The only rather sad part is around 2/3 of the way through, where the author had to use a pre-compiled binary from the Internet Archive, because the original WWW site had rotted away, and the source code did not assemble. This stuff tends to rot if the community does not do the preservation work.
That said, Sergey Bulba's WWW site is still around and the relevant stuff can be found today at https://ay.strangled.net/progr_e.htm . But the continued existences of things like this are not the sort of things to take for granted.
Hi! This hit HN after I had gone to bed so only picking up on it now. Thanks for finding that link and letting me know, I've updated the article with a note and your link.
One of the uncomfortable realities I've encountered being involved in the retro scene is that so many of the resources are slowly disappearing, either because the original authors age out of the scene or loose interest (or sadly, many are approaching that age where natural causes are taking them from us), old companies are long since defunct and resources slowly disappear into a legal quagmire or no-one ever thought to archive them in the first place.
I'd never want to jump in and steal your thunder, Mark - but that's partly why I'm building Code Like It's 198x over at https://code198x.com, and the sibling projects that form the rest of the 198x family, including emulators, assemblers and other build tools.
Too many of these resources are gone already, or require particular combinations of old operating systems and libraries to run at all. And in many cases, blog posts, articles, even books, are becoming hard to find. I decided to try to collate as much information as possible in one place.
Caveat: I've used AI extensively to do the research and writing, but I've attempted to cite all material from primary sources and every code sample gets tested not just in my own tooling but in existing third-party tooling too (just in case I made a mistake).
I mean, I'd love it if the wider community got behind my effort and helped me improve it directly, but the important thing is that the material is out there.
> This stuff tends to rot if the community does not do the preservation work.
This is one of the areas where I'm actually pretty okay with getting LLMs to do the "junior dev" work. Here, take this, look up what that compiler error means, change the thing it's bitching about to be written the modern way please.
I was in high school when the demoscene took off in the 80s. It forever tainted my view of software development as full of lazy programmers not bothering to optimize code as hardware got better and better. Myself included.
I founded a demoscene club in college and it was always whiplash to go from the code I saw at our end-of-year demoparty and whatever crap I saw during my summer internships
> tainted my view of software development as full of lazy programmers not bothering to optimize code
I have the opposite memory of the C64 demo coders, they were masters at optimizing and pushing hardware well beyond what anyone thought it could do. Generally though they would be very focussed on writing a great demo, but they couldn't/wouldn't spend the time putting together a full game - the flashy demo was their goal.
I was a Spectrum games programmer and yes we were pushing the hardware but what I was seeing from the C64 demo scene was on a different level. There were a lot of demo writers pushing the known boundaries with things like multi layer bas-relief scrolling and playing with colours & music. I can't remember their being much of a demo scene for the Spectrum at the time here in the UK.
Holy CRAP. That is some ground-breaking stuff - One can only imagine what people would have made of it, had they seen something like that back in the Speccy's heydey.
The time-shifty nature of demoscene is really interesting to me. The community seems small but influential, so general awareness of it moves more like word-of-mouth, even in the internet age; people make incidental contact and pick up some small but incomplete aspect of it, often years after the initial release. People in 2026 enjoying work made in 1992; people making new demos in 2026 that look like they're from 1992.
Hits harder than the same dynamic in pop culture because these things are so little-known, but they find their way to your eyes and ears across the gulf of time all the same.
This is it exactly! I wrote this back in 2019 on my "Back To The Floppy" post[1]:
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it is exactly about the Amiga that captures me in a way that no other computer ever did. Part of it is I think because the Amiga was the last system that was simple enough that one person could reasonably hold the entire machine in their head.
It was complex, true, but with enough studying and time you could know pretty much everything about every single bit of the Amiga’s memory space, workbench, the custom chips and so on. That’s what makes it so special and endearing.
That simply doesn’t exist on other platforms. I mean modern systems are amazing - and I’ve worked on some serious big-iron hardware in my time - but you could spend an entire lifetime now simply becoming an expert in one tiny piece of the whole system. Modern computers just don’t have the accessibility that the Amiga had, and it straddled the divide perfectly between being simple enough to know it and love it, yet powerful enough to do things you’d never dreamed possible.
