I know this. It's also very impressive, and coded on a C64 IIRC (checked the page, yes).
This demo is more on the side of "do magic and observe output", rather than "let's make something looking normal in an impossible way" (i.e: elevated) or "let's make something impossible possible" (i.e. 8088 MPH [0]).
All three kinds are equally impressive in my book, yet I prefer the latter ones more.
My main takeaway from Demoscene is not "compression", but the possibility of writing code which performs very well, and what I found is, it's not very hard to do at the end of the day. You just have to be mindful about what you're doing, and how that thing called computer works under the hood.
It is at the same time "knowing your instrument quite well" and "be able to produce quality [at structural level]" and "be able to produce quality [at final output level]".
My main takeaway from Demoscene is not "compression"
Compression is still a big part of it, just not in the "take the original data, minimize it and reproduce it later" sense of the word. The procedural generation employed by these demos is still a form of compression: the highly-specialized decompressor needs only a few bytes of information to create the intended effect (texture or shape).
If anything, it shows how much compression can be achieved if the decompressor can be tuned to the data domain, as opposed to general-purpose compression algorithms.
It is not just a matter of information science in terms of "how can one concisely describe the object - that would be the strict informational content", but also clever procedural method to generate an output starting from the specifications of a machine.
In the case of flt's "A mind is born", several efficiency techniques are used - overlapping of palette and SID registers etc., but especially notable could be that the melody is generated by a sequence-after-seed process (Linear-Feedback Shift Register), where the seed is chosen so that a good melody is returned ( full explanation of the code: https://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/ )
> My main takeaway from Demoscene is not "compression", but the possibility of writing code which performs very well
This 100%. It's not exclusive to demoscene, but demoscene is certainly yet another inspiration to write lean apps. (The performance of Electron is another :) )
I'll never ever be able to work for an AAA game company because I couldn't stomach dumping 100GB of raw texture data onto someone's hard drive.
This demo is more on the side of "do magic and observe output", rather than "let's make something looking normal in an impossible way" (i.e: elevated) or "let's make something impossible possible" (i.e. 8088 MPH [0]).
All three kinds are equally impressive in my book, yet I prefer the latter ones more.
My main takeaway from Demoscene is not "compression", but the possibility of writing code which performs very well, and what I found is, it's not very hard to do at the end of the day. You just have to be mindful about what you're doing, and how that thing called computer works under the hood.
[0]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65371