Onslaught - Bad Apple 64 - C64 Demo
Why Hacker News recommends it
Shared as an impressive example of squeezing video and compression onto a 1 MHz 8-bit machine in Bad Apple porting threads.
What it is
Onslaught's Bad Apple 64 is a Commodore 64 demo that streams over 2000 frames of the Bad Apple animation from a single disk side at 12fps, with each frame packed to around 70 bytes.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2018 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends iammyIP · 2018-03 · on “A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64”
The remarkatble thing is less the compression of a 3:12 video with sound in 1MB, and more the c64 being able to decode it in realtime with a framerate > 10. I especially like the unique but still 64-flavoured compression artefacts of the video. Heres another Onslaught demo that fits on a Floppy disk: [this video]
Recommends cromwellian · 2021-03 · on “Bad Apple on an Apple //e: playing video on a stock 1 MHz Apple II [video]”
C64 version using VQ compression: [this video] A much much more impressive display of the same tech in this Onslaught Eclectic demo by the same author: Real time decode of video and audio from floppy at 16fps [LINK]
Cites tombert · 2026-03 · on “"This Is Not the Computer for You"”
Oh no argument on that. I have a typical yuppie software job with decent pay, so generally I will buy the right tools for a job now instead of trying to make due with whatever I can scrap together. I'm not that busy of a person, but I certainly have more obligations than I did when I was sixteen, and now sometimes it really is worth it to spend an extra grand on something than it is to spend a week hacking together something from my existing stuff. Still, I look back at the hours I spent making terrible YouTube videos with my terrible computer really fondly. I was proud of myself for making things work, I was proud of the little workarounds I found. I think it's the same reason I love readin