For a perfect blend of the old & new, take a look at https://youtu.be/Lw4W9V57SKs?si=MAHCYx0X9luu6fwu&t=5719 - Razor 1911s 40-year retrospective, starting from the C64, and progressing through Amiga, DOS, and the modern PC scene. I've heard old sceners were literally in tears during the live competition with all the throwbacks, music morphing from C64 SID chiptune to Amiga MOD and onwards, inside references... It's pretty much a love letter to all the phases of the scene's life to date.
If you are in the US and near Pittsburgh, Demosplash(one of the largest demo party in the US) will be at CMU on Nov 21. Tons of 8 bit shown there and to actually play with during the conference!
The title expected me to see the common 48k model, not the rarer 128k one.
The paper itself says "a stock 128Kb Spectrum" which is confusing for those who weren't aware of this model.
Most other European countries were C64 and MSX territory.
It is strange that on UK, Speccy birthplace they were apparently rare, given all the Crash and Your Sinclair magazines I owned at the time, and related content.
Well, I needed that beep-tastic AY sound chip! The 128K model is what the Speccy demo scene kinda gravitated towards, although there are some VERY impressive demos that run on a 48K machine - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7PX7YBac8k for what you can do with just a beeper!
When I said "stock" I really meant a basic 128K/+2/+3 machine and not one of the interesting Soviet/Eastern European clones with advanced capabilities that some portions of the demoscene adopted.
The only rather sad part is around 2/3 of the way through, where the author had to use a pre-compiled binary from the Internet Archive, because the original WWW site had rotted away, and the source code did not assemble. This stuff tends to rot if the community does not do the preservation work.
That said, Sergey Bulba's WWW site is still around and the relevant stuff can be found today at https://ay.strangled.net/progr_e.htm . But the continued existences of things like this are not the sort of things to take for granted.
Hi! This hit HN after I had gone to bed so only picking up on it now. Thanks for finding that link and letting me know, I've updated the article with a note and your link.
One of the uncomfortable realities I've encountered being involved in the retro scene is that so many of the resources are slowly disappearing, either because the original authors age out of the scene or loose interest (or sadly, many are approaching that age where natural causes are taking them from us), old companies are long since defunct and resources slowly disappear into a legal quagmire or no-one ever thought to archive them in the first place.
I'd never want to jump in and steal your thunder, Mark - but that's partly why I'm building Code Like It's 198x over at https://code198x.com, and the sibling projects that form the rest of the 198x family, including emulators, assemblers and other build tools.
Too many of these resources are gone already, or require particular combinations of old operating systems and libraries to run at all. And in many cases, blog posts, articles, even books, are becoming hard to find. I decided to try to collate as much information as possible in one place.
Caveat: I've used AI extensively to do the research and writing, but I've attempted to cite all material from primary sources and every code sample gets tested not just in my own tooling but in existing third-party tooling too (just in case I made a mistake).
What's your thoughts on making that all available as a bloody great self-hostable archive so everyone gets to have a copy, juuuuuust in case?
I'd be more than happy for EVERYONE to fork it, download it, whatever. It's all open-source on GitHub, as are the related projects.
Awesome.
The way the Internet should be.
I mean, I'd love it if the wider community got behind my effort and helped me improve it directly, but the important thing is that the material is out there.
so good!!
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed!
> This stuff tends to rot if the community does not do the preservation work.
This is one of the areas where I'm actually pretty okay with getting LLMs to do the "junior dev" work. Here, take this, look up what that compiler error means, change the thing it's bitching about to be written the modern way please.
I was in high school when the demoscene took off in the 80s. It forever tainted my view of software development as full of lazy programmers not bothering to optimize code as hardware got better and better. Myself included.
I founded a demoscene club in college and it was always whiplash to go from the code I saw at our end-of-year demoparty and whatever crap I saw during my summer internships
It's a bit after my time, but I still enjoy showing people new to the demoscene just what is possible with 4Kb of code - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro5grR_efG0
I love the crowd reaction. Would have loved to have been there. There's some great behind the scenes details here: https://iquilezles.org/articles/function2009/
I knew it Elevated before opening the link. Such a good intro.
