8088 MPH by Hornet + CRTC + DESiRE (final version)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Held up as the peak of demoscene hardware hacking, especially for its finale and for how good the PC speaker sound gets.
What it is
The winning demo from Revision 2015's oldskool competition, running on a real 1981 IBM PC with CGA at 4.77MHz. It uses extreme tricks to produce effects, graphics and sound far beyond what the hardware was thought capable of.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2016 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec i336_ · 2016-11 · on “The BASIC Issue with Retro Computers”
You've probably seen these but I thought I'd mention them anyway. [LINK] [LINK] Piece de resistance: [LINK] (live cheering FTW) / [this video] (capture card copy) The credits in the 3rd video are an excellent example of using modern tooling. (How this was done has been documented online and is easy to find; it did take some cheating to do it but it's still awesome.) Hrm, the SID music in [LINK] is also amazing (this demo was on two floppies, I particularly like the music in the 2nd part which uses a distinctly different theme) and very obviously produced by modern tools too. (Note, that video is a 50fps capture and uses a real SID.)
Cites jammi · 2018-05 · on “C64 Keyboard Prototype”
A PC beeper can sound just as good, when used on a fast enough PC and the beeper output is connected to something better than the built-in piezo speaker. Even on the original IBM PC, you could make it sound almost as good by very careful optimization and close to 100% of allocation of CPU cycles, like shown at the end of the 8088 MPH demo: [this video]
Cites PavlovsCat · 2019-03 · on “Daydreaming about the future instead of doing work today”
> It's like a forum full of carpenters that are using Black and Decker tools to build houses. In that analogy the end result is the same, but the process to get there more complicated. In reality, the difference is between a house that has stuff like insulation and faucets that don't leak, versus than something slapped together in 5 minutes for $50 that costs 50 times more to live in, for as long as you live in it. It's less effort for the programmer, more effort for every machine it gets run on, every time it gets run . And that stuff compounds in non-linear ways, too: The more data has to be read from disks, the more useless the disk cache becomes, the more data has to be shuffled around i
Cites amiga-workbench · 2021-03 · on “The Sound of 1-bit: Musical Creativity on the 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum (2017)”
I don't remember it being widely used for music, but some games did a pretty good job with it. [LINK] The 8088MPH demo also sounds surprisingly good. [this video]