasound 🥳🥳🥳
did anyone ever figure out what that text said?
They greet a few of the popular demo groups during that time. The second group they greet is Future Crew.
it's embarrassing how cool i think this is. I'm in gen Z too
for you it's A E S T H E T I C lol, for us it was cutting edge
google earth ancestor there.. :D
cd2
Kuuntele ilman mainoksia - tilaa CZcams Premium Käyttöluvan CZcamslle myöntänyt:
The Orchard Music (tahon BLEEPSTREET Records puolesta) ja 2 musiikin tekijänoikeusjärjestöä
ARTUR OLEARCZYK - SKŁAD DŻWIĘKÓW .
Triton did the best stars.
System Rules
That demo required really expensive HW on the CPU, graphics card and of course audio side. Ironically, a year later the ridiculously cheap Playstation 1 came on the market, which literally decimated that PC HW.
I would've loved to try this on Windows 7 (64-bit)… Apparently, this runs at 60 FPS with only a Pentium I. Compare that to Undertale (Apple IIe graphics, but higher system requirements than Crysis 3), and _this_ is a winner of efficiency! All programmers should follow this as an example, and properly optimise it so that it can run on older hardware.
True.
But if this can run perfectly on Windows 95 (and also a full game, Sonic CD, by the way) with 16 MB RAM, I don't understand why today's retro-inspired games (Shovel Knight, etc.) with graphics more basic than these, can't even install, never mind load, on the same hardware that they look like they support.
I just think developers should generally optimise their games a bit more. If Undertale got that treatment, even a toaster would've been able to run it.
It's a long story, but I've probably said enough for this reply.
TENMAxNIEMA At least Cave Story has better optimisation. (As far as I'm aware.)
Still better than shoddy console ports with inexcusably-high system requirements (Call of Duty: Ghosts, Star Wars: Battlefront, etc.), eh?
I think I captured the demo from a mid range Pentium (likely my P166MMX system, see retronn.de/imports/computer_overview.html ). However the demo runs already pretty well on a 386DX-40 with an ISA graphics card and stutter free on a 486DX2-66 with a local bus graphics card. The 486DX-66 is roughly a factor of three faster than the 386DX-40. The low res VGA modes in DOS run at 70 Hz, so the original capture is 70 fps as well. CZcams caps this however at 60 fps why sometimes slight stutter occurs due to the downconversion.
If you want to try this on modern Windows I recommend to look at the Dosbox Emulator. It might not show the same performance characteristics as a real system though as in the Emulator each opcode takes one cycle regardless of complexity.
***** I agree with you, too. I don't see how they call themselves "programmers" if retro-inspired graphics require 40 times more RAM than storage space… At this rate, a simple Hello World program would require 16 GB, rather than half a kilobyte.
With super-powerful hardware comes laziness…
You'd expect people to do what VD-Dev did for the Nintendo 3DS: learn the ins and outs of the hardware, spend months coding an engine in assembly language with "every ARM optimisation [they] know", and get as much out of the 3DS's hardware as they possibly could whilst still running at 60 FPS (resulting in IronFall: Invasion).
Instead, we have a host of shoddy engines like GameMaker: Studio and to some extent, Unity. Not to mention games that run so poorly on PCs despite their comparatively-low poly-count (the Batman games, Assassin's Creed Unity, and a few instalments of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series).
In Toby Fox's case, it's understandable; GameMaker: Studio was all he knew how to use. But with all the money he must be earning from Undertale, you'd expect him to be able to hire someone like Chris Sawyer to recode the whole game into C++, resulting in lower system requirements than Roller Coaster Tycoon (remember how it was 99% coded in x86 assembly?). Apparently not.
These days, it seems like the only competent engine around here by comparison is Unreal Engine 1 (and maybe Unreal Engine 2).
But hey, at least MenuetOS is coded entirely in assembly, right? Apparently boots up in 5 seconds on a Pentium MMX, and still fits on a floppy disc.
Michael Huth So if I can find the original demo, I can try loading it onto DOSBox? That could be interesting.
But CZcams never allowed videos to run beyond 30 FPS until a couple of years ago… (And even then, CZcams's buggy HTML5 player doesn't bother to run at 60 FPS on Internet Explorer - the only web browser I'm comfortable with.)
Who is not give a like, this did not understand what is hell going on :)
Much better musicians than Future Crew.
*Before anti-aliasing was a thing*
On pcdemos are just cheats
not great. i liked the warping cube. ....is this some sort of remix? gfx is a C-. music is not much more. bring back modex.