Even after reading the background, and watching the presentations on how it was done, I'm still like "nah, mate, this is straight up witchcraft"
Same here, I had to fit my first programs into Timex 2068, Amiga 500 and MS-DOS limitations, and FX-4800P as well, later upgraded to 880P.
Hence why I find so interesting ESP32 projects, folks these days don't seem to grasp how much we can actually fit into something like that.
> tainted my view of software development as full of lazy programmers not bothering to optimize code
I have the opposite memory of the C64 demo coders, they were masters at optimizing and pushing hardware well beyond what anyone thought it could do. Generally though they would be very focussed on writing a great demo, but they couldn't/wouldn't spend the time putting together a full game - the flashy demo was their goal.
I was a Spectrum games programmer and yes we were pushing the hardware but what I was seeing from the C64 demo scene was on a different level. There were a lot of demo writers pushing the known boundaries with things like multi layer bas-relief scrolling and playing with colours & music. I can't remember their being much of a demo scene for the Spectrum at the time here in the UK.
Nice.
Check out this one though: https://demozoo.org/productions/13188/
Gosh.
The dithering on the voxel demo there had me truly stumped, watching as I am on a phone. Colours I never saw in my Speccy days!
Holy CRAP. That is some ground-breaking stuff - One can only imagine what people would have made of it, had they seen something like that back in the Speccy's heydey.
Demoscene is still a thing!
https://syntaxparty.org/ is on in a couple of weeks if you happen to be in Melbourne.
I'd have loved to come to this, but I can't make the date work. Have a wonderful time!
Great article, and the demo has quite a few goodies into it, and props to a fellow "Speccy and Amiga" fan.
A warm time travel back to 1980's, high school and coding partings at friend's houses.
Not me vogueing to that little ditty~
The time-shifty nature of demoscene is really interesting to me. The community seems small but influential, so general awareness of it moves more like word-of-mouth, even in the internet age; people make incidental contact and pick up some small but incomplete aspect of it, often years after the initial release. People in 2026 enjoying work made in 1992; people making new demos in 2026 that look like they're from 1992.
Hits harder than the same dynamic in pop culture because these things are so little-known, but they find their way to your eyes and ears across the gulf of time all the same.
1992... Around the last year someone could fully understand a contemporary computer.
This is it exactly! I wrote this back in 2019 on my "Back To The Floppy" post[1]:
[1]=https://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy...
For a perfect blend of the old & new, take a look at https://youtu.be/Lw4W9V57SKs?si=MAHCYx0X9luu6fwu&t=5719 - Razor 1911s 40-year retrospective, starting from the C64, and progressing through Amiga, DOS, and the modern PC scene. I've heard old sceners were literally in tears during the live competition with all the throwbacks, music morphing from C64 SID chiptune to Amiga MOD and onwards, inside references... It's pretty much a love letter to all the phases of the scene's life to date.
If you are in the US and near Pittsburgh, Demosplash(one of the largest demo party in the US) will be at CMU on Nov 21. Tons of 8 bit shown there and to actually play with during the conference!
Small nitpick, but the ZX Spectrum 128k itself is not the base 48k model :)
I couldn't find where it said that?
The title expected me to see the common 48k model, not the rarer 128k one. The paper itself says "a stock 128Kb Spectrum" which is confusing for those who weren't aware of this model.
Rarer?
In the Iberian Peninsula, 128K models were all over the place.
Obviously since it was initially an Investronica (local Sinclair distributor) initiative.
Not really in UK or other European countries (besides the Amstrad almost-knockoff).
Most other European countries were C64 and MSX territory.
It is strange that on UK, Speccy birthplace they were apparently rare, given all the Crash and Your Sinclair magazines I owned at the time, and related content.
That caught my attention right away! I was not aware of the 128K Spectrum until today. About time to learn :-)
Well, I needed that beep-tastic AY sound chip! The 128K model is what the Speccy demo scene kinda gravitated towards, although there are some VERY impressive demos that run on a 48K machine - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7PX7YBac8k for what you can do with just a beeper!
When I said "stock" I really meant a basic 128K/+2/+3 machine and not one of the interesting Soviet/Eastern European clones with advanced capabilities that some portions of the demoscene adopted.
Nice stuff and welcome to the